You climb the watchtower and the watchtower is the building that turns distance into time. The watchtower sees what the ground cannot see. The watchtower stands above the treeline and above the roofline and above the horizon and the standing above the horizon means the watchtower sees the thing that is coming before the thing that is coming arrives. The watchtower is height with a purpose. The watchtower is not decorative. The watchtower is functional. The function is to look and the looking is the oldest form of defense because the first warning is always worth more than the last wall.

The watchtowers along the Great Wall of China stretched thirteen thousand miles and the stretching thirteen thousand miles meant a fire lit at one tower could reach Beijing in twenty four hours. The towers were spaced at intervals of five to ten miles and the spacing at five to ten miles meant every section of the wall was visible from at least one tower. The soldiers in the towers burned wolf dung because wolf dung produced thick black smoke and the thick black smoke was visible for miles. One column of smoke meant a hundred soldiers approaching. Two columns meant five hundred. Three columns meant a thousand. Four columns meant the invasion was real. The system was invented during the Han Dynasty around two hundred BC and the inventing around two hundred BC means the watchtower network predated the telegraph by two thousand years. The information traveled at the speed of fire. The fire traveled at the speed of sight. The message moved across the empire in a day because the watchtowers turned the wall into a wire.

The fire lookout towers of the American West watched eight hundred million acres of forest from wooden rooms bolted to mountaintops. The Forest Service built nine thousand towers between nineteen hundred and nineteen fifty and the building nine thousand towers was the largest observation network ever constructed in America. The lookout lived alone in a fourteen by fourteen foot room with windows on all sides and an Osborne Fire Finder bolted to a table in the center. The Osborne Fire Finder was a brass ring mounted on a topographic map and the brass ring had a sighting device and the sighting device could pinpoint a smoke column to within a quarter mile from thirty miles away. The lookout saw the smoke. The lookout took a bearing. The lookout called it in on a telephone line that ran down the mountain on poles cut from the trees the lookout was protecting. Jack Kerouac spent sixty three days as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in Washington in nineteen fifty six and the sixty three days became the ending of Desolation Angels. Gary Snyder worked the lookouts. Philip Whalen worked the lookouts. The Beats found the watchtower and the watchtower gave them what they were looking for which was solitude and height and the long view.

In the medieval world the watchtower was the keep. The keep at the Tower of London was built in ten sixty six by William the Conqueror and the building in ten sixty six meant the keep watched the city for nine hundred and sixty years. The keep was the tallest structure in the castle and the tallest structure in the castle was the last refuge. When the walls fell the defenders retreated to the keep and the retreating to the keep meant the keep was where the battle ended. The watchtowers of the Irish coast were built during the Napoleonic Wars to watch for French invasion and the watching for French invasion meant seventy nine towers were built around the coast of Ireland in three years. James Joyce set the opening of Ulysses in the Martello tower at Sandycove and the setting in the Martello tower meant the novel about Dublin began in the building that watched Dublin from the sea.

You stand in the watchtower and the view is the reason the watchtower exists. The view stretches to the horizon in every direction and the stretching to the horizon means you can see what the ground hides. You see the road before the traveler arrives. You see the smoke before the fire grows. You see the army before the army sees you. The watchtower. The room on the mountaintop. The thirteen thousand miles of fire signals. The nine thousand lookouts in the American forest. The keep at the center of the castle. The view. The distance turned into time. The architecture of vigilance. You climb the tower. You look out. You see everything and everything does not know you are watching. The watchtower watches. That is all the watchtower does. That is enough.