Fire Lookout Quotes

The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble -- to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consumer nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.

We’re having another meeting tonight, if you can come,” Yaakov said. “The soldiers are watching the village very closely,” she said, speaking in a whisper. “They are on the lookout for anyone who might be involved in organizing.” Arguments continued in all corners of the room. One man vehemently warned, “Anyone involved in advancing reforms or revolution against the government could face prison or a firing squad.

And so their spirits soared as they took positions own the passageways of battle all night long, and the watchfires blazed among them. Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glittering round the moon's brilliance blaze in all their glory when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm... all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs and the steep ravines and down from the high heavens bursts the boundless bright air and all the stars shine clear and the shepherd's heart exults - so many fires burned between the ships and the Xanthus' whirling rapids set by the men of Troy, bright against their walls. A thousand fires were burning there on the plain and beside each fire sat fifty fighting men poised in the leaping blaze, and champing oats and glistening barley, stationed by their chariots, stallions waited for Dawn to mount her glowing throne.

By being virtually useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.

The person in the ski mask, gloves, and all-dark clothing hunched forward to bring his truck engine to life. His lookout a mile north had signaled the target car was on the way. Nobody could have spotted him in the hide spot near the highway. He’d been there throughout the darkness of the night. Since the sun began its climb, he’d been enshrouded in the smoke. And with all the hissing and booming the fire was causing, what he was about to do wouldn’t be heard, either. Conditions couldn’t have been staged any better.

That thing some people call boredom, in the correct if elusive dosage, can be a form of inoculation against itself. Once you struffle through that swamp of monotony where time bogs down in excruciating ticks from your wristwatch, it becomes possible to break through to a state of equilibrium, to reach a kind of waiting and watching that verges on what I can only call the holy.

He [Aldo Leopold] recognized that industrial-age tools were incompatible with truly wild country - that roads eventually brought with them streams of tourists and settlers, hotels and gas stations, summer homes and cabins, and a diminishment of land health. He sort of invented the concept of wilderness as we now understand it in America: a stretch of country without roads, where all human movement must happen on foot or horseback. He understood that to keep a little remnant of our continent wild, we had no choice but to exercise restraint. I think it's one of the best ideas our culture ever had, not to mention our best hope for preserving the full diversity of nonhuman life in a few functioning ecosystems.

The game resembles the act of writing in that you can’t help but compete with yourself: no one is watching, but you still desire perfection, even if such a thing is unattainable. In fact, the toss of a Frisbee is a bit like the writing of a sentence. Each must move along a certain line to keep the game going forward. Each can go astray, spin out of control. At times what is called for is a long, unspooling line, a toss that slices and circles and hovers in the wind, feinting one way before turning back in another, just as a sentence can move in spirals around a central idea, curving ever closer to the center, the heart, the rock. Other times you need a direct approach. Straight and crisp. A shot from short range.

Tish is no longer in hiding, on constant lookout for danger up ahead. The worst came, and she survived. She is a little girl who no longer has to avoid the fires of life, because she has learned that she is fireproof. Only people who stand in the fire can know that. That is the one thing I need my children to know about themselves: Nothing will destroy them. So I do not want to protect them from life’s fires; I want to point them toward the fire and say, “I see your fear, and it’s big. I also see your courage, and it’s bigger. We can do hard things, baby. We are fireproof.

They always talk about Cobb playing dirty, trying to spike guys and all. Cobb never tried to spike anybody. The base line belongs to the runner. If the infielders get in the way, that’s their lookout. Infielders are supposed to watch out and take care of themselves. In those days, if they got in the way and got nicked they’d never say anything. They’d just take a chew of tobacco out of their mouth, slap it on the spike wound, wrap a handkerchief around it, and go right on playing. Never thought any more about it. We had a trainer, but all he ever did was give you a rubdown with something we called “Go Fast.” He’d take a jar of Vaseline and a bottle of Tabasco sauce—you know how hot that is—mix them together, and rub you down with that. Boy, it made you feel like you were on fire! That would really start you sweating. Now they have medical doctors and whirlpool baths and who knows what else.

I instructed my Church members to scatter themselves over the whole house, and to keep their eyes open in regard to any that were seriously affected under the preaching, and, if possible, to detain them after preaching for conversation and prayer. They were true to their teaching, and were on the lookout at every meeting to see with whom the Word of God was taking effect; and they had faith enough to dismiss their fears and to speak to any whom they saw to be affected by the Word. In this way the conversion of a great many souls was secured. They would invite them into those rooms, and there we would converse and pray with them, and thus gather up the results of every sermon.

As the moment drowns me in despair thinking about your plight all I can be is be real and so I sit in the middle of the night writing this message to you like a knight in shining armour accompanied by flickering candlelight in a room with an open crackling fire, open window and green fields where the stars shine down and the ocean whispers her secrets to me,

Words can set passion on fire, words can break a longing heart, words are in every language it’s in every communication, words can make war or peace words can bring you to your knees, words are all we have that’s what defines us

I’d rather have drugs and liquor and divine visions than this empty barren fatalism on a mountaintop,” he wrote toward the end of his stint. These words are especially poignant when you consider that two years earlier he’d written to Allen Ginsberg: “I have crossed the ocean of suffering and found the path at last.” For Kerouac, the path of Buddhism proved too difficult, too alien to his temperament, and he eventually retreated into the mystical French Catholicism he’d known as a boy. Its fascination with the martyrdom of the Crucifixion jibed with his sense of himself as a doomed prophet destined for self-annihilation. The essential Buddhist ethic—do no violence to any living being—was a principle that tragically eluded him in his treatment of himself.

Although this may have been just another lie, his luck held out and two days later in the early hours of October 12, 1492, Juan Rodríguez Bermeo, the lookout on the Pinta, spotted a light and alerted the other ships by firing the signal cannon. Captain-General Juan de la Cosa, the owner of the Santa Maria, woke Columbus to notify him of this sighting. Rubbing his eyes, Columbus stated that he had seen the light a few hours earlier, thereby claiming in a rather unethical way, a lifetime pension for being the first man to sight land. When they went ashore later that day, Columbus named the island San Salvador. He mistakenly thought that he had arrived in the “Indies,” an early name for Asia, and thus named the indigenous natives “Indians.” Anthropologists believe that the first natives Columbus encountered on the island were Lucayan-Arawak Indians. In Columbus’ logbook, he noted that they had little knowledge of fighting and that they did not wear clothes. Apparently, they were exceptionally clean and washed themselves frequently. Although leery of Columbus and the scruffy newcomers with him, they were very polite and perhaps somewhat fearful of them. It was noted that the women stayed in the background and did most of the work around the village, whereas the men did the fishing. In contrast to these polite people, the members of Columbus’ crew were a rough and crass lot.

In the end five million acres were burned in 1910, and flame-killed trees provided fuel for reburn cycles that lasted well into the 1930s. Reburns spread into healthy timber and ultimately redoubled the acreage that was lost. Faced with the possibility of a lumber shortage and consequently under tremendous political pressure, the Forest Service finally gave fire suppression top priority. Money was appropriated by Congress, crews were organized, lookout towers were built, timber companies constructed access roads into the mountains, telephones began to replace runners and mounted messengers. Fire fighting had finally entered, as one historian said, its heroic age.

Wilhelm Rau has compiled the Vedic references to pottery from the oldest strands of the Black Yajurveda and found that although the potter’s wheel was known, it was hand made pottery that was prescribed for the ritual sphere. This suggests to him that “the more primitive technique persisted in the ritual sphere while in secular life more advanced methods of potting had already been adopted.” Should this assumption be correct, “we can pin down the transition from hand-made to wheel-thrown pottery, as far as the Aryans are concerned, (down) to the earlier phases of Vedic times” (Rau 1974, 141).12 Of relevance to this line of argument is a verse from the Taittīrlya Samhitā (4, 5, 4), stating that what is turned on the wheel is Āsuric and what is made without the wheel is godly (e.g., Kuzmina 1983, 21). According to Rau’s philological investigations, the characteristic of this oldest pottery was that it was made of clay mixed with various materials, some of them organic, resulting in porous pots. These pots were poorly-fired and ranged in size from about 0.24 m to 1.0 m in diameter at the opening and from 0.24 m to 0.40 m in height. Furthermore, they showed a lack of plastic decoration and were unpainted (Rau 1974, 142). Of further relevance is the fact that firing was accomplished by the covered baking method between two layers of raw bricks in a simple open pit. In later times this was done with materials producing red color. Rau advises excavators to be “on the lookout for ceramics of this description among their finds” (142).

She would have to push and stretch and weave time, dig it, build it, carve it. Make time to put lookouts in all the high places, including the other side of the war street, perhaps no further east than the farm where Saxfryth and Ceadwulf had kept sheep. Lookouts with horses. Lookouts with beacon fires. Lookouts who would know what they were watching for and to run to first.

To take the requisite care of a large fleet of merchant vessels, there should be in the convoy a number of frigates, which are to be distributed ahead, astern and on the wings of the fleet, which is always to be kept in the order of three, four, five or six columns, according to the number it may be composed of. Some other frigates are also to be sent on the look-out, in order that the commanding officer may be informed of what passes at a certain distance, and warned in good time of the approach of the enemy. If the frigates which are sent to look-out should discover an enemy of superior force, they will make it known by signal, and perhaps it may be thought advisable that they should steer a different course from that of the fleet, in order to deceive the hostile ships in sight. The line of battleships are to hold themselves a little ahead and to windward of the weather column of the fleet; because, in that position, they will be able with promptitude to attend wherever their presence may be necessary. The commanding officer must not neglect to have all suspicious and neutral ships chased and even stopped by the frigates about him, and which are always to be supported by one or two lines of battleships, according to the exigency of the circumstances. The degree of progress which the whole fleet will make will be regulated by that of the worst-going ships, which, however, are to be abandoned when found to cause too great a loss of time; for sometimes it is better to risk a small loss than to expose the whole by delay. There will be placed between the columns, sloops of war and other swift-sailing vessels to maintain order and keep the ships in their stations. Their particular business will be to get the tardy ships to make more sail, and to oblige those which may be out of their post to resume it. In the evening they will give an account, to the frigates having charge of going the round, of those which have not well manoeuvred and these will be reported to the Commodore. During the night the same order will be maintained, except with respect to the look-out frigates which are to be called in within a certain distance of the fleet, and which are to be allowed lights as well as the rest of the men-of-war. They are to be particularly careful to oblige all straggling ships to return to the convoy, and to fire, without hesitating, on all strange vessels coming from the main sea, in order to give the alarm. Every night they are to be supported on the wings by some line of battleships.

Time shapes itself around me in that silence, shape-shifts from mistress to shade, caressing and haunting by turn. Days pass in which there is nothing but wind, bending the pines to postures of worship of an unseen god in the east.

I’ll tell you where he takes me, and you’ll follow,” Juliet went on out loud, and then looked at Vai. “Do you know about—” “Oh, yes, we used that trick with Paris and Romeo,” said Vai. “Romeo?” Juliet echoed. “Right,” said Vai, “you don’t know anything. What you and Romeo did at the sepulcher? It bound him and Paris together, the same way you’re bound to that Mahyanai girl. Very convenient for using Romeo as a lookout while we broke into the Lord Catresou’s study. Less convenient when it made the pair of them act like idiots protecting each other, which was always.

105 Our death is an eternal wedding-feast; what is the secret of this? He is God, One. The sun became dispersed through the windows; the windows became shut, and the numbers departed. Those numbers which existed in the grapes are naughted in the juice which flows from the grapes. Whosoever is living by the light of God, the death of this spirit is replenishment to him. Speak not evil, speak not good regarding those who have passed away from good and evil. Fix your eye on God, and speak not of what you have not seen, that He may implant another eye in your eye. That eye is the eye of the eye, nothing unseen or secret escapes from it. When its gaze is by the Light of God, to such a light what can be hidden? Though all lights are the Light of God, call not all of those the eternal Light. Eternal light is that which is the Light of God, transient light is the attribute of flesh and body. The light in this mortal eye is a fire, save for that eye which God anoints with surmeh {collyrium}. His fire became light for the sake of Abraham; the eye of reason became in quality like the eye of an ass. O God, the bird of the eye which has seen Your bounty flies in Your air. The Pole, he who is the sky of the skies, is on the lookout in search of You; Either grant him vision to see You, or do not dismiss him on account of this fault. Make tearful the eye of your soul every moment, guard it against the snare of human stature and cheek. Eye asleep and yourself wakeful—such a sleep is perfection and rectitude; But the eye asleep that finds no interpretation (of dreams)—expel it from sleep, despite envy. Else it will labour and be boiling in the fire of love of the One, even to the grave.

Norman Maclean once wrote that “when you work outside of a town for a couple of months you get feeling a lot better than the town and very hostile toward it.

In an article that same year for Sunset magazine, he went so far as to note that in an arid climate such as the Southwest, any grazing at all, even of the most conservative kind, would likely produce erosion. For a high-ranking member of the Forest Service, this amounted to apostasy. To this day, stubborn advocates of public-lands ranching refuse to hear of it.

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

One indisputable charm of being a lookout is the sanction it offers to be shed of the social imperative of productivity, to slip away from the group hug of a digital culture enthralled with social networking, the hive mind, and efficiency defined as connectedness. I often think of a line from Aldo Leopold: “Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.” I want to lengthen, not shorten, my attention span, and most of the material splendors of the twenty-first century bully me in the opposite direction. The

going to check?” “We’ll have to use Umbridge’s fire and see if we can contact him,” said Hermione, who looked positively terrified at the thought. “We’ll draw Umbridge away again, but we’ll need lookouts, and that’s where we can use Ginny and Luna.” Though clearly struggling to understand what was going on, Ginny said immediately, “Yeah, we’ll do it,” and Luna said, “When you say ‘Sirius,’ are you talking about Stubby Boardman?” Nobody answered her. “Okay,” Harry said aggressively to Hermione, “Okay, if you can think of a way of doing this quickly, I’m with you, otherwise I’m going to the Department of Mysteries right now —” “The Department of Mysteries?