![]() "It's a voluntary organisation, the FFLA. He runs the local Facebook page for the organisation and has even become good friends with the FFLA's eastern director. That passion and in-depth knowledge of the towers has already landed Kelley voluntary work with the Forest Fire Lookout Association (FFLA). It's now one of the oldest still active in the United States." "It's a wonderful stone tower that was built in 1911 for private use, and then the state took it over in 1913 to use as a fire tower. "It's still one of my favourite towers - but I don't really have favouri.," he trails off. I'm really thankful to my dad for being willing to do that." The longest trip we've done was, like 1,180 miles, going from Massachusetts to Maryland. It's usually not much hassle to do more than one in a day. If we want, we can drive two hours to Vermont, do a nice hike there, then snag an easy-to-reach Massachusetts tower on the way back. "We get up early, my dad drives, and I usually do the planning. "Sundays are usually when I visit towers," Kelley says. Since he started travelling to visit firewatch towers, he and his father have visited over 140 of them - an average of more than one per week. On his bedroom wall is a board filled with information, including types of towers, what makes them unique, and even a list of the names of the lookouts who were stationed at different towers at certain times. Kelley's young brain is packed with trivia like this. Sometimes lookouts would spend whole days following the lines to find a tree branch had dropped on it." "There were some places in Maine where it was your job to check 15 miles of phone line to see if there was a break in it. "That used to be something lookouts were required to do," Kelley explains. Likewise, the section where you follow a phone line to find a breakage is also an accurate depiction of the firewatch profession in the 1980s. You spend a good portion of your time tracking revellers through Shoshone National Park you find their empty beer cans, you clean up after them, and you try prevent them from doing any damage to the forest and your supplies. The cabs at the top of them are usually locked because vandalism is one of the biggest problems."įirewatch nails this. A lot of the ones in Massachusetts are still active, so they're not really open to the public. "There wasn't a big gap in time from me finishing the game to heading out and looking at lookout towers ," Kelley recalls. This grounded story was still bouncing around in Kelley's mind days after the credits rolled, but his real fascination was with the architecture. In the end, all these quirks turn out to exist only in protagonist Henry's head it is secretly a game about coping with guilt, and the paranoia of living in isolation. While Firewatch may not feature any goat herders, the story alludes to government conspiracies, aliens, and spies. After playing Firewatch - the ending at the Thorofare Lookout, which is an L4, and Henry's tower, the Two Forks tower - I just kept thinking about the design, how cool they look, and how cool it would be to do that kind of thing." "It's not really one thing about them - it's their location, their history, and their design. "Firewatch was the catalyst for my interest in towers," Kelley, now 14, explains. The game's story resonated, but the experience also ignited a passion for something else: fire towers. Sitting in his bedroom in Hadley, Massachusetts - a small farming town in New England - he knew he was playing something special. Kelley was 12 years old when he played Firewatch for the first time. The pastel-coloured, heartrending adventure impacted Kelley's life in more meaningful ways, too. None of this would have happened in a world where game developer Campo Santo didn't make Firewatch, its 2016 indie hit about isolation, estrangement and scanning the horizons for signs of fire. That was good, because it allowed him to escape." So I just leave my dad there talking to her. "I start walking away because she won't leave. "She has her two pet goats with her and she is telling us about how the government is spying on her using the fire tower," Kelley tells me. As she closes in, they see that she is holding a lead in each hand - attached at the end of each lead is a goat. ![]() ![]() The pair are taking photos of the nearby fire lookout tower when, suddenly, they are approached by a stranger. Jack Kelley and his father are standing in the middle of the woods in Phillipston, Massachusetts.
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