One of the big coincidences of 2025 has to be two fan mails arriving within five days of each other asking for more information about the fire watchtower in What We Found in the Corn Maze and How It Saved a Dragon. I had not, until now, thought of the fire tower as one of the book’s actual characters. True, it uproots itself from the ground and begins striding around the countryside with the book’s three heroes as passengers in its cabin – they nearly fall out when the tower limbos under some high-tension wires – but as far as having a personality, the tower is pretty wooden, despite its flexibility.
Still, to answer my correspondent in Oregon…no, Olivia, the fire tower’s attraction to the local water tower goes nowhere. As Modesty, riding in the tower’s cab, points out when the tower leans a little too affectionately close to the other tower, “No, no, no! You’re a fire tower. This is a water tower. Fire and water don’t mix! There can only be heartache.”
She’s right. There certainly can never be fireworks.
And to Liam, from Missouri, I can only say I’m sorry to hear that the fire tower near you was torn down and replaced with a cell phone tower. Sometimes they pave paradise and put up a parking lot. Same thing. I still have a fire tower about four miles to the south of where I live. I pass it almost every day on my way into town, and it was this tower that inspired the one in the book.
Although this one doesn’t walk around much.
Still, to answer my correspondent in Oregon…no, Olivia, the fire tower’s attraction to the local water tower goes nowhere. As Modesty, riding in the tower’s cab, points out when the tower leans a little too affectionately close to the other tower, “No, no, no! You’re a fire tower. This is a water tower. Fire and water don’t mix! There can only be heartache.”
She’s right. There certainly can never be fireworks.
And to Liam, from Missouri, I can only say I’m sorry to hear that the fire tower near you was torn down and replaced with a cell phone tower. Sometimes they pave paradise and put up a parking lot. Same thing. I still have a fire tower about four miles to the south of where I live. I pass it almost every day on my way into town, and it was this tower that inspired the one in the book.
Although this one doesn’t walk around much.
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