Go Tell It on the Mountain

By: Jackie J. Maughan

Book Overview

These 29 essays written by authors, teachers, and environmentalists form a kind of community that of the fire lookout. Their writing reflects a diversity of experience and some common threads: chosen isolation, silence, natural beauty and power, a sense of the spiritual, and also a profound sense of

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811707385
• ISBN13: 9780811707381
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Length: 207 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Let's just say I've read it many times...in my Lookout.

As a woman in my early 20's, I felt that I needed to plop myself deep in the mountains near where I was raised for as long as I could get away with it. I sought and found a Lookout position in northern Idaho, and the week before I left, I was given this book. To this day (years later), I treasure it so much that it doesn't sit out on my bookshelf. Being a lookout is an indescribable experience that only increases over the years, and the various stories and thoughts put forth in this book are truly worth reading. A real treasure to me as a Lookout, and good insight to those who might be curious.

What it's like to be a lookout, and why we do it

As an experienced fire lookout I can vouch for the authenticity of these stories. This book is the real thing. It was a joy for me to read the accounts of my brothers and sisters on the mountaintops. These stories bring it all back: the lonely splendors, the hair raising lightning strikes, the columns of smoke on the horizon. being a lookout, like being a lighthouse keeper, is one of the last occupations performed in total solitude. For those of us that could hack it, it was a religious experience. Alas like the lighthouses, the lookouts are going the way of the dodo. Here's a chance, readers, to see what its like to spend a summer on the mountaintop.