Controlled Burns: What ‘Firewatch’ Taught Me About Loneliness and Avoidance

I've always had a fascination with trees, with their movement in the wind, both collective and individual, and the way they look from afar and up close, as clusters of green or towering canopies of shade. I enjoy discovering new trees I’ve never seen in person, like when I first walked into a field of alien-like Joshua trees and posed for a photo under the tallest one more than triple my height. Even more, I appreciate trees that are like steady friends: the row of birches I walk by every morning to get coffee, the oak in my parent’s backyard that I’ve known for years.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, where trees are full and green in the summers, lining our three rivers and covering the city’s many hills where various neighborhoods intersect. In the fall there are usually a good few weeks – maybe a little over a month if you’re lucky – where their leaves turn every shade of orange, yellow, red, and all the in-betweens before falling to the earth, leaving the branches barren, the cold browns of the naked hillsides mixing with the overcast gray skies of winter. 

In 2021, I moved to sunny Los Angeles, a big change from a post-industrial city that experiences an average of 59 clear-skied days per year. In LA, the trees were different. I remember seeing the purple Jacarandas that line the streets of Pasadena and finding them magical. But the palm trees bothered me. I found them weird and almost out of place in certain areas. (I would later learn that I wasn’t crazy, they had primarily been imported to the area and are not a native species, same for my beloved Jacarandas.) The various cacti, whether in the city or a day’s drive away in the surrounding deserts, pleased me with their unpredictable forms and sizes. Morning commutes to my bookstore job in Pasadena had me driving straight towards the San Bernardino mountain range. It rose as I got closer, the clouds getting stuck at the peak on stormy days and the sun casting spots of brightness onto its beige colored face. Up in those formidable hills there were all kinds of plant life that I was unfamiliar with: sagebrush, yucca, pinyon pines, juniper pines, ponderosa pines, all the pines.

Before I lived in California, I knew about the wildfires. I remember half-joking to my new friends there that I was upset I had missed the fires of 2020 that turned the skies orange across multiple states. Even though I would soften the blow of my dark obsession with a joke, I was serious about missing out. I was and still am genuinely interested in wildfires in the Western US specifically. I’m fascinated by their destructive history, how the first park rangers were rudimentary wildland firefighters, the collective efforts and failures to calm or prevent them, the act of controlled burns, the devastation and feeling of otherworldliness during and after the flames. It could also be because I grew up in a place that never had the same threat of major wildfires. I never knew the fear of seeing the billowing smoke rise in the distance, covering the sky, choking the lungs. I could only imagine the terror of driving on scalding asphalt with walls of bright flames on either side of you. 

When Firewatch came out in 2016, the title immediately caught my eye. I was into the outdoors and curious about wildfires. I find it embarrassing to admit now, but somewhere around my last year of high school and my first years in college, I had a typical boyish bout of obsession with the free-thinking, nature-obsessed writers of the canon: Thoreau, Muir, Whitman, Hesse, Kerouac, etc. I remember reading Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels and learning about Jack Kerouac trying to spend a season as a fire lookout in Washington but finding it miserable and leaving early. Learning that was a bit demoralizing because I was feeling a little restless with my first years of college, listless, directionless. I had even thought of joining the National Park Service or forestry school, and becoming something like becoming a fire lookout, an already outdated job, sounded like it would’ve been great. I couldn’t understand why someone like Kerouac would find it so unbearable. With these memories and emotions drawn from the game’s title alone, I was excited for Firewatch before I knew anything about its story. 

Players control Henry, voiced by Rich Sommer, after he leaves Boulder, Colorado to become a fire watch, or fire lookout, in the Shoshone National Forest. The game is simple and playable in one sitting, but its depths belie its short length and straightforward mechanics. On Henry’s first day, he receives a call on his park-issued radio from Delilah, Henry’s supervisor and a lookout at a nearby tower. “So, what’s wrong with you,” she asks him. Henry is thrown off by the question, and Delilah explains, “People take this job to get away from something.”

Henry won’t disclose everything to Delilah up front, but the player already knows from the intro that Julia, Henry’s wife, has early-onset dementia. After some years of Henry trying to care for his wife himself, Julia’s quality of living declines and Henry’s drinking increases. After learning of their daughter’s dwindling state of mind and Henry’s dependence on alcohol, Julia’s parents take her back home to Australia. When the player first sees Henry’s hands — their hands, as the game is in first person — holding the radio, he still wears his wedding ring, a constant reminder of what he's hiding from. A picture of the two of them sits on his desk, though I picked it up at one point and accidentally tossed it face down. I have been unable to ever get it to sit right after that, a coincidental metaphor for Henry’s past and everything that was to come in the game’s story. 

One of my favorite authors, Hermann Hesse, loved trees. He once wrote about how much he adored and respected them, saying, “[...]even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.” On paper, each fire lookout is at Shoshone for the purpose of watching over the forest and preventing danger, a noble role. But Henry and, as Delilah points out, many other fire lookouts both in fiction and real life, are of that former category, the “hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness.” Henry is lonely. Delilah, as we learn, is lonely too. Jack Kerouac wasn't, at least not at first: he went out to find peace in the solitary atmosphere of Desolation Peak’s fire lookout tower, but all he ended up with was loneliness and a desire to get back to the crowded ports and streets of civilization. 

Something I realized through playing Firewatch is that loneliness can’t really be solved by taking that fire lookout job, or for a more contemporary comparison, taking a forever trip to the woods or buying a van and living that #vanlife. I know I’m not alone in having entertained the thought of going to live in the woods, of a simpler life away from all the stresses of modern civilization, just me and the trees. The idea is just another form of escapism, sort of like playing video games, and it feels good when you think about it but doesn’t really work out if your intentions are just to run away from something. Henry was running from his problems when he took the fire lookout job. He thought some time alone could solve them – or maybe he just wanted to avoid them. 

Rather than letting Henry stew in his isolation, Firewatch creates a pseudo-relationship between Henry and Delilah that builds to the point of real friendship and, possibly, even feelings of love. The two fire lookouts only interact over the radio, and there are no other conversations between Henry and any of the other fire lookouts, who we are told overlook other sections of the forest. Every “character” Henry runs into is always just out of reach, visible only as dark silhouettes, old notes, tape recordings, photos, or a corpse. 

Every character in Firewatch, including each side character, is at Shoshone to get away from something, be it a mistake or a hard conversation. For Delilah, it’s a ruined relationship. We don’t get too much information, but Delilah says she had a boyfriend, Javier, whom she loved deeply. But when she failed to help him through his brother’s death, not even attending the funeral, Javier abruptly left her. This prompted Delilah’s service as a fire lookout, which is over a decade long when Henry meets her. It’s implied that she, too, has a drinking problem. For Delilah it’s tequila, often cooled in stream water.

Delilah and Henry hiding in the woods to drank away and avoid their fears felt like like looking into a mirror of my own past. I first started drinking to cope with anxiety and depression in college. But I would also do it in the hopes it would help me write more freely and maybe in the process I’d have a revelation about what to do after graduating. I see now I was drinking to avoid actually doing either of those things. 

Once I graduated, I left New York City, where I attended college, after a year or two and came back home. Like many young people with writing degrees, or liberal arts degrees more generally, I had trouble finding my way into a career. I was writing, and I had some personal success with that, but I didn’t know where to start. Most nights, I would play video games and drink. When I was alone, Skyrim was the perfect escape. I would hyper focus on getting the perfect flora overhauls, the best trees and grasses to virtually wander through. As for my career, ideas about going into forestry service or something similar would pop-up and melt away again.

On its surface, the job of a fire lookout seems, as it did to Kerouac, like an easy gig. You get to sit in a comfy bungalow on stilts with as many books as you can fit in your pack and spend your days reading and observing the best natural spaces the country can offer with little to no human interaction. But it is a serious job, too. Fire lookouts are there to keep watch for major threats to the forest. 

Eventually, there is a big fire near Henry’s section of the forest. The player can choose between three names for the fire; I chose the Flapjack Fire. In the game, just like real life, there are brave wildland firefighters from the forest service that go into the blaze to manage the spread and cut lines of defense. Often, this comes in the form of controlled burns. During wildfires, wildland firefighters start controlled burns in sections of forest where the wildfire is spreading. Controlled burns clear out further potential fuel for the wildfire, stopping it from reaching over to more forest. When the controlled burn clears out a line, the wildfire reaches a dead spot, and hopefully doesn’t jump to more forest. 

Controlled burns are an act of defense, of starting one fire to address the larger one before it causes total devastation. When I think of the lives of Henry, Delilah, and all the others in this game, I can’t help but see that they all failed to set their own controlled burns. Tasked with watching for threats to the forest, they didn’t recognize the one inside of them, a fire sparked by the messy pasts they tried to escape in the isolation of their fire towers.

Something I felt when first playing Firewatch, which became more pronounced when playing it again recently, was that it’s not healthy to avoid problems or challenges. I’ve had my own fears. Fears that I might be depressed and have anxiety, fears of finding work doing something I really wanted, fears of moving across the country, fears of finding love. 

It wasn’t this game’s story that helped me start my own controlled burns, but playing the game now and looking back, I can see my past fears reflected in its themes, in the actions of Henry and Delilah. My own controlled burns, like getting on medication to help regulate my emotions, gaining more experience in the field I wanted to work in, and getting out of my social comfort zone, have made a world of difference. I still have my fair share of fears and problems, but if I never took steps to address those other ones, that wildfire would be blazing much brighter. 

At one point early on in Firewatch, Henry wanders into a field of lush aspens surrounding a small stream. He’s shocked, after passing through an area that had clearly been burned by a previous wildfire, to see so many healthy, green-leaved trees. Delilah explains that aspens survive off of the same root network, as a family. They protect each other, even through wildfires, and are able to grow back after significant burn damage. After a while, it looks like nothing happened.

There’s something I love about this moment, the implication that with a strong network of family or friends, or even by just being part of society, life’s biggest challenges can be survived. Alone, we can still make it, but we are much more vulnerable. It’s a moment where the veil of the fire lookout job, of finding isolation in the forest, drops away. By the end of the game, all Henry wants is connection, and eventually, the player sees he no longer wears his wedding ring, instead pursuing the idea of a life with Delilah, this person he’s never really met face to face. But this relationship is just another fantasy. 

The wildfire crew doesn’t fully succeed in stopping the spread of the Flapjack Fire. From the beginning of the game to the end, the sky goes from a beautiful blue, to a hazy gray-beige, to a tinted orange, and finally an all-out reddish nightmare. Henry and Delilah are forced to evacuate. As much as Henry pleads for Delilah to wait for him, she ends up taking an earlier helicopter out. She decides not to meet Henry, acknowledging that it won’t be good for either of them to keep avoiding their problems. Henry ends the game as he started: alone. But after everything Henry and the player experienced, it becomes clear that the path of isolation and avoidance does no good. Henry leaves Shoshone with the understanding that the first step towards fixing his life is to go see his wife.

I did finally get to see wildfires while living in California. One was along I-5, which I saw while driving to San Francisco. There was still smoke coming off the edges of a bridge when we passed by charred hills. Another was outside Salinas, amongst the usually idyllic, grassy hillsides where Steinbeck set some of his most famous novels. And the aftermath of a large fire near Lake Tahoe, where charred rows and rows of matchstick pines sprouted from blackened earth. It wasn’t exciting as much as it was sad to see these once beautiful places, wooded hills of conifer and aspen, rolling fields of pale grasses, sagebrush, and creosote, smoldering away to nothing. Still, a sense of beauty could be found there, something new and strange amongst the dark soil and ash and trailing smoke. At two of those burnt areas, I saw wildfire crews digging out lines, stomping flames, controlling the burn. Their work, at least, gave me hope.