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October 3, 2007

The Loneliness of the Lighthouse Staffer

Two curiously elegiac technology-related articles in the major media yesterday and today. The first came in the NY Times, with the subject being the decline in staffed fire lookouts. The focus, in particular, was one Mike Gates who summers in a fire lookout on Saddleback Mountain, about 7,000 feet up and 120-miles northeast of San Francisco in the 1-2million acre Tahoe National Forest.

Mr. Gates, now 58, has spotted perhaps 100 fires during his years on the job, two this September alone. He is known for staying up late, and waking before dawn to fix his eyes on his patch of Tahoe National Forest, a 1.2-million-acre preserve just north of Lake Tahoe.

“Maybe after looking at the same landscape for so long,” he said, “it’s easy to see something’s amiss.”

His is a skill set that is slowly fading away, replaced by less romantic, more technological methods. Only about 800 lookouts nationwide are now manned, according to the nonprofit Forest Fire Lookout Association, down from more than 8,000 in the 1930s.

Curiously, today we have an article in the WSJ about New York subway clerks, the people who sit behind bulletproof class and mumble directions at you when you're lost in Manhattan. Their numbers are declining, again because of technology (most tickets are sold through machines), and the remaining clerks are increasingly being turned to other more human-centric things, like wander the station and kibitz.

Over the past two years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its subway subdivision, New York City Transit, have closed down 158 token booths, nearly a quarter of the total in a system that sells five million rides a day. The booths are still there, but now they are called "kiosks." And now 600 unseated token clerks like Mr. Dargenio have become "roving station agents," a less-than-voluntary corps of subterranean official greeters.

Except the subway isn't Disney World. By turns it's a hot, cold, lonely, mobbed mass-transit museum of begging, mugging and flooding. Emergencies are numerous and diversions continuous. The maps are indecipherable, the loudspeakers incomprehensible. Straphangers get mad, and they take it out on the face in the glass booth. A 2005 Cornell University survey of station workers found that 81%, while on duty, had put up with verbal or physical threats from customers.

But for the roving clerks, customer service on the subway isn't bulletproof anymore. Their defense now is personal attitude modification.

"When you're inside the booth, nobody can get to you, hit you, spit on you," says Adriana Carney, a rover at Wall Street on the Lexington Avenue line. "Whatever problem they have, they'll go away. Eventually. Now that I'm outside, people say, 'You're so nice.' I tell them, 'You haven't seen the other side of me.'"

Fascinating that two such similar stories appear back to back, and the two are instantly self-dating, with it unlikely that future generations will see staffed fire lookouts (or subway booths), any more than we have staffed lighthouses on rocky points. It is the quiet passing of an era, which is always something to watch.


My related story. Years ago I was mountain-biking east of San Diego in the backcountry. I was cycle-climbing a dusty trail up a rocky peak, one that had a fire tower on top, which I assumed to be abandoned. When I reached the top, at about 6,000 feet, I stood there, pleasingly covered in sweat, and enjoyed the view and the solitude -- about which time I heard someone call to me from high above. It turns out the fire tower was staffed, and the woman who worked there -- from Oregon, as I recall -- invited me up to have a look from her higher vantage. We talked about wildfires, which are on the rise and more savage than ever in San Diego County, and she spoke rhapsodically about early morning spotting of mountain lions in nearby meadows as the fog burned off.

I took a few pictures through her 360-degree panorama, climbed down, and cycled off. I have no idea today if the station is still staffed, but I think about it now and then, and wonder.

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