Terry Renna/AP

Police direct traffic outside an entrance to former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, Aug. 8, 2022, in Palm Beach, Florida. On Friday, the warrant to search the property was unsealed at the request of the U.S. attorney general.

We know that Monday’s FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s winter home Mar-a-Lago was unprecedented. We know that it was approved by Attorney General Merrick Garland, and followed a long discussion between Mr. Trump and the U.S. government about retrieval of material he took from the White House prior to President Joe Biden’s swearing-in.

With the unsealing of the warrant Friday afternoon, we now have some information about what agents took when they drove out of Mar-a-Lago’s gate: around 20 boxes of items, including 11 sets of classified documents, some so secret they are meant to be viewed only in secure government facilities.

But some important questions regarding the affair remain unanswered, including where it is headed. Why has the Department of Justice put so much effort into clawing back Mr. Trump’s boxes?   

“It’s unclear if this is going to be a criminal case, or if this was just an effort to regain possession of classified documents,” says Andrew Weissmann, former general counsel for the FBI and former lead prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s Office of the Special Counsel.

The timeline

Monday’s appearance of FBI agents at Mar-a-Lago’s entrance was preceded by law enforcement attempts to avoid such a drastic step, according to Attorney General Garland.

“Where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means as an alternative to a search and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken,” Mr. Garland said in his brief public remarks Thursday.

The National Archives and Records Administration became concerned about Mr. Trump’s removal of White House records shortly after he left office in 2021. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of material from Mar-a-Lago.

This spring, federal investigators served a grand jury subpoena on Mr. Trump in search of documents they suspected he still had in his possession, according to numerous news reports. This subpoena played a role in a June meeting between Jay Bratt, a top Department of Justice counterintelligence official, and Trump representatives at Mar-a-Lago. 

Mr. Bratt took away an unspecified number of classified documents at the time. He inspected Mar-a-Lago areas where documents were stored, and later requested a more substantial lock be placed on the door of one such area. Trump employees complied.

Agents broke open the lock while searching Mar-a-Lago this Monday.

The nature of this lengthy back-and-forth between the parties can be interpreted two different ways. Mr. Trump’s allies argue that it shows good faith on his part to cooperate in the process. Given that, federal agents showing up with a search warrant was a surprise, and overreach, they say.

“All presidents take records when they leave. ... It’s routine for any Office of the Former President to negotiate with the National Archives,” Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project and a former Republican staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.

Justice Department supporters say it was obvious that Attorney General Garland was trying to solve the issue in a circumspect way. That means he and the FBI must have grown frustrated with the slowness of the process and perhaps believed they were being stonewalled.

“There are sensitivities with investigating a former president, as we’ve seen this week, but the government has a duty to safeguard its secrets,” says Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and current professor at the University of Michigan Law School.

Government secrets

It’s clear that classified information was at the heart of this dispute. Under the Presidential Records Act, all presidential documents are the property of the government, not the person who occupied the Oval Office. But it seems highly unlikely the Justice Department would take the unprecedented step of obtaining a search warrant for relatively mundane information.

And some classified documents are more classified than others. According to news reports, FBI agents at Mar-a-Lago were in search of classified information on some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, perhaps dealing with nuclear weapons, or more general national security programs. 

According to an inventory list attached to the search warrant released Friday, the FBI removed three sets of secret documents from Mar-a-Lago, four sets of top-secret documents, and one set marked “TS/SCI documents,” an apparent reference to top-secret, sensitive compartmented information. 

Sensitive compartmented information comes from the nation’s most sensitive and secret producers of information, both human and technological. It is closely guarded and intended only for officials who have a need to know it. It is generally held in special rooms or buildings. 

As president, Mr. Trump would have been in essence the nation’s highest classification authority. He would have had the power to declassify many secrets at a whim. At times, he did, as when he declassified a photo of a fire on an Iranian rocket launchpad and posted it to his Twitter account in 2019.

“The President of the United States has both the constitutional and statutory power to declassify anything he wants,” Mr. Davis said in his statement. “If President Trump left the White House with classified records they are declassified by his actions.”

But that is not entirely true, say other experts. There are some secrets at the highest level that he cannot declassify. There are statutes that impose a greater level of secrecy on many nuclear secrets, for instance. And while the president does have the power to declassify, it is not instant – it is a process he must begin that is concluded by the classification bureaucracy.

“There’s a whole protocol around how that has to happen, [and] it seems highly unlikely that that was followed,” says Mr. Weissmann. 

What next?

It is possible that the FBI felt it had to act with a search warrant just to reel in secrets it was worried might end up in the wrong hands the longer they sat in Mar-a-Lago’s basement. Law enforcement also reportedly subpoenaed the surveillance footage from cameras trained on the resort’s storage entrances – suggesting officials were interested in, or worried about, who was coming in and going out.

In that case the retrieval of the documents could end the Department of Justice’s mission.

But U.S. officials are charged for mishandling classified documents. In 2005, former U.S. national security adviser Sandy Berger pleaded guilty to knowingly removing classified documents from the National Archives. In 2015, retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, which he gave to his biographer and lover. 

Since 2005 the FBI has launched at least 11 investigations of unlawful removal and retention of classified material dealing with U.S. officials, according to cases compiled by Voice of America.

Generally speaking, prosecutors are looking for aggravating circumstances when they pursue such cases. That means indications of intentional mishandling, or the involvement of vast quantities of material and its exposure, or indications of disloyalty.

“It will matter a lot both what is in these documents and why Trump had them,” says the University of Michigan’s Professor McQuade.

The search warrant for Mr. Trump’s residence, released following a request from the attorney general, lists three criminal statutes in regards to the investigation. One simply covers the unlawful removal of government records. A second covers destroying records to obstruct a government operation.

The third is Section 793 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, better known as the Espionage Act.

As of yet it is unknown how these statutes link up in any way to the documents the FBI has collected. Despite the precedents of prosecutions for improper use of classified information, this is simply uncharted territory for the U.S., legally speaking.

“Obviously we haven’t dealt with a situation where a former president has taken what appears to be many, many boxes of government documents, and what appears to be highly classified government documents, at a time when he didn’t have the authority to do that,” says Mr. Weissmann. 

As a survivor of Partition – the chaotic and violent cleaving in August 1947 of British colonial India into two independent states – Nirmal Singh might be excused or even pitied if he were bitter, or sad, or still traumatized today by events he says came close to snuffing out his young life.

But as Hindu-majority India and mostly Muslim Pakistan prepare to mark the 75th anniversary of Partition on Aug. 15, the nonagenarian retired Indian army colonel is spending time in his New Delhi home remembering – and cherishing – the moments that convinced him as a 16-year-old Sikh boy of “humanity’s goodness.”

Above them all is the memory of the Hindu woman who put her own family in great danger by hiding Mr. Singh and his siblings in her second-class compartment on a train headed from the Pakistani to the Indian side of the new border.

When Mr. Singh foolishly cracked open a compartment window in desperate pursuit of some fresh air, the mob outside the train instantly began chanting “Sikhs! Sikhs! Sikhs!” and calling for their death.

“But when some of the rioters pounded on the compartment door and demanded the Sikhs be turned over, the Hindu woman insisted she was alone with her daughters,” Mr. Singh recalls.

“It worked, and they went away,” he says. “I remember thinking it was the greatest act of bravery I’d ever seen.”

For Mr. Singh, Partition’s anniversary is an occasion to reflect on the acts of courage and compassion between neighbors, or even strangers, of another faith that he witnessed in the midst of a paroxysm of sectarian hatred.

Indeed, the partition of British India is considered to be the largest mass migration in human history, displacing some 14 million people and resulting in the deaths of more than 1 million others. Already simmering sectarian violence was exacerbated by hastily drawn borders that divided villages and abruptly pitted against each other groups that had lived together in communities for centuries. 

And although there was a time when Mr. Singh’s focus on “humanity’s goodness” in conjunction with Partition would have been an anomaly, increasingly it is a perspective not just included but celebrated in efforts to understand Partition’s legacy. Recent years have seen a notable rise in the retelling and memorializing of the more positive and edifying human qualities that were also part of a searingly traumatic time, say postcolonial historians and experts in Partition.

“These stories we are hearing more today, specifically the ones I have heard – the Muslim man who marries the Sikh woman to save her from the mobs that are parading her around and abusing her, the Muslim officer who shelters a Hindu couple for 25 days, the Muslims who preserve the treasure of the former Sikh owner of their new home in Pakistan until he returns for it decades later  – all of these stories are reminders that while the violence was one aspect of the landscape of Partition, it does not represent the entirety of it,” says Aanchal Malhotra, an Indian oral historian who writes extensively on Partition.

Courtesy of Nirmal Singh

Nirmal Singh poses with his four sisters in 2017. Three of the women were on the perilous train ride between Pakistan and India in August 1947 along with Mr. Singh and his brother.

This year Ms. Malhotra published her second book on the subject. “In the Language of Remembering” is a collection of interviews with the survivors and their descendants, organized by chapters highlighting the emotions that Partition encompassed – from fear, loss, and regret to discovery, hope, and love.

“We should never minimize the reality of the lives lost or disregard the enduring trauma that people still feel,” she adds. “But at the same time the stories that point to human qualities like hope and compassion and goodness are also part of Partition’s legacy, and they deserve to be told.”

Remembering the good

Over recent years, museums and history centers intent on chronicling the full story of Partition have multiplied, and cross-border heritage clubs have sprung up, while universities have developed classes on Partition’s legacy.

Anecdotal evidence suggests newspapers and other media in both India and Pakistan are telling more of the inspiring stories of Partition’s legacy – such as the widespread recounting of the warm and familial reception that greeted the 90-year-old Indian Hindu woman when she returned last month to her childhood home in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

What explains this shift in focus from the trauma and loss of Partition to sharing more of the heroism and compassion and small acts of kindness that were also part of the experience?

Experts cite a number of factors, from the rise of oral history as a valid alternative to academic history in understanding particularly traumatic experiences, to the advanced ages of the remaining Partition survivors and people’s natural tendency to turn nostalgic about the past.

Some oral historians note that their craft gives more voice to women and their insights into an event than does traditional historical research, and they say this makes for the richer and more nuanced picture of Partition emerging over recent years.

Even the rise of Hindu nationalism in India over the past decade has played a role, experts say. Interfaith leaders and initiatives promoting cross-border understanding have sought to counterbalance the intensifying marginalization of Indian Muslims and accompanying anti-Muslim fervor, they say, with examples of intercommunity harmony, including during and after Partition.

So when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared last year that Aug. 14 should henceforth be observed as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, for example, some Partition heritage clubs and remembrance organizations stepped up efforts to communicate the full array of experiences and memories of Partition.  

Yet another factor some cite is the growing interest in the legacy of Partition among young people in both India and Pakistan – especially those who have grandparents who lived through it. In interviews, opinion articles, and classroom projects, they report seeing qualities like resilience and determination in how their grandparents persevered despite uprooted lives and often tremendous loss.

“Young people today haven’t grown up with their parents talking about Partition, so they go to their grandparents – and in many cases they hear stories that paint a picture of a socially broad experience that was mostly good,” says Furrukh Khan, an associate professor of postcolonial history at Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan.

“So often the students are amazed to hear from their grandparents or others of that generation the stories of lives lived across religious and cultural lines, of the neighborhoods they shared and the friendships they had,” says Dr. Khan, who has been teaching a course on Partition for two decades.

Pull of a homeland

Dr. Khan acknowledges that Partition was a different experience for Pakistan than for India, a difference that may explain why some in the two countries remember the event and interpret its legacy differently.

“For Pakistan, it’s independence, a new nation,” he says. “For India, it’s breakup – of the mythic Mother India.”

What Partition did not destroy for millions of Indians and Pakistanis alike (and for some Bangladeshis, whose new nation was formed in 1971 from what was East Pakistan post-Partition) is a sense of a common homeland, some experts say.

This is particularly true for those whose family roots are in Punjab, the most populous region divided by Partition, where Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs lived together for centuries.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“Anytime Punjabis meet anywhere in the world, there is an instant rapport, and always the first question is, ‘What village are you from?’ meaning of course your family’s village before Partition,” says Ms. Malhotra, whose paternal grandparents met in a refugee camp in Delhi after their families were uprooted from the part of Punjab that became Pakistan at Partition.

“We realize we eat the same foods, share a common culture, even speak the same language, which is Punjabi,” she says.

Dr. Khan – who spends his weekends growing rice and mangoes on a small farm in Punjab just a couple of miles from the Indian border – acknowledges this sense of a “homeland” shared by Punjabis. But he says it may be strongest for Sikhs, whose highest religious sites are located in Pakistani Punjab and have been difficult for Indian Sikhs to visit despite some recent loosening of restrictions.

Mr. Singh, the retired Indian army colonel, confirms with a story how Partition has been no match for an undimmed sense of a homeland.

In 2004 he was able to visit Pakistan for the first time, and, while there, he asked his hosts to take him to his old neighborhood in Rawalpindi where his extended family once lived.

“When we entered the area, I thought it seemed right, but at the junction where my uncle had had a clinic, there was a fish market and a chicken market, so I wasn’t sure,” Mr. Singh says.

Courtesy of Nirmal Singh

Nirmal Singh with his wife (left), eldest daughter (far right), and his granddaughter, Priyanka, in Orlando, Florida, Feb. 11, 2020.

It was then that “the miracle happened,” he says.

From out of the large crowd of curious onlookers around him came a voice that said, “Are you looking for Dr. Pritam Singh’s clinic?” And when an amazed Mr. Singh responded that he was, and that Dr. Singh was his uncle, the man said, “Yes, this is the place.”

Mr. Singh says he fell to the ground, touching it “with a sense that this was home, and I thanked God for bringing me back to this place.”

When he got back up, he asked the people gathered around what had become of the man. “They said, ‘No, no man was here,’” Mr. Singh recalls. “He had just disappeared.”

Editor’s note: The map in this story has been updated to correctly show the location of Karachi, Pakistan. The story has also been updated to clarify Dr. Khan's title.

“Once I start to hear the lightning rods buzz, I have to get back inside,” Samsara Duffey warns as she watches black clouds advance from the southwest toward this windswept 8,000-foot peak. “Sometimes the hair on my forehead will tickle [with electricity]. That’s when I know I better find cover.”

A moment later, the air vibrates, and a static hum reaches her ears. Sheets of gray rain across the upper South Fork of the Sun River advance toward Ms. Duffey’s 1962 U.S. Forest Service lookout building here in “The Bob” – Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness. Her border collie, Mae, leads the way up the steps and through the tattered screen door. 

The southeast wind picks up and finds the cracks between the wood and 107 windowpanes. Each fragile piece was carried on a mule up the winding 6-mile trail from the valley. The radio sputters with trail crews checking in.

“The cabin shakes when the wind hits 25 miles per hour,” she says, leaning against the shuttering western wall. “I think I can feel it coming.”

As the room darkens beneath the clouds, her grin anticipates the collision between the storm and her shelter, giving away her comfort with wilderness extremity.

For the past 26 wildfire seasons, since the age of 21, Ms. Duffey has served as a fire lookout for the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. Decades of legendary solo bushwhacking trips across ridges and drainages have resulted in intimate knowledge of her fire district and beyond. This “ground truthing” helps her pinpoint smoke and flames with acute accuracy.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

The veteran fire spotter demonstrates how to pinpoint the location of a fire with an Osborne fire finder.

After watching the American West burn summer after summer from her perch above tree line, she’s developed a complex view of environmental responsibility, informed by a palpable joy in the wilderness and ethical introspection on the interactions between the human and nonhuman
world. 

“This place has a value in and of itself without humans. The intrinsic value of wilderness is wilderness,” she says. “My duty is to try to interpret, report, and provide experiences for people where they understand that. And beyond that privilege is the joy of getting up every day and looking at this landscape.”  

The sweep of that terrain comes into sharp focus as the battering gusts and fat rain on the trembling windows let up after only half an hour. As the storm rolls east out of the mountains and onto the prairie, the strobe of cloud-to-cloud lightning above Haystack Butte brightens its dramatic pinnacle and steep sides for an instant.

It started with a grizzly encounter

Bears padded quietly across the forest floor near a tent where a 16-year-old Samsara and her mother slept. The two had backpacked into Indian Point in The Bob the day before and hung their food packs high in the trees after dinner.

“We didn’t know when we arrived, but there were habituated grizzly bears in the area,” the fire spotter today explains, noting that the bears had become accustomed to humans and their food. The commotion of the bears discovering their packs woke mother and daughter, but in the dark night neither of them could see the animals. Morning light revealed their supplies strewn across the pine needles, torn by teeth and claws.

“They were so comfortable around humans, the Fish, Wildlife, and Parks killed the sow, and the cubs were sent to a zoo in Little Rock, Arkansas,” says Ms. Duffey.

That incident shaped her sense of responsibility for her impact on the natural world: “I felt it was my fault,” she says, her voice cracking. “And so, a lot of what I’ve done through my work is to try to keep that from happening.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Atop Patrol Mountain, Samsara Duffey uses binoculars to survey her district, which is the size of Rhode Island.

Spurred by her commitment to wild places and creatures, and hoping to prevent more human-animal conflict, she majored in wildlife management at the University of Alaska Fairbanks after high school in Helena, Montana. A few semesters into her studies, she realized that the science of wildlife management – “the counting and counting” – didn’t interest her, but she still earned her bachelor’s in wildlife biology. The ethics of how the human and nonhuman world interact grip her to this day.

In 1997, home in Montana for the summer and searching for work, Ms. Duffey learned that the lookout job at Patrol was open. With her sister located at the Prairie Reef lookout 12 miles (as the crow flies) from Patrol, she jumped at the opportunity.

While not the highest peak in the range, the mountain still offers an expansive view of the U.S. Forest Service’s 1,200-square-mile fire district – an area the size of Rhode Island. The view of the land she’s responsible for in the Patrol district, and beyond, is carved and buckled by Straight Creek and the South Fork of the Sun River drainages, Sugarloaf Mountain, Scapegoat Plateau, and countless limestone cliffs. 

Yet even these sweeping vistas aren’t temptation enough to draw many hikers up the trail to the lookout – on average 60 to 80 a summer sign Ms. Duffey’s guest book at the summit. In just 6 miles, from the Straight Creek trailhead on the dirt Benchmark Road, the path ascends nearly 3,000 vertical feet and includes a slick-stoned creek crossing that runs cold with snowmelt. It’s also her only maintained route to civilization.  

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Ms. Duffey says she does not work alone; border collie Mae is always with her.

This unique summer job was federally established more than six decades before Ms. Duffey was born. A series of rampant fires burned 3 million acres in Montana, Idaho, and Washington in 1910. “The Great Fire,” as it was called, sparked the Forest Service to prioritize fire detection in protecting the nation’s natural resources. 

Lookout towers were built across the country, and by the 1940s, around 5,000 fire lookouts stewarded the national forests. However, most of those posts have closed due to advances in technology such as planes and satellite imaging. The Forest Fire Lookout Association estimates around 400 fire lookouts are still operational today.

Ms. Duffey’s 12 weeks of work fall roughly between July 1 and Sept. 20 every year. The four-days-on, three-days-off rotation consists of 10-hour shifts when she monitors trail crews, fields questions from the Forest Service in Great Falls, and scans the expansive landscape for smoke. On the days she turns the radio off, Ms. Duffey explores the wilderness just off the steps of her wooden cabin. 

Priceless ground truth

The gurgling summer flows of the South Fork of the Sun River were interrupted by the jingling straps and buckles of a pack train headed into the backcountry over a decade ago. Montana writer Hal Herring had moved to the Rocky Mountain Front only a few years prior and was still learning the lay of land. Accompanied by some friends, Mr. Herring was bound for the White River, deep in The Bob. Their mules were loaded with a week’s worth of camping supplies tucked in panniers. A sharp bend in the trail revealed a woman drinking water in a snowberry patch, her running shorts and shoes out of place on a remote path on which most people are burdened by backpacks and boots. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

The Patrol Mountain Forest Service lookout cabin has “effective visibility” of an 11-mile radius for spotting fires. But the view can be as far as 20 to 30 miles across ridges highlighted here by a summer sunset.

“The people I was with knew her, so they all said hello,” says Mr. Herring, who waved as he passed. “I asked them at our next break, ‘Who was that in the shorts?’”

“Samsara, the Patrol Mountain lookout,” his companions chorused, explaining that on her days off, she sometimes runs to a neighboring lookout at Prairie Reef to visit. 

“I turned and couldn’t even see Patrol from where we were,” Mr. Herring laughs. “I asked the party, ‘Isn’t that really far?’”

“Not for her,” they replied.

Ms. Duffey has an extraordinary ability to read the land and feels comfortable exploring off trail.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Only 60 to 80 hikers a summer sign the Patrol Mountain log. Ryan Witkowski (in orange) and Claire Mannheimer (center) made it up the 6 miles in July and met lookout Samsara Duffey.

“I see a mountain, ridge, or basin I want to reach, and I just hike. Used to run more,” she laughs. “There doesn’t necessarily need to be a trail. I used to look at a lot of topographic maps, but now I know the landscape well. If I really need to make time, more than 20 miles in a day, I’ll stick to the trail. But when I’m exploring, I’ll take old, no longer maintained trails or animal paths.”

Unless she’s hiking through a recent burn, Ms. Duffey negotiates forests littered with blowdown – dead trees toppled by wind that make walking more like climbing through a jungle gym. Lodgepole pines are notorious for remaining flexible after death, and their sharp branches catch skin and clothing as a hiker scrambles over, under, and around. Even maintained trails have fallen trees, and because The Bob is federally designated wilderness, trail crews aren’t allowed to use chain saws to remove the fallen timber, resulting in slower clearing. Ms. Duffey has learned her landscape through blood, sweat, and worn-out shoes.

“It helps me know the place I’m responsible for,” she says. “All the hiking is for pleasure, but it helps me be better at my job.”

With this knowledge of “ground truthing” – providing direct observation on-site to confirm mapping images – she can isolate smoke quickly and report flames with familiar detail, which is invaluable to her supervisors in Great Falls.

“A fire lookout’s knowledge and presence on the landscape is pretty priceless,” says Michael Kaiser, Helena district fire management officer. “They can guide folks into the fire they spotted either through trails, roads, or landscape features. And when they have eyes on the fire, they can provide updates to make sure folks on the ground don’t get into a bad situation.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

A view from the lookout across Honeymoon Basin is lit by morning sunlight.

One such fire Ms. Duffey spotted in 2021 burned near Danaher Cabin, an 1800s homestead now used as a Forest Service patrol station, which is beyond her district boundary. “Scrambling through that country helped me develop a feel for the distances when reporting the fire,” she explains, “and I could tell that the smoke was on the west side of the mountain coming from somewhere near the cabin.” 

The “jolt” of recognition

The sky was empty except for drift smoke from far-off fires one summer day in 2019. Ms. Duffey sat at the radio knitting, not expecting any storms until later in the afternoon. Then, like a tulip unfurling in the morning, a thunderhead suddenly blossomed to the south. Without the warning of thunder, it dropped a single strike, then fizzled back into the blue not 10 minutes after it appeared. The spontaneous cloud left her delighted and awed at the dynamic nature of the sky she monitors.

“This is a good place to look at clouds,” she says.

In the mountains Ms. Duffey stewards, human-caused fires are rare due to the remote nature of the forest. Lightning strikes are the most common igniter, and knowing the different clouds helps her prepare for incoming weather and possible fires.

“When I see some wispy virga, that indicates strong winds up high. When I get completely overcast, it’s a midlevel stratocumulus, which is just a solid layer. And then there are the orographic or ground-effect clouds like lenticular clouds,” she explains, the scientific descriptions animating her face as she talks.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Samsara Duffey, on watch, peers from her cozy aerie.

But what happens when the watching becomes witnessing – when her big sky reverie is interrupted by that plume of smoke she’s commissioned to look for. 

“There’s a jolt,” she says.

“No matter how many I spot, there’s a similar rush every time,” she confesses. “And because of that initial rush, my first step is to grab my binoculars and make sure it is smoke. Even after 50-some fires, I’ll get excited over blowing pollen, which can mimic smoke. There’s another phenomenon right after a storm called ‘waterdogs’ that can look like smoke as well.” 

Once smoke is confirmed, she uses her Osborne fire finder to pinpoint the location of the fire. Despite being developed in the early 20th century – the model in the Patrol lookout was made in 1934 and sports an updated map from 1967 – this technology is still one of the modern fire lookout’s most important tools. 

Installed in the heart of the cabin, the fire finder is a map of the surrounding landscape with a hole at the epicenter marking the lookout. The map is bordered by a graduated measurement ring. And to determine the bearing of a fire, Ms. Duffey peers through a sighting hole on one side of the tool’s rim. 

Using a welded handle on the measurement ring, she rotates her sight until it’s aligned with the wire crosshairs on the far side. The crosshairs must zero in on the smoke or flames. Then, using the map and her expertise of the landscape she’s watched and walked, Ms. Duffey can estimate roughly how far away the fire is from the lookout. The heading to the smoke is called an azimuth, the horizontal angle or direction of a compass bearing. 

She then fills out a smoke report, radios the dispatch operator in Great Falls, and continues to monitor the smoke.

“Once I call it in, everything is out of my hands. I’ll take note and be available,” she says of the surprisingly businesslike process that flows from the initial jolt of a fire.

Indeed, her decades of stewardship here have shaped her manner in both the short and long view: Ms. Duffey holds a calm and accepting attitude.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Ms. Duffey communicates by radio with Forest Service crews in the field.

Despite having been on watch as the West experiences the engulfing effects of climate change – fires growing more frequent and burning hotter, fire seasons lengthening, and snowpack shrinking across the Rocky Mountains – Ms. Duffey continues to find hope in the natural world. She accepts what the seasons bring, but the shadow of climate change doesn’t darken her experience of the world she loves deeply. 

“It contradicts with how I feel about the political situation of our country, and everything going on ecologically, but I still find daily joy,” she says peering out her window. “Three days ago, that flower wasn’t there”; she points to the snowfield on the lee side of the ridge. “Now all of a sudden there’s a blossom. That’s amazing.”

Her intimacy with the land results in an idiosyncratic perspective of the blazes she’s entrusted to spot. 

“This is a fire-adapted landscape,” she explains. “There are plants and animals who need fire to come through this place. I report the fires, but I don’t feel as if I’m saving the trees when I call it in. They’ve burned before and will again.” 

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Do right by the deer and lichen 

Because she can’t leave the mountain as easily as many Americans leave their workplace, she continues her responsibility to the mountains beyond her punched timecard. 

“This is where I get to live and work,” says Ms. Duffey. “It’s a privilege to be here and work here. I love this landscape, and I want to do right by it.”

But, she clarifies, “this isn’t my home. It’s the deer’s, lichen’s, and eagle’s. I don’t want to cause any more harm than I have to.”

The way she mitigates her impact while she occupies the shelter displays her humility before the wilderness. She collects her plastic and organic trash – no bear attractants allowed outside the shelter – which must be carted off the mountain on the mule train that arrives to resupply her food and water every three weeks. All her paper and “dry” trash is burned in the wood stove just often enough “so it doesn’t get too stinky.”

Her ground toilet – “the out,” as she calls the open-air commode – offers a grandiose view northeast toward the Sun River, and with only one main user, the privy can naturally decompose all waste.

Once a week, she washes her hair and uses baby wipes for what she calls “spit baths.” 

“I don’t know what it is,” she says with a chuckle over her isolation, “but for some reason, most people happen to show up while I’m taking a bath.”

The accrued quotidian experiences of her 26 summers here have given her an outlook and deep-rooted sense of place that she believes can inspire others – the visitors to her lookout, students in the classrooms where she substitute teaches in the winter, or people she leads on tours in Yellowstone National Park – to learn more about their homes. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Relaxing before starting her workday, fire lookout Samsara Duffey has a 360-degree view through 107 windowpanes; in the center of the cabin is a 1934 vintage Osborne fire finder with a 1967 map that is still used in locating fires.

“I think most people would struggle to name and identify their state tree,” she says, prefacing her conviction that the connection to nature is essential for everyone. “That’s something little, but it grows into the problem of people not being connected to where they live, which is why we have the idea that wilderness is not necessarily a good thing. The settlers that came to the United States believed that they had to subdue the wilderness. They were proud to cut their homes out of the woods, plow the fields, and dominate and subdue the landscape.”

While Ms. Duffey feels more comfortable in the crowd of ravens and ground squirrels here than in a busy bar, she says most people might perceive her as lonely.

That’s not how she sees herself: “There’s a difference between being lonely and being alone.” 

“I mean there’s always Mae,” she laughs as the border collie opens her eyes from a nap. “But I see such incredible things when I’m alone. There are so few people who get to see wolverines. I was sitting out there on the Honeymoon Basin rim one day, quiet, and a wolverine walked within 30 steps of me. Didn’t even know I was there until I moved.” 

She considers that the stillness and patience of being by oneself must be relearned in our increasingly connected and stimulated society. Those who separate willingly are often misunderstood. 

“As children, we aren’t given the tools to learn how to be comfortable with ourselves,” she says. “Particularly girls and women who are always told that their value, safety, and happiness are based on men. We aren’t encouraged to develop introspection, critical thinking, or the ability to hang out by ourselves. When we spend that time alone, we receive the message back: Really? Are you OK?”

Even in her married life, Ms. Duffey must spend time alone. Her husband is a smokejumper supervisor in West Yellowstone, where they make their home. Their summers – a fire worker’s busiest time – are spent apart, with only infrequent texts sent between them. They try to spend at least one or two weekends together, but the 5-hour drive and 4-hour hike to her aerie make visits difficult.

“One time,” she reminisces with a smile, “he got to the trailhead at 10 p.m., and instead of sleeping in the car, he started up ... through the dark and got here after 2 a.m. He didn’t even have a headlamp.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Illuminated by early morning sun against Montana’s big sky, the Patrol Mountain fire lookout perches at 8,000 feet.

Conscious stewardship – 24/7

Beyond those special days, Ms. Duffey fills her time – when not operating the radio or actively looking for smoke – knitting or reading. Along the northern cabin wall, there’s a stuffed shelf that includes “Brave New World,” “Jane Eyre,” and “Of Mice and Men.” 

But knitting is her most intensive and time-consuming creative outlet in the lookout, and the mules trekked an entire duffel bag of yarn up the mountain for her this summer. Her favorite patterns come from the Fair Isle of Scotland. Hats, gloves, and sweaters with complex color sequences adorn hooks in the lookout. 

Even when her hands are working the knitting needles and her mind is focused on the design, her eyes wander across the panorama of mountains and valleys outside the windows, still stewarding from the mountain that has taught her the long view.

“I don’t feel lucky or unlucky if my district burns or doesn’t burn,” she says of nature’s course. “I have a good summer no matter what. I’m here to watch, and there’s always something to see.”

REUTERS

A protester in Colombo, Sri Lanka, holds a national flag Aug. 10 at a tent camp that became the focal point of months-long demonstrations against ruling politicians.

In Kenya, where leaders have long stoked tribal divisions to gain power, the Aug. 9 election produced an unusual expression among many citizens. During the campaign, young people would signal to each other with a two-handed fist bump, bringing their thumbs together in a show of oneness over duality. The gesture was a symbolic rejection of the divide-and-rule tactics by politicians.

Such displays of civic unity have become more common in many democracies. Voters have woken up to a common ploy by leaders to manufacture fear of “the other” rather than encouraging followers to embrace the dignity of their fellow citizens and engage in calm discourse over difficult issues. 

During this year’s mass protests in Sri Lanka, for example, the protest site became “a civic space, a safe zone for the country’s religious, ethnic and sexual diversity” in contrast to decades of leaders whipping up factional hatred, according to The New York Times.

“People now openly talk about equality,” said one Sri Lankan protester. The protests led to the ouster of an unpopular president.  

Last year in Israel, many Jewish and Arab citizens protested together to end intergroup violence fueled by the divisive rhetoric of politicians. “It’s not a question of national identity but of values,” one protester told Haaretz. “We can’t let racism break through again.”

In 2019-2020, tens of thousands of Iraqis camped out in major cities in a show of unity against the political practice of divvying up power and oil wealth along religious and ethnic lines, which has only fueled corruption. The protest sites became temporary mini-states of desired secular rule.

In Lebanon three years ago, young people held mass protests aimed at ending the fearmongering between religious groups and at bringing about good governance. In Taiwan, protests known as the sunflower movement have led to an emerging national identity that overcomes old divisions between families from mainland China and native Taiwanese.

This phenomenon is now quite global. “We once thought of a community as a group of people who live in the same geographic area, or who share socio-economic, ethnic, linguistic, or religious characteristics,” Achim Steiner, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, said in a 2020 speech. “The evolving global context, including the extent to which new technologies have empowered communication and information-sharing at the individual-level, requires us to embrace a far wider definition.”

The United States is not immune to this trend. A survey last year by the Siena College Research Institute found one divisive factor stood out among Americans more than any other. 

“Ringing loud and clear,” the survey found, “is a dissatisfaction with a political landscape in which they say politicians stoke divisions, divide and conquer, won’t work together to address the needs of the people and remarkably can’t be held accountable for misdeeds that are apparent to everyday citizens.”

In any society, people wear a variety of different hats to define themselves. Yet they can also create bonds of affection under the umbrella of an identity based on shared civic ideals. In Kenya, that identity is now more widely shared between individuals, all with a simple fist bump between clenched hands.