It was October 2020, and I had taken a position caretaking Hopkins Mountain Fireman's Cabin, a historic fire tower observer's cabin in the Monongahela National Forest. The Monongahela comprises almost 1 million acres of protected forest blanketing the mountain ranges on the eastern edge of West Virginia. The cabin itself was not much to admire = just a 14-by-13-foot gable-roofed room with a small concrete front porch. But the view from the porch - an eastern-facing vista of layered mountain ranges, nesting together far into Virginia - was breathtaking.