A powerful and intimate memoir about a young woman’s gruelling, revelatory summers working alone in a remote lookout tower and her riveting eyewitness account of the increasingly unpredictable nature of wildfire in the Canadian north.
“In her engrossing – at times raw – memoir, Moyles elegantly unfurls an unanticipated personal evolution…[Lookout] can feel novelistic in its combination of evocative descriptions of jaw-dropping nature and Jack London-esque touches.”
- The Globe and Mail
Growing up in Canada’s northern boreal forest, Trina Moyles heard many stories of lookout observers – eccentric types who spent their summers alone in the woods, climbing 100-foot high towers, and watching for wildfires burning out of control. “I could never do it,” she told herself. After a decade doing community development work abroad, and newly engaged, Trina found herself back in the north and applying for the seasonal job she’d once found unimaginable.
The cupola, a small octagonal dome, or Trina’s “office in the sky”, perches atop a 100-foot steel tower. Lookouts spend hours in the cupola, scanning the forest for smoke from wildfires burning out of control.
Thus begins her first summer as one of a handful of lookouts scattered throughout Alberta, with only her dog, Holly, to keep her company. While searching for smoke, Trina unravels under the pressure of a long-distance relationship – and a dawning awareness of the environmental crisis that climate change is producing in the boreal. Through megafires, lightning storms, and stunning encounters with wildlife, she learns to survive at the fire tower by forging deep connections with nature and an extraordinary community of people dedicated to wildfire detection and combat. Alone in the boreal forest, she discovers a kind of self-awareness and freedom that only solitude can deliver.
“A beautiful, closely observed love letter to the boreal forest and the wilderness of northern Canada at a time when it is threatened by unprecedented change. But Lookout is more than that: it’s also a powerful, unforgettable story about the ways that solitude in nature can break us down and then put us back together again.”
–Eva Holland, author of Nerve
Winner of the Alberta Memoir Award
Winner of the National Outdoors Book Award in the Outdoor Literature Category
Finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Edmonton Book Prize
Lookout is a page-turning memoir and a riveting story of loss, transformation and belonging to oneself, layered with an eyewitness account of the destructive and regenerative power of wildfire in our northern forests.
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Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest
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