Nobody applies to work at a Forest Service relay station because they want to be around people.

You apply because you want the opposite.

You want four months of solitude in a concrete block building on a ridge in the middle of nowhere.

Maintaining radio equipment that most of the

agency has forgotten exists. You want to wake up alone and go to sleep alone, and spend the hours

in between reading gauges and running diagnostics, and watching weather roll across a hundred

miles of unbroken timber. That's what I wanted. That's what I got.

My name is Jesse.

I was 29.

This was 2020.

The summer everything shut down,

which made the isolation feel less like a choice

and more like the natural state of things.

The relay station was in the Olympic National Forest on the western

side of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Not the National Park, the National Forest,

which is a different jurisdiction and a different kind of land. The park gets millions of visitors a

year. The forest gets a fraction of that, and most of them

stay near the roads. Once you're a few miles into the interior on the west side, into the old

growth valleys and the high ridges, you might as well be on another planet. The station sat

at about 3,800 feet on a ridge line called Spur Ridge, between two drainagees that fed into

the Keenult River system. The building was maybe 20 feet by 30 feet, poured concrete walls,

metal roof, one door, two windows. It housed a bank of radio repeaters that linked the ranger

...