One summer I volunteered as a forest fire lookout tower operator.

Colcord Lookout Tower was on the northern edge of the million acre Tonto National Forest, just under the mighty Mogollon Rim, in the center of Arizona.

The tower was at the top of a mountain, at the end of a long, rugged dirt road that snaked deep into the remote Ponderosa Pine forest.

The tower was on top of 12 flights of an open steel stairway: a 15'x15' glass-walled room high above the tall trees.

The tower swayed in the wind, but had an unimpeded 360 degree birdseye view over a half million acres of the most pristene forest in North America.

The nearest neighbor, McFadden Tower, was 100 miles south as the crow flies, just out of eyesight at the curve of the Earth, where the central basins of Arizona give way to the desert. It looked west over the forests of the Apache Indian Reservation, and on a clear day, south a hundred miles or more into the grey haze and wavering heat rising from the desert floor near Phoenix.

A third tower, Aztec, was about a hundred miles to the southeast, on a lonely peak in the center of the Aztec wilderness. It looked over the upper desert south to Tucson, west to McFadden, east over the forests ofthe Navajo Indian Reservation, and north back to Colcord.

Together we could see more than a million acres, and the three of us, lone lookouts perched high above the forest, kept watch for the rising smoke of forest fires and dodged the swarming fighter jets as they maneuvered over the isolated wilderness.

Occasionally, we spoke to each other, crackling voices over radios, but otherwise we were each mostly alone, watching.

And mostly that summer the forest didn't burn.

In fact, I didn't spot a single fire.

But I did see quite a bit else, and this story is about one of those things: how I came to see close-up from a distance, by the power of triangulation:

the way three people hundreds of miles apart can determine the exact location of an upstart little forest fire burning in the million acre wilderness by matching their sights and calculating degrees to distance and location.

take me back to the forest!!!

As always, I was on a quest for information.

My goal was understanding.

The forest was part of my beat...and it seemed like a really cool way to spend a summer coming to know.

Eventually, I left the forest, and the business of journalism, and came to the cities, and the universities, to take up the study of more abstract matters: the essence of humans, and our information-processing imperative.

and I came to want to understand

whojoin is here soon for the discussionwe areonline... (not yet!)

when we ARE online.

the process is called understanding.

Tonto means "stupid one," Kemosabe.

"Mogollon" is said "muggy-on"

The Mogollon Rim, known affectionally as "The Rim," is a 800-mile wide 2000-foot tall sheer cliff that cuts horizontally across the center of Arizona. The Rim marks the boundary between the Alpine forests in the northern part of the the state, and the rolling juniper-covered basins in the center.

The town where I lived was an unorganized group of about 1000 people who occupied a peculiar place called Pleasant Valley.

The town post office was called "Young" after one of the early women settlers.

My newspaper was called "The Young Gazette" and I wrote about the people, the place, and their peculiarities.

Pleasant Valley is a 5000 acre valley of grass hidden deep within the million acre forest. It has been an important place, geographically, and spirtually, for eons.

The valley was the place from where the Anasazi Indians mysteriously disappeared; later it was the site of "the bloodiest feud in the history of the west."

this is

a story of

coming to know,

of one journey to understanding...

information comes in its own time, according to need.

realization of need is the power of information

in-FORM-ation is a process through which we come to know

there are always at least three ways to know...

how easily we come to think in twos:

opposites compared.

either/or

left/right

black/white

yes/no

digital/analog...

Such thinking is without context: in either/or we get nice neat categories:

With one we have identification and definition;

With two comparison and classification;

But with Three!

ahh!

...With three we have context!

...environment!

space!

dimension!

The connection came via a visit from the goddess of the obscure citation, who led me to a previously unpublished manuscript by retired scholar-librarian, J.Z. Nitecki...which I then published online for all the world to read.

And that is the beginning of this leg of my journey through

To be continued...