I first noticed the billboard on a rainy Friday night as I was driving south on Elston from Cortland. I had to make a U-turn to double-check what I thought I’d seen. The billboard had a picture of Smokey the Bear standing in front of hills and trees with the caption, “Most causes want your checkbook: He wants your matchbook.” Smokey stood with his left paw on his hip, his right foot propped on a shovel and his other front paw on its handle. This was nothing out of the ordinary. What made me turn the car around was Smokey’s body. I swear this wasn’t my imagination: Smokey looked hot. His stomach muscles rippled. His pectoral muscles and biceps bulged in a manly way–and, frankly, so did the crotch of his jeans.
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Smokey the Bear is an odd symbol to find in the middle of Chicago in any case. (For the record, the U.S. Forest Service says his name is just “Smokey Bear,” but that isn’t what everybody says, and anyway it blows my favorite riddle from when I was nine: “What’s Smokey the Bear’s middle name?” the answer being “the.”) Forest-fire prevention seems the least of concerns on Elston’s industrial corridor or in the depressed neighborhood on South Ashland where another billboard stands. While it’s possible the people who see these signs may travel to a forest this summer–the rationale the Forest Service uses for putting them there–you have to wonder about the effectiveness of an ad campaign designed to convince people to behave better that’s launched so far from the place where it’s needed. After all, Disney doesn’t put up billboards in Chicago telling people not to cut in line at rides at Disney World.
Chicago is also a strange choice for Smokey ads since the natural ecosystems in this region require fire for survival. A long history of fire prevention here has led to the demise of many of our native plants and animals.
Fires are part of nature, just like floods. And as inconvenient, sometimes as devastating, as both may be, halting them creates its own form of havoc. In the Yellowstone area 50 years of fire suppression resulted in an abnormally large buildup of combustible fuel, which allowed enormous fires to sweep the region five years ago. Letting some fires burn during that half century would have greatly decreased the fuel load and therefore the severity of the recent fires.
When I brought up Smokey’s new look, without specifying how I thought it had changed, he claimed it hadn’t. He said Smokey might look different from time to time depending on the artist who drew him. But I’m not the only one noticing Smokey’s new bod, because Conrad offered without any prompting that some people were saying that Smokey now looked like a macho bear because the artist gave him “pecs and whatever.”
