Santa Fe is the oldest capital in the U.S. and celebrates the end of summer with fire. Literally. On the Friday before Labor Day, a huge gathering of people descends on the New Mexico town to participate in a spectacular ritual called Zozobra, in which a fifty-foot effigy goes up in flames.

Zozobra means capsize in Spanish. It also loosely means anguish, anxiety, and gloom. These definitions perfectly describe both the real and metaphoric aspects of this ritual that just celebrated its 99th birthday. The giant part-ghost, part-monster puppet, made of wood, wire, and cloth, is filled with various kinds of shredded “gloom” paper. Think divorce documents, police reports, old mortgages, and tiny notes of worries submitted by locals as well as by people all over the world. (You can even submit your worries online for $1!) As it burns, all of the stressful and depressing parts of the year burn too, until everything falls to the ground.

The first Zozobra burning was in 1924. Sculptor and painter William “Will” Howard Shuster Jr. created the event, according to his personal journal, as a mash-up of two experiences. The first was deciding to cheer up his depressed artist friends one night at a bar by asking them to write their bad feelings on paper napkins and then burning them in an ashtray, and the second was a trip he took to Mexico where he witnessed the Easter tradition of a paper-mache Judas, filled with firecrackers, paraded throughout the town. Combining those two ideas, he held a private party for artists and writers in the Santa Fe area and burned a six-foot version of what is now known as Zozobra.

The ritual has evolved into an enormous event—over sixty thousand people flock to New Mexico to kick off Santa Fe’s Fiesta Week, a historic celebration full of pageantry, artisan vendors, live music, and a pet parade. The nonprofit Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe took over the fiery event in 1964, and it has become their biggest fundraiser for their mission to make lasting differences in the lives of children. The Fire Spirit (Zozobra’s arch nemesis) is an integral counterpart of the ritual. A real person, dressed in red with a headdress and carrying a pair of blazing torches, dances around Zozobra who is angrily waving his arms and growling (“Zozo” fact: Zozobra is one of the world’s largest functioning marionettes), until finally the Fire Spirit ignites the fire that will consume Zozobra and the gloom within. “Gloom Deposit Boxes” are spread throughout the town in the weeks before the event, into which thousands of people drop their paper woes. Zozobra’s head is also laced with explosives, so he “capsizes” into embers amidst a blaze of fireworks.

Even kids get to participate in the annual “burn”—the Gloomies—but let’s let Ned Harris, Zozobra’s archivist, tell you more about that.

How long have you been the archivist for Zozobra?

Five years officially, but I have been a collector of Zozobra art and ephemera for more than thirty years.

What brought you to it? 

Zozobra has a very important role in Santa Fe, designated in 2005 as the first UNESCO Creative City in the U.S. Among other things, it immediately establishes a sense of place for Santa Fe, New Mexico, which despite being well-known is actually a pretty small mountain city. I am drawn to things that highlight our unique identity as a city. We have our own cuisine, dialect, and rituals. I think this is marvelous. Zozobra is made by the people of Santa Fe, children make Zozobra themed art in the local schools, and there is a steady stream of folk and fine art made by adults. The event and the mythology both have an important cultural role here.

I know the puppet is made from cloth, wire, and paper, but how is it built to move? And how many people does it take to move it? 

We think Zozobra weighs 3,000 pounds once stuffed and dressed. His head is carried by about sixteen people; his body and ghost tail require more than 70 people to lift and carry them to a waiting lowboy trailer. Many of the same people move him every year. There are lots of City employees, club members, and members of the public that come together before dawn to take Zozobra to his historic home at Fort Marcy Park.

I understand Zozobra went from being a private artist event to a public phenomenon. What were big turning points along the way?

It became public after just a couple of years. Zozobra has burned every year since the first 1924 burn, which means it remained a civic focus despite wars, economic turndowns, and changes in leadership. The Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe has participated in the event since the earliest days and was given the copyright and trademarks to the event by Will Shuster in 1964. For years, the monster’s appearance was very stable and over the last ten years, each iteration reflected each progressive decade. The Zozobra Decades Project served as a ten-year lead-up to the 100th burn, which will take place on Friday, August 30, 2024.

How big is it now?

Zozobra himself? Fifty and a half feet tall—

Ha! No, the festival!

Around sixty thousand people are in attendance.

I love the idea that the Zozobra puppet is filled with discarded papers. Is that true? How are those collected? Do people come to participate? Or watch? or both? What does participating mean?

We have a couple of very dedicated volunteers who spend the year between burns collecting hundreds of forty-gallon bags of shredded paper from public and private offices. For kids, participation means engagement at every stage—a group of about a dozen kids between the ages of ten and eighteen have helped for many years in almost all aspects of construction. This year, the hands were made by a very experienced member of the Kiwanis Club in collaboration with a young man who has been helping us for years. The current Zozobra Chairman, Ray Sandoval, started as a kid hanging around with the adults more than forty years ago. Many of the volunteers involved with the production of Zozobra started as kids and grew up into their leadership roles. It is a completely organic process driven by passion. Some people get the bug.

We always ask interviewees a question about what adventure means to them, so do you have any particularly wild or unique stories about any specific year that fall under the "adventure" category? How is archiving an adventure (because I bet it is!)?

In many respects, it is Zozobra’s adventure. He begins as a pile of lumber and boxes of hardware. As he takes form, he develops a personality because he is stuffed with the glooms of the town. People submit their glooms right up to the last minute and in his ritualistic immolation, the glooms of the town are carried away. It is a palpable feeling as the crowd files out.

The archivist’s adventure is collecting artifacts of something that is designed to be destroyed. An enormous amount of effort goes into staging an event that is focused on this sort of constructive destruction. You could even say it’s conceptual art, consciously building something with the intention of destroying it for an emotional purpose year after year. As an archivist, the goal is to collect documentation of this progression from idea to form to memory.

“Idea to form to memory”—that’s so well said and such an amazing process!

I think Zozobra reminds us that we can rid ourselves of our gloom—deliberately.

Yes! Thank you so much, Ned!

As we all witnessed the devastating fire that spread across Lahaina in western Maui on August 8th—a fire that killed over one hundred people and destroyed over 1,700 homes—so too did a mighty tree.

In the middle of one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history, there stands a sixty-foot-tall beacon of hope: a banyan tree. With forty-six major trunks spread across two acres of land, this extraordinary example of an arboreal specimen is the largest banyan tree in the U.S. and has been a gathering place for friends, a playground for kids, home to hundreds of myna birds, and a symbol of resilience for more than 150 years. And although the tree’s canopy has been incinerated, its bark and limbs burned, and—according to arborist Steve Nimz—“in a coma,” tissue beneath the cambium (the wood layer just beneath the bark) is, miraculously, alive.

Banyan trees are fascinating. A member of the fig family, they are pollinated by tiny wasps that breed inside their fruit. In a wild life cycle, female wasps enter the figs through an opening called an ostiole and even though they are supposed to fly to the figs—in fact, they are called to the banyan tree by a very specific attracting scent—the female wasps are too big for the fig “door” and their wings are torn off and their antennae are damaged as they enter. As they lay their eggs, they deposit pollen that fertilizes and creates seeds, and then they die. When the eggs hatch, the males (who are born without wings) fertilize the female wasps, then chew more “doors” in the fig walls, allowing the females to fly away. When the female wasps leave their “nest,” the sticky fig remnants help to collect pollen, they find another banyan tree, and on and on it goes. A lot fascinating. And a little gruesome.

(An interesting side note question: Do the figs we eat then contain dead wasps? Probably not. Researchers have figured out that the figs actually then digest the insects. But even if a few remain, there’s nothing wrong with a little wasp protein!)

Banyan trees grow in a slightly gruesome way too. Their seeds are left on the branches of nearby trees—called host trees—and this is where they begin to grow. Their roots wind their way to the ground and, in the process, strangle their host tree, most often killing it. All of these roots then intertwine and become the trunk of the banyan tree. The tree continues to grow aerial roots that first grow up into the sky like branches until they eventually head back into the ground and mesh with the trunk. As banyan trees get older, their roots can spread horizontally too, which has the effect of making one tree look like an entire forest. Some people coax these roots into bridges and use them as integral parts of the paths they travel.

The sap, leaves, and bark of these wonder trees are also used in making medicine to fight digestive problems, gastrointestinal infections, oral issues, and inflammation, and are especially popular in ayurvedic medicine. They symbolize longevity and even immortality in the Hindu religion, they are often planted near temples and crematories, and in Hinduism, it's said that the deity Krishna stood beneath a banyan tree at Jyotisar when he delivered the sermon of the sacred Sanskrit scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. They are also important in Buddhism and are known as the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment (also referred to as the Bodhi tree). So banyan trees are ancient sacred symbols and today, in Maui and around the world, they are symbols of hope. 

But hope only goes so far. A team of arborists have been working hard to revitalize the banyan tree in Lahaina. They’ve surrounded it with signs and fencing, added compost to the soil around its trunk, aerated the soil for proper drainage, and enlisted the help of a local utilities company to water the tree with its water trucks. And kumu Kapono Kamaunu has blessed the tree too. The road to its recovery is long. Though, if this mighty banyan tree survives—and even thrives—it will truly embody its symbolism of fertility, life, and resurrection. Kevin Eckart, the founder of Arbor Global, an organization that establishes, protects, manages, and defends arboriculture, told us: 

I believe the Lahaina banyan has a very good chance of survival…Much work in applying supplemental water, soil conditioning, and mulch application has been conducted that improves the environment to protect the tree from further deterioration and supplement its natural defense and recovery. Observations this past week found some resprouts, but more importantly found increased sap flow and root regeneration. These are good signs of basic recovery. The next consideration is the structural restoration of this tree. It seems that it will likely lose some of the trunks on the west side that were exposed to exceptionally hot conditions, but does not appear to have lost the foundational structure.

If you would like to support the recovery effort, The Maui Strong Fund is providing financial resources to support the immediate and long-term recovery needs for the people and places affected by the devastating Maui wildfires. 

As of the first of September, 39,443 fires have raged across the U.S. this year, burning up over two million acres of land. Eighty-two of those fires are burning right now, and three have literally just ignited in Oregon, Washington, and Louisiana as we write this newsletter. Almost twenty thousand wildland firefighters are working to put them all out. Some of these “smoke-eaters” work on engine crews, some on helitack crews, and some on hand crews. Then there are hotshots.

Officially called Interagency Hotshot Crews, these elite types of firefighters are in a specialized subset of a hand crew. They respond to wildfires in very remote, often dangerous locations. Hotshots are highly trained, both physically and mentally, and have to pass specific endurance and strength tests to qualify. Explained by a hotshot himself, they have to:

• run 1.5 miles in a time of 10:35 or less

• hike 3 miles in 45 minutes wearing a 45 lb backpack

• complete 40 sit-ups in 60 seconds

• complete 25 pushups in 60 seconds

• complete a specific number of chin-ups based on body weight

• and be proficient at hiking on rough terrain in any kind of weather

  
  

Hotshots work all over the country on crews of around twenty firefighters and are on call all the time—as in twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. At a moment’s notice, they can be called upon to drop into an isolated landscape to fight a raging wildfire.

Firefighters control a fire’s spread by removing one of three ingredients fire needs to burn: heat, oxygen, or fuel. For hotshot crews this means first constructing a fireline. They anchor it to something that won’t burn, like a lake or a road or a rock formation, and then remove everything that can burn. How do they do that? This is where the term hand crew comes from—they use chainsaws, axes, shovels, and Pulaskis (a very cool-looking combo ax and hoe invented by Forest Service Ranger Ed Pulaski). Sometimes they use drip torches to get rid of vegetation that might burn. Once the fireline is created, hotshots then begin fire-mopping, or cooling whatever is burning, smoldering, or just plain hot. This can mean felling trees, trimming brush, or digging up hot dirt to get to its mineral level (which doesn’t burn). If water is available hotshots use it, but if they are too remote, which is often the case, then they can’t. 

(Want to learn some hotshot vocabulary? Check this out! And look at this cool visual of a “map” of the order of hotshot positions in a fire brigade.)

Before the 1930s, hotshots didn’t exist. In fact, no organized wildfire organizations or groups existed until 1933 when President Franklin Deleno Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corp (one of his New Deal programs) to create jobs for young men. Known as Roosevelt's Tree Army, these early foresters improved national and state parks, prevented erosion, controlled flooding, and planted trees—but they also fought wildfires. 

Sometime between 1946-1948, the first hotshot crew was created, called Los Padres Hotshots. They were responsible for the Los Padres National Forest that spans California. By 1974, nineteen hotshot crews existed, and in 1976, Deanne Shulman became the first female hotshot when she joined Los Prietos Hotshots, also based in California. Then in 1981, she became the first female smokejumper.

Climate change, drought, accident, and arson can create deadly wildfires that sweep through huge forests on the West Coast of the U.S. You are a trained Smoke Jumper: a brave young firefighter who plunges from an airplane right into the inferno. You must choose wisely to save people, homes, and wilderness from the raging flames!?