Hank and the Elk

Third season, morning check, I keyed the radio to report clear skies and no smoke and then said, before I thought better of it, that there was a bull elk standing about forty yards below the tower just looking at me like he had something to say. Hank didn’t miss a beat. Asked if the elk had a name yet. I said no. He said that was a mistake, an elk that bold deserved a name, and from then on it was Gerald. Every check where I mentioned seeing him, Hank would ask how Gerald was doing, is he still giving me that look, has he applied for a permit yet to be up here. It went on for two full seasons before Gerald stopped showing up, probably shot by somebody with a tag come fall, though neither of us ever said that part out loud.

Most of what passes between me and Hank is business, and I don’t say that as a complaint. Weather, smoke bearings, the occasional relay about a hiker or a closure, twice a day, sometimes more if there’s something moving. He’s not a talker on the radio and neither am I, not really, and for most of five months that’s the entire shape of the relationship, two voices confirming the sky is what it looks like. But four years of twice a day adds up to something, even if it’s built out of forty second exchanges about visibility and wind.

The one that’s stuck with me longest wasn’t a joke at all. Second season, a bad week, lightning coming through with almost no rain behind it, I had four separate smokes going at once and was running short on sleep and short on patience with my own handwriting in the logbook. Keyed up for the evening check and my voice must have given something away, because Hank didn’t do the usual clipped exchange. He asked, straight out, if I was doing all right up there. Not procedure, nothing on the form asks that. I said I was fine, tired, and he told me to go log off and get some rest, nothing’s burning that can’t wait ten minutes, and then signed off like nothing had happened. It wasn’t much. But it was the only time in two seasons a voice on that radio asked about me instead of the mountain, and I’ve thought about it more than plenty of longer conversations I’ve had with people I could actually see.

I don’t know much about Hank beyond the dispatcher’s chair. Don’t know if he’s got a family, what he does on his days off, whether he’s ever been up a tower himself or just talks to people who are. That’s not unusual up here, you build a whole relationship out of a voice and a schedule and never fill in the rest, and it works fine because the part that matters, somebody checking that you’re alive and the mountain’s not burning, doesn’t require the rest. But Gerald’s still a running joke four years on. Last season I saw a young bull below the tower again and radioed it in as Gerald’s grandson, and Hank laughed, actually laughed, the closest thing to an unguarded sound I’ve heard out of that radio in five years of mornings.