deer mice and coyotes, but fewer dusky-footed wood rats and California mice. Parts of nature die while others thrive.
Predators are known to patrol fire lines, looking for game flushed out by flames or, after the fire, game that is looking for green forage.
In 1950, New Mexico’s Capitan Gap Fire took seventeen thousand acres. A fire crew, threatened by flames and heat, dug into the soft earth of a recent landslide and covered themselves with dirt. They later emerged alive. Also alive after the fire was a young black bear, a cub clinging to a tree, its hair singed, its skin burned in places. The bear’s rescuers named him Hotfoot Teddy. He was later renamed after the advertising bear, the cartoon Smokey. Hotfoot Teddy became the living version of Smokey Bear and as such lived in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. He lived until 1976, and when he died he was buried at Capitan, under a stone marker.
Smokey’s image was painted for a twenty-cent stamp. Restaurants and streets and a historical state park have been named after him. In a single week, Smokey Bear has received as many as thirteen thousand letters. Although he could not read his letters, he was given his own zip code: 20252.
All this notwithstanding, Edward Abbey, critical of Smokey’s campaign to control nature, is not alone as a detractor of Smokey. Smokey has been blamed for government policies of fire prevention, of wrongheaded efforts to stop the natural occurrence of fire. Abbey called the bear an idiot, but others have branded him a pariah and worse. Smokey has been blamed for accumulation of fuels in American forests. He has been blamed for the nearly wholesale burning of Yellowstone National Park in 1988, when years without fire resulted in the accumulation of enough fuel to lead to what some saw as an unnatural fire—unnaturally large and unnaturally hot, thanks to the bear.
The former firefighter and renowned fire historian Stephen J. Pyne described the Yellowstone fire in an article in Natural History : “Groves of old-growth lodge pole pine and aging spruce and fir exploded into flame like toothpicks before a blowtorch. Towering convective clouds rained down a hailstorm of ash, and firebrands even spanned the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Crown fires propagated at rates of up to two miles per hour, velocities unheard of for forest fuels. A smoke pall spread over the region like the prototype of a nuclear winter. Everything burned.”
But Smokey has his place. Some fires, sometimes, can be prevented, or at least delayed. Some fuel loads, sometimes, can be managed. The key to fire management today seems to rely on premature ignition, on setting controlled burns to manage fuel loads and to reset the chaparral. Had Smokey been on the job, the Tea Fire that burned the photographer’s house might have been prevented. Maybe, with the right funding and the right planning and the right amount of foresight and luck and unbounded optimism, the fuel load that let flames rip down the hill from the Tea House could have been burned piecemeal, a controlled burn done in manageable swaths to renew the chaparral without destroying homes and overrunning fire engines and melting a file cabinet full of irreplaceable photographs.
Back in Santa Barbara, I stop at the house of the photographer’s mother, an artist known for her mosaic murals. The county has commissioned her to create a mosaic commemorating fire survivors and first responders. It is to be a community participation mosaic, art as therapy for people who live surrounded by fuel, for people who live with fire.
The mosaic, under construction, is too big for her studio. She has moved it into her gallery, attached to her house. It is art under construction, laid out in rough form. Its substance comes from used fire equipment and fire. Half of a toy metal excavator sits near the bottom of the mural. It was salvaged from a fire and then sliced lengthwise using a plasma cutter. Now it represents
Predators are known to patrol fire lines, looking for game flushed out by flames or, after the fire, game that is looking for green forage.
In 1950, New Mexico’s Capitan Gap Fire took seventeen thousand acres. A fire crew, threatened by flames and heat, dug into the soft earth of a recent landslide and covered themselves with dirt. They later emerged alive. Also alive after the fire was a young black bear, a cub clinging to a tree, its hair singed, its skin burned in places. The bear’s rescuers named him Hotfoot Teddy. He was later renamed after the advertising bear, the cartoon Smokey. Hotfoot Teddy became the living version of Smokey Bear and as such lived in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. He lived until 1976, and when he died he was buried at Capitan, under a stone marker.
Smokey’s image was painted for a twenty-cent stamp. Restaurants and streets and a historical state park have been named after him. In a single week, Smokey Bear has received as many as thirteen thousand letters. Although he could not read his letters, he was given his own zip code: 20252.
All this notwithstanding, Edward Abbey, critical of Smokey’s campaign to control nature, is not alone as a detractor of Smokey. Smokey has been blamed for government policies of fire prevention, of wrongheaded efforts to stop the natural occurrence of fire. Abbey called the bear an idiot, but others have branded him a pariah and worse. Smokey has been blamed for accumulation of fuels in American forests. He has been blamed for the nearly wholesale burning of Yellowstone National Park in 1988, when years without fire resulted in the accumulation of enough fuel to lead to what some saw as an unnatural fire—unnaturally large and unnaturally hot, thanks to the bear.
The former firefighter and renowned fire historian Stephen J. Pyne described the Yellowstone fire in an article in Natural History : “Groves of old-growth lodge pole pine and aging spruce and fir exploded into flame like toothpicks before a blowtorch. Towering convective clouds rained down a hailstorm of ash, and firebrands even spanned the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Crown fires propagated at rates of up to two miles per hour, velocities unheard of for forest fuels. A smoke pall spread over the region like the prototype of a nuclear winter. Everything burned.”
But Smokey has his place. Some fires, sometimes, can be prevented, or at least delayed. Some fuel loads, sometimes, can be managed. The key to fire management today seems to rely on premature ignition, on setting controlled burns to manage fuel loads and to reset the chaparral. Had Smokey been on the job, the Tea Fire that burned the photographer’s house might have been prevented. Maybe, with the right funding and the right planning and the right amount of foresight and luck and unbounded optimism, the fuel load that let flames rip down the hill from the Tea House could have been burned piecemeal, a controlled burn done in manageable swaths to renew the chaparral without destroying homes and overrunning fire engines and melting a file cabinet full of irreplaceable photographs.
Back in Santa Barbara, I stop at the house of the photographer’s mother, an artist known for her mosaic murals. The county has commissioned her to create a mosaic commemorating fire survivors and first responders. It is to be a community participation mosaic, art as therapy for people who live surrounded by fuel, for people who live with fire.
The mosaic, under construction, is too big for her studio. She has moved it into her gallery, attached to her house. It is art under construction, laid out in rough form. Its substance comes from used fire equipment and fire. Half of a toy metal excavator sits near the bottom of the mural. It was salvaged from a fire and then sliced lengthwise using a plasma cutter. Now it represents
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