THE SUMMER OF my sophomore year in college, I came across a job-board announcement for an opening as the Granite Mountain fire lookout, in Washington State. Having been turned down for positions as a ranger in Glacier National Park and a bird-study volunteer in Northern California, I couldn't believe my luck when I was basically hired over the phone.

A couple of weeks later, there I was, caretaker of one of the most stunning pieces of real estate in Washington's central Cascades. The glass-walled lookout tower stood on tall stilts, four steep miles from the trailhead. To the west, the sun faded away beneath a pink and blueberry sky. To the east and north were layers of razorback ridges and toothy spires and mysterious evergreen valleys. Icy Mount Rainier towered to the south. I stood like a sea captain on the bridge, tossed back my head, and howled with delight.

And then there were the 64 other days.

I'd assumed this would be a season of profound reflection. But as was true for Jack Kerouac, who spent a summer at nearby Desolation Peak lookout,it was really just a season of vegetative boredom.

At first, I kept myself occupied by reading thick books (500 pages in a day!), studying the nearby flora (lichen, ho!), and filtering already pure lake water …and then filtering it again. I made friends with the pikas and tried not to spit toothpaste on their favorite boulders.

By the time a blaze finally erupted, torching thousands of acres of federal land to the east, I had become so dumbly entranced by the whiz and squirt of my MSR WaterWorks that it took me a full half-hour to recognize the mushroom cloud of Armageddon. I adjusted the squelch knob on my radio and called in the blaze with all the formal, painstaking details.

"Thanks, Eric," the dispatcher said. "Someone radioed that in an hour ago."

The next summer, thinking that something more active might suit me better, I signed up for part-time work on a meadow-restoration project in North Cascades National Park. But by mid-July I'd concluded that there were just too few people in the wilderness. It was not the right place for my dream job.