Up In the Tower

I was twenty when I was hired by the state to watch out for fires that could devastate, since the cost of flights was becoming too great, up to the tower I go. Now North Pennsylvania is a wild place, to see it all burn would be a true disgrace, and it’s an easy way to make my pay, so to the tower I go. Rumpled rows of ridges rolling to the south, low, eroded hillsides of small mining towns, and chittering squirrels, good lord they are loud, when to the tower I go. A carpet of trees, a scattering of fields, a copse of white birches whose bark likes to peal, anglers in a river, the long poles they yield, high in the tower I go. Most days I’m up here I do not have a care, every half-hour I scan the hills and stare, looking for stray smoke-lines or fire’s red glare, why to this tower I go. I’ve caught a few small ones, mostly lightning-strike, helped find one started by a kid’s motorbike, with three-sixty views they’ll not escape my sight, when to this tower I go. But mostly it’s hikers that I see up here, uoung families with kids who play like pioneers, and some of them will not come up out of fear, but to the tower most go. They ask me of mountains after their long climb, what peak’s over there? Am I here all the time? they’re so happy that I do not really mind, within the tower they go. The fathers all think there’s some value in this, here in the clean air, no phones and no office, and no whiny customers constantly pissed, they have no tower to go. But it’s no like the old days in small cabins cold, come dusk I walk down and then drive to my home, and I’ll get my work-out tomorrow, I know, back to the tower I’ll go.