Self-Portrait as Smokey Bear

“Stripped free of technology and social contact, maybe I can finally reflect on the man I’d like to be.”

Smokey Bear is hanging out in the back room, waiting for his entrance. It’s the ninth of August—his seventy-first birthday—and every child camping and fishing in Chippewa National Forest is here for the celebration. Smokey needs a handler to guide him around because he can’t see too well, and his innards smell like a sweaty couch, but nobody seems to mind. Most days, he’s a 6’1”, burly firefighter, but today he’s me: 5’4” and 125 pounds. If I walk too fast, his big furry legs might slough right off. Smokey’s a New Mexico boy, technically, if you look up the details, but he fits right in here in northern Minnesota, where the cult of the forest still thrives. The era of the controlled burn has done nothing to diminish Smokey’s idol status among local children. He has merely adapted, become one who says, “Be responsible with forest fires. Leave them to the professionals, to be scheduled and performed every couple years, weather permitting.” Out here though, of course, he doesn’t say anything: Bears don’t talk. He just staggers about, and waves, and poses for photos. It’s more than enough: When the time comes for Smokey to leave, one child has latched onto his leg so firmly that her parents must pry her off—crying, screaming—before he can be led away.

Everywhere, however, there is evidence of another Smokey, the one on the old posters on the wall in the kids’ play area: Smokey the rugged antihero. That Smokey knelt by scorched gravesites, his silhouette dwarfed by the flame-colored sunset, and begged God for mercy in the face of natural catastrophe. That Smokey was an orphan, his family burned to death, a bear who had only his mission: to awaken humanity to the horrific potential of flames, replace their nonchalance with caution. This was the Smokey of most of the memorabilia in the miniature “Smokey Bear museum” along one wall of the nature center, a Smokey who spoke in absolutes through stickers and tin lunchboxes and now-faded buttons. Neither the fury nor the lunchboxes were enough to make that Smokey immortal: Go to Capitan, New Mexico and you can pay your respects at his grave, where he was buried without ceremony on the night of November 9, 1976.

Now, almost forty years later, as a forest ranger slices up Smokey’s birthday cake for a small horde of excited children, I extract myself from the musty pieces of the Smokey costume, return them to the trunk in which he travels the nation, and step back out into the main room just in time to watch a deer mouse dart out into the center of the floor, convulse, and die, all within about fifteen seconds. Through a series of facial expressions and hand gestures, I manage to alert my boss to this development without drawing the attention of any of the children or their parents, who are far less interested in whatever this disheveled blue-haired girl is doing than they were in Smokey. I place the mouse carcass on a picnic table as an offering to the crows, and in five minutes, it is gone. The birthday festivities continue unimpeded.

According to the Smokey Bear Act of 1952, unauthorized usage of Smokey’s name or image is punishable by a fine of not more than $250, or up to six months’ imprisonment, or both. I, on the other hand, am among the elite few to be authorized to spend time as Smokey: part of my unpaid internship, my three months of solitude in a cabin in the woods. This is a decent place and time to be Smokey Bear: The fire danger sign stays at “moderate” most of the summer, but the reality of flames seems a step away. This, after all, is the Land of 10,000 Lakes, of pockmarked Swiss cheese maps with more blue than green. Itasca County alone is home to more than a thousand lakes, with names like Bowstring, Egg, Little Too Much. A good place to get away from the flames and take refuge in the water: Fishermen and boaters far outnumber hikers and hunters, and though every other person is a wilderness firefighter, this summer they are firefighters for somewhere else, deployed to Alaska or Wyoming or other impossible elsewheres. Being Smokey here and now is low-stakes, easy; muted and smothered in his mascot suit, I can finally, if only for an hour, be seen as a man.

*

I have been assigned, thanks to bureaucratic error, to a building all by myself, the old promise of roommates fallen through. This cabin was built in the 1960s to house a forest ranger and his nuclear family, part of a miniature neighborhood nestled along the shore of Little Cut Foot Lake. The only other house remaining of the batch is dark, half-concealed in the pines uphill. At some point in the last five years, the Forest Service decided to stop trying to remove the hundreds of bats that kept working their way in; they’re true residents now. I wonder how close I would need to get before I could hear the chorus of their soft, shrill shrieks. The rest of the compound was demolished long ago, save for a crumbling dock buried in the reeds, the ancient aluminum canoes by its base repurposed as scaffolding for colossal wasp nests. Somewhere down the dirt road is a campsite where volunteers—other human beings, my closest neighbors—reside, or so they tell me. I meet them, a very nice elderly couple, but a few weeks later, the campground closes early for the season on account of a massive horsefly hatch, and my only neighbors go back to Florida for the rest of the summer.

At least I have a house of my own, at age twenty, if only for a little while. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, one extremely suspicious basement. A single tube TV that looks original to the building. No internet, no cell phone service, no functional television. No landline—just a phone book with a shredded cavity in its middle, cradling the skeleton of the mouse that had hollowed it into a nest. This is the sort of place where one imagines finding oneself, if only because one can’t imagine finding anything else. I bring a pile of books, of course—fifteen of them, stacked on my dresser—but most of them buy me only an evening or two, and within a couple weeks, I have read them all. I stay up late reading; it is so hard to keep track of time when dusk this far north seems to last until 11:30 p.m., the lingering glint of sun around the horizon unsettling my grasp of day and night.

I try to cultivate a positive atmosphere, at least for the first few days. A week or so before moving here I had gone to the Yankee Candle store in America’s second largest indoor mall and purchased a variety of candles with enticingly “woodsy” names, like “Balsam & Cedar” and “Mountain Lodge.” I light them, once in awhile, but in a house this big it doesn’t do much: The space seems persistently vast and odorless, lacking even the expected fragrances of dampness or dust. To better command the space, I begin confining myself to the bedroom, especially at night, when the vast, opaque blackness beyond the French windows in the living room seems an unbearable threat, a dense flatness containing, always, the possibility of gleaming pairs of bestial eyes. Solitude, I assure myself, is meditative; stripped free of technology and social contact, maybe I can finally reflect on the man I’d like to be.

I am here, in my role as “summer naturalist,” to be both educator and amateur taxonomist, classifying and identifying the world around me for the benefit of others. I count petals, consult field guides, and discover names: dogbane, sweetfern, beaked hazel. I stride along the quarter-mile nature trail and reveal all to the visitors on my guided hikes: the poisonous berries, the silly names, the rumored medicinal properties. There is a kind of deep pleasure in classification, in leaning in so close to plants that they tremble with my breath, in counting tattered petals, and stroking leaves to feel for tiny hairs. Thoreau, Muir, and Dillard have their appeal, but my favorite pieces of nature writing have always been dichotomous keys, those thousand-page tomes of binary choices meant to guide their users through species identification.

These books demand and structure these closer looks, these caresses, the occasional mauling of a flower or stem to better scrutinize its internal structures. This will to classify is not exclusive to plants: I start memorizing bird calls, tying whistles and songs to plumage colors, flight patterns, and other identifying characteristics. I am here so that someday—after two more years of undergraduate education, then six of grad school, then luck—I can make these vivid details my profession, swear my fealty to binoculars and microscope. It seems at times a sick irony, this love for the scientific binary, given its echo of that question whose answer has so often been determined for me: “Are you a boy, or a girl?”

My fellow interns, at nature centers a half-hour or so away, are having a hell of a time, or so I hear: butchering roadkill rabbits in the beds of their trucks, judging impromptu loon-calling contests, greeting the sunrise with five-mile jogs. They are living the sorts of lives one lives out here, attuned to the abundance and beauty of the big picture, capital-F Forest. I can’t enjoy this big picture; I can’t even see it. I am too busy poring over a guide to the different species of lichens, holding ragged scraps of dead bark inches from my face in search of some clue to their truths. My need to process nature piecemeal, to break it down into digestible shards, seems like a failure of masculinity, an inability to embrace nature in its rugged and unrefined glory. At first, I tell myself that this is a temporary setback, that “grit” will not be necessary in my future as scientist. A day shadowing some bat researchers, who are tracking roosting sites in the forest, soon dispels that particular fantasy. In the moist eighty-five-degree heat, we march directly through hazel thickets, up slopes, and through sucking mud, according to the whims of the enormous radar antenna. Six hours, forty ticks, and innumerable tears in my canvas work clothes later, we have found a single bat; the scientists have been doing this for weeks.

*

Even within the house, within this one room, nature is never far away; that is, after all, the appeal of this sort of “cabin in the woods” fantasy. The crisp black carcasses of flies and gnats line each windowsill, their exoskeletal husks retaining the appearance of wholeness and vitality long after their liquid insides have rotted away. Every night, a little past two in the morning, I see them backlit by moonlight as I awake to the sound of fluid gurgling that echoes, sourceless, through the vents. (I discover, a month later, that this is a water softener issue.) Several times, I feel a creeping beyond that of awkwardly slept-on limbs and discover big black carpenter ants walking over my body and bed, drawn here to feed upon the insect carapaces. I brush them carefully onto the floor and return to my own anxious dreams.

It only takes a couple weeks for a sense of otherworldly dread to seep into the house itself, imbuing the banal realities of an old and messy dwelling with palpable menace. Everywhere in the floors there are deep, circular holes of unknown depth, absences left by former pipes and tubes. One cushion of the elaborate floral couch in the living room is just a shade darker than the other two, as if beneath an unseen cloud. The quiet hum of the vents begins to resemble a whisper. Every night, the dripping from the vents grows louder, a cacophony of fluid noise that can only be coming from the impossibly dark, empty basement. The ritual of showering demands, day by day, the removal via tweezer of an increasing amount of brown ticks, like poppy seeds, nestled in the crevices of my body to feed. This structure seems, as a whole, far too detailed and unknowable to trust. It is not that I am out of place here; it is that I am too at home, this building an extension of the body of whose own aberrant contours I am more and more aware in my meditative solitude. I start taking the long drive to the nearest town—forty-five minutes each way—more and more often, just to escape the unanswered questions and intrusions that the house seems to promise.

Back at the nature center, my favorite part of my job is taking care of the toads. The first week of this job, I capture four of them in a marshy area and christen them with the most creative names I can summon up at the time: Tiny Toad, Lil Toad, Medium Toad, and Big Toad. I find comfort in the constancy of their presence in the silent nature center. In return, I must go through the ritual of feeding them. At dawn, I step outside with a mason jar and find a sunlit patch of wall, scoop up big, fat daddy longlegs one by one until their spindly legs tangle together into a twitching knot. I hurry inside, dump the contents of the jar into the terrarium, close the lid, avert my eyes. The toads need this, need me; this is the cost of tending a body. It isn’t enough: One by one, the toads disappear. The lid to their terrarium is weighted down, and a forensic investigation of the moss and twigs inside reveals no carcasses, no blood. It still takes me weeks to come to terms with the obvious: Big Toad is eating the other toads alive, as toads are known to do. I begin checking in on the toads more often, almost hoping to catch Big Toad in action, a single frog leg protruding at a jaunty angle from his mouth, but all he ever does on my watch is hop about and stare, eat some bugs. I introduce a couple more toads as replacements; these, too, go missing. I start to feel as if I’m offering Big Toad his brethren as a kind of sacrifice.

I try to tell myself that, despite all the setbacks, I can still work through this summer. Masculinity, I tell myself, is supposed to be about gain from suffering—think of muscular jocks in their tank tops that read “PAIN is just WEAKNESS leaving the body.” I will push through this, somehow, as I have always pushed through things, make it into a trial by fire, a coming-of- age. I think back to the first few weeks, reading through the books on my dresser, the good weeks. Then I stop thinking; I don’t need to dwell on the past. Coming out here is supposed to be a way of making myself a future. This suffering does not seem to be hardening me, though: I lose fifteen pounds, I cry at night, I count down the days to the end of summer on my calendar. At one point, I realize I have eaten nothing but instant oatmeal for a week. Unlike my fellow interns, or the forest rangers, or the countless people who have made this place their home, I have not quite made enough of myself to withstand the steady pressure of the woods.

*

If there is one moment to blame, though, for this failure, this anxiety, it is this: Years before Minnesota, I am standing in a parking lot on top of a mountain in North Carolina, my mud-skin-clothes soaked into a single sodden layer, like salamander skin. Here, the Great Smoky Mountains. Beyond the curb of the lot, waxwings cluster on a single dead branch. Past them, a wall of fog, opaque and interminable. As we stretch in our circle at the edge of the world, we repeat together the mantra that will get us through the afternoon: “I will always be wet. I will always be tired. I will always be dirty.” Even a prolonged gaze reveals no outline of the mountains beyond the fog. This is the end of everything; to step over that curb would be to spend an eternity falling through clouds. Our group stands here at the midpoint of another day of labor, of digging trenches in a mud replete with speckled salamanders and flame-colored millipedes, a mud so fluid it writhes under our shovels and pickaxes and sledgehammers. I delight in, on occasion, bending down and picking up one of these wriggling creatures, ignoring the vivid warning colors of animal poison. Critically, I cannot bring myself to delight in the rest: the repetition, the wetness, the tiredness.

As I step down that trail, beyond the fog, something slips, something changes. Discomfort slides into restlessness. I want to claim that discomfort, to own it, to mold it into the persevering American self, the rugged mountain man. I want to believe that if I push myself hard enough I can become someone else. But that’s not how it works out. That was never how it could have worked out. Here, instead, is how it goes, in the Smokies, in Minnesota, now:

Smokey Bear stares out at the wall of flame, at the abyss of soaking fog, at its endlessness, and feels as if staring into the sun. He wants to walk into it, to seek his trial by fire and water; he does not. Instead, he turns away, sheds his skin, and runs.