Lookout years jump-started adventurous life for author

“Life on a mountaintop is a little short on the pleasures of Saturday nights. It’s a little short on other things — refrigerators, bathrooms, bridge parties, drug stores and people. But there’s never a night when one can’t sleep for thinking of tomorrow’s payment on the car and never a day when he can’t stop to realize that life is good.”

 Jeanne Kellar Beaty,excerpt from “Lookout Wife”

Jeanne Kellar Beaty confided in the first pages of her 1953 book, “Lookout Wife,” that she was waiting for something big to happen in her life.

“For twenty-five years I had waited in vain for adventure to sweep me up in powerful arms and ferry me to the far corners of a romantic world,’ she wrote. “I had even taken a few halting steps to meet it.”

It should have come as no surprise, then, to any of Beaty’s friends and families that when the opportunity arose for her and husband, Chip, to head to Idaho to staff a fire lookout in the Salmon National Forest, they took it without a second thought.

“‘Where’s the Salmon National Forest?’ I asked as an after-thought,” Beaty recalled in her book.

“‘Somewhere in Idaho, I think,’ my husband answered. That was all we knew about it. That was enough.”

Now almost 93 years old, Beaty described her reaction to renewed interest in her story.

“I’m astonished and I’m flattered,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Canada not far over the border from Eureka.

Beaty is the guest speaker at the Northwest Montana Chapter of the Forest Fire Lookout Association fundraising event on Saturday in West Glacier. The nonagenarian is driving herself here. In fact, she plans to traverse Going-to-the-Sun Road while she’s here.

Association board member Beth Hodder of West Glacier took the lead in tracking down Beaty, and vice chairman Kjell Petersen pitched in, too. They were pleased, and a little surprised, to find Beaty still living not that far from the Flathead Valley.

Beaty will talk about what it was like for her and Chip to live in the lookout tower during the summers of 1949 and 1950, ever watching for smoke and fire from their mountaintop perch. She  also will talk about her long career as a writer and journalist.

The Idaho State Historical Society also recently contacted Beaty about the book she wrote 62 years ago, which was published by Random House in New York.

“It was not a best seller,” she offered.

The first printing of “Lookout Wife” was 10,000 copies and there were no subsequent printings. Lookout enthusiasts have tracked down and purchased copies of the book online, and several members of the local association have copies, Petersen said.

Beaty is getting her house ready to sell so she can move closer to her daughter north of Calgary. In the process of sorting through things, she ran across “a very nice review [of “Lookout Wife”] by the Cleveland Plain Dealer.”

The Beatys’ lives continued to be filled with adventures in varying degrees.

Chip was a smokejumper in McCall, Idaho, for several years and eventually got his Ph.D. in geography. Because his research was on desert flooding, they spent time on and off deserts for a time.

“We had so many other adventures,” she said. “There was always another chapter ahead.”

Beaty had a long career in journalism.

She wrote travel pieces for the New York Times for 25 years, during which time she also wrote for Good Housekeeping magazine. Her articles showed up in several other publications as well.

Later, when Chip left the University of Montana for a teaching job at the University of Lethbridge in 1969, Beaty wrote editorials for the Lethbridge Herald for a decade.

Though she has done no professional writing for the last 25 years, Beaty said she believes she’s a better writer now because she has more experiences from which to draw for literary inspiration.

Swimming three times a week might be contributing to her long life, but it’s probably good genes, too. Beaty’s mother was 99 1/2 when she died. Chip died in 2000.

Beaty has dabbled in art, watercolors and pottery. She has had to give up being a potter, though, because the clay is too heavy.

“In my next reincarnation I will be a weaver. Wool is much lighter,” she said with a touch of whimsy.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.