The last I heard of Smokey the Cop was over the short airwaves, through the Park Service radio in my lookout tower. It seemed that some scruffy types from California, degenerate hippies, were smoking a controlled substance somewhere in the vicinity of Indian Gardens under the South Rim. Far out in the wilds, as they doubtless imagined, far from the fuzz, the law and those who call themselves “the authorities.” So they thought. But they were wrong. A humble maintenance man, fixing a waterline, saw them, smelled the sweet stink of Cannabis and radioed park headquarters. Minutes later a helicopter—a helicopter!—with armed rangers inside was sent down to make the bust. I can see those hippies now, in my mind’s eye, sitting naked and cross-legged in their little circle under the shade of a juniper, passing the pipe of peace from hand to hand, each one far out in the cool of inner space; I see them becoming gradually aware of a giant dark bird with whirling wings hovering above, shrieking at them in the voice of steel and power and outrage—God is the great black spider in the sky!—coming down, down, down upon them….

Was it then I finally gave away my Smokey Bear hat? The one with the four dimples in the high crown and that wide, flat, rigid brim, hard as iron, with which you could chop a man’s head off if necessary? (We kept the brim flat by installing the hat under the seat of a toilet bowl each night; the same way your friendly state police do it.) Don’t remember. Can’t seem to recall things as good as I used to. As the French say, quel dommage du brains. But I did give it away, to a short boatman with a big head. Fellow named Stewart, I think. He ruined it by wearing it head-first through the Big Drop in Cataract Canyon down in Utah.

But I still remember some things. I remember the old Park Service Bizet-inspired fight song that we sang at night around the campfire at the Horace Albright Training Center (not quite the same thing as DTC in Pisa):

Toreadora

Don’t piss on the flora

Save our wild decóra.

Etc.

And I remember a few other things I’d rather forget. Only a few but they’re enough. That’s why I live out here where I do, where none but the wedgetail eagles and the buzzards will ever find me, here on this rocky butte with the 200-mile view in all directions, here in the heart (but the desert has no heart), here in the skull of the Hoodoo Desert. Paranoid? Yes, I’m paranoid; anyone who’s not should have his head examined. What? What’s that, Doctor? Well, yes sir, you’re right, I don’t know exactly who my enemies are, I can’t name them, if that’s what you mean. But Doctor, can’t you see?—that’s what frightens me: I don’t know who they are.

As for Smokey the Cop and all his friends—those jolly policemen of various types—state, federal, secret, private, uniformed, plainclothes, foreign and domestic—I stay away from them. I also avoid muggers, rapists, hijackers, terrorists, politicians, murderers and other lunatics. And for precisely the same reason.