To get here from the west, you cross the Rio Grande River and drive past the hugely empty spaces where the first atomic explosion imitated daylight. Come from the east, you cross desert where Billy the Kid went wild, and skirt Roswell, where the UFO crashed and set off a million bad movies.
I’ve been in Siberia, I’ve crossed Inner Mongolia, I’ve had picnics a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. But I’ve never been anywhere this middle of nowhere.
And then the town comes up quite unexpectedly, just a couple streets hidden in the forest. You probably wouldn’t think to stop in this part of south central New Mexico, except first, it’s been a long time since you last saw a gas station; and second, you see the signs: the Smokey Bear Museum, the Smokey Bear Motel, the Smokey Bear Cafe.
Yes, the bear was real. And this is where he was from, and where, in the end, he came back to.
Smokey Bear — not Smokey “the” Bear, there’s an act of Congress about that — fought forest fires, made the woods safe for everyone. We had Smokey coloring books, and there were all those great TV commercials — at least until they stuck in that annoying owl. Smokey’s face was on posters, books, ads in Boy’s Life magazine.
My wife, one of Smokey’s Junior Forest Rangers and proud of it, spent her fierce, blond childhood terrorizing campers all over Montana, because they had not tended their fires according to Smokey’s standards. And one of the biggest thrills of my own childhood was going to see the bear who, after a traumatic start, lived out his life at the National Zoo, in Washington, D.C.
You know the Smokey mantra: “Only you can prevent forest fires.”
We come into the tiny town of Capitan, N. M., Smokey Bear central, from the west. It’s a full day’s drive from Albuquerque, hanging a left off I-10 at the crossroads town of Soccoro, where you can buy 40 or 50 kinds of beef jerky, and as many kinds of chilies. In this part of the country, that pungent chili scent comes with every meal, a sinus-clearing part of the landscape.
As we move east, the world quickly goes a shade of gray that doesn’t seem possible in nature. It’s ironic, this close to the home of America’s most important firefighting campaign, that the biggest fire ever started here. On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity Site, just over that low range of mountains to the south. This was the emptiest territory in the country 60 years ago, and there’s still nothing out here, except for a small shop that sells rocks partially melted by the blast.
It doesn’t seem like there could be a forest within a thousand miles of a place that looks so utterly scrubbed, stripped down to the lowest common denominator of landscape. Nothing grows, and even the sand seems hesitant to move in the wind.
But about the time we start talking about the desert cliches of vultures and thirst because we finished off the last soda a hundred miles of empty ago, the road starts to climb, passing 5,000, then 6,000 feet in altitude. The temperature drops. Low bushes are quickly replaced by towering trees. A pine sap tang replaces the smell of utter sterility.
This is the Lincoln National Forest, and it’s where Smokey Bear was born, but it’s not where the Smokey story starts.
Smokey Bear was actually born twice. The first time, in August 1944, he was born as a publicity stunt.
There was no real bear; there were simply posters for an anti-forest fire campaign. Albert Staehle drew a bear wearing Levis and a ranger hat; he was named “Smokey” after a New York City fire chief. Most of the iconic drawings and posters we know today were the work of Rudolph Wendelin, who painted Smokey from 1954 to 1973, but the groundwork was Staehle’s.
The second time Smokey was born was on May 9, 1950. Firefighters working an out-of-control blaze near Capitan Gap found an orphaned bear cub. The scorched cub weighed only 4 pounds when they plucked him out of a burned tree.
Newspapers picked up on the bear cub, and Smokey moved off the posters and into the real world. Bear mania quickly followed. In his prime, Smokey had his own ZIP code and got more mail than the president of the United States. His approval rating was probably a lot higher, too.
This is all chronicled inside the log cabin Smokey Bear Museum, which opened in 1961. A table groans under huge scrapbooks filled with Smokey clippings, and a glass case is stuffed with every Smokey toy or doll imaginable, including Milton Bradley’s Smokey Bear board game. There are mugs, spoons, canteens, T-shirts, posters, pens. If Smokey’s face was ever on it, it’s here. In the gift shop half of the room — in the modern world, all roads lead to the gift shop — I buy myself a Smokey T-shirt, passing on the Smokey Bear watch with a tinge of regret. A cool rain brings out the pure air of the high New Mexico mountains as we walk to the next building over, the Smokey Bear Historical State Park.
Here’s the official story of Smokey: the impossibly small dog harness they put him in when he was first found; a collection of old Smokey posters, cartoons, film clips, photos.
But really you come in for just one reason: this is the bear’s final resting place.
And although this is as middle of nowhere as middle of nowhere gets, every year, more than 30,000 people come to stand for a moment and pay respects to the bear. The path to Smokey’s grave leads through a small botanical garden. Smokey would like that.
Of course, not everybody sees the bear as respectable. In fact, the bear has become the center of a huge controversy that’s helping determine our national forest policy. A 2002 United States Department of Agriculture document suggests that our belief in Smokey and the fact that “only you can prevent forest fires” has “led to a misunderstanding of ecological processes and consequences.”
For half a century, following Smokey’s advice, we stomped out forest fires as quickly as they sparked up. The massive blazes in Yellowstone Park in 1988 were largely nature’s backlash against the no-burn policy. In fact, much of the West, currently locked in drought, is a tinderbox of dead trees and brush because of decades of too-careful fire management, and nationwide, forests have lost a vital step in regenerating, the full consequences of which are just now being understood and addressed.
Don’t blame the bear, though. We never had a bigger friend to nature. It just took us a while to catch on to his deeper message, perhaps best summed up by what’s become Smokey’s No. 2 motto, the simple but very eloquent: “Think.”
Smokey’s final spot in the forest is a good spot, surrounded by healthy trees and next to a small stream that bubbles and gurgles reassuringly. A simple, flat stone marks where they laid Smokey to rest, in 1976. After he died, the National Zoo tried naming another bear Smokey, keeping the legacy going, but it never caught on. There’s only one Smokey. And really, there’s only one way to give him the honor he’s due. We drive a little east, passing through the near-ghost town of Lincoln, where Billy the Kid killed two men, escaping after forces under the command of Gov. Lew Wallace — who later wrote the novel Ben Hur — captured him in a shootout.
From there, it only takes a minute to find a road leading into the forest. Pavement gives way to dirt, the sound of the world drops away, and as twilight comes on, a couple bats flit overhead, proving that no matter what our daily lives may be like, in the forest, it’s always business as usual.
This is what Smokey wanted for all of us. Forget the controversy over Smokey’s legacy; the simple truth is that Smokey taught us the forests were ours, and that they were good, good things. The little bear, stuck in a tree that was about to crumble to ash, had an almost evangelical mission: to teach us, in the words of poet Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra (we have to forgive Snyder for putting in that extraneous “the”), that all who follow the way of Smokey “Will always have ripe blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.”
What more can you ask?
IF YOU GO:CAPITAN, N.M.
Getting there: The easiest route to Capitan is to fly into Albuquerque, then rent a car. Take I-25 south (part of the Trans-American Highway, leading all the way from the tip of South America to the tip of North); just past Socorro, turn east onto Highway 380, and follow this to Capitan.
Lodging: The Smokey Bear Motel & Restaurant, 800-766-5392. Once you’ve parked, everything is no more than a minute or two’s walk away.
Information: Smokey Bear Historic Park, 505-354-2748, or Smokey Bear Museum and Gift Shop, 505-354-2298.
New Mexico Department of Tourism: 800-733-6396.
-EDWARD READICKER-HENDERSON
Edward Readicker-Henderson’s last story for Travel was on Alaska. He divides his time between Alaska and Arizona.
