The Firewood 014: Our hero, Hank the Tank
The bear known as "Hank the Tank" was finally captured after two years terrorizing a gated community in Tahoe. The hero we need, and also the hero we deserve.
Hello, friends.
It’s been almost two years since I wrote anything here, and in fact, has been just about as long since I wrote anything “for fun.” At a certain point, I realized that this was not just laziness or getting older, but probably kind of a major mental health issue. I’ve been dealing with burnout and debilitating anxiety for longer than I can estimate, and so over the past few months, treating it has become a priority. I’ll have more to say about that later, but it’s been an interesting journey so far (I wrote something a bit more businessy about it on LinkedIn).
I’d been making a list of ideas for things I’d write about here, and try to get the cadence of publishing back up — but I wasn’t ready to kick things off quite yet.
And then I learned that California wildlife authorities had captured Hank the Tank.
I couldn’t not write about Hank the Tank.
So here I am, and I hope to be back more frequently soon.
— C
There are few things that capture social media attention more universally than animals that aren’t where they should be. Bonus points if they’re on the run or evading capture.
One of the greatest days on Twitter (RIP), for example, was the day when a pair of llamas escaped from a trailer near Phoenix and promptly ran off through suburban streets. Local news stations opted to cover the story with aerial cameras, O.J. Simpson-style, and it suddenly became one of the biggest news stories in the country.1 (I was in Los Angeles in our old Brentwood office, and the engineering team put the llama live feed up on a projector screen.)
Rogue animals also tend to make for blissfully apolitical sensations, in part because somehow everyone tacitly decides that the right thing to do is to side with the animals. The cobra that escaped from the Bronx Zoo. The Dallas Zoo’s apparent problem keeping animals from busting out. And then there’s Flaco the Owl, who escaped his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo and shocked authorities when he was able to thrive in the park itself.
But “Hank the Tank,” a 500-pound black bear in South Lake Tahoe, CA, was a different story altogether. For one, Hank isn’t a zoo animal, but rather a wild bear who apparently got extremely good at breaking into houses and stealing food. And then there was this photo.
News of “Hank” bubbled out of local Tahoe-area news in February 2022, with national coverage reporting that authorities had been unable to deter the bear with the likes of tasers and paintballs. There was also the revelation that Hank was eating as though preparing for hibernation, but the food supply never dwindled, so Hank just kept eating. Meanwhile, the chonky bear became a hero to just about everyone — those who hate cops (the South Lake Tahoe police had to turn to Facebook to beg people to stop jamming their phone lines to lobby for Hank’s safety), those who think California officials are incompetent (something something Gavin Newsom), those who loved the idea of havoc being wreaked on a luxury gated community in a mountain resort town, and, well, those who just love to stuff their faces and would happily break down a garage door to get to some pizza.
The problem for animal lovers is that Hank’s behavior indicated that the bear was strongly habituated to living among humans, which usually means said bear would be captured and then euthanized. This always makes wildlife enthusiasts a little bit queasy, but when an animal has become a folk hero, it really doesn’t seem right. So, for a few days in there, just about every tweet by any California state agency that involved natural resources or wildlife had replies that looked like this:
“Hank” was spared through means that sound like how a death row prisoner would get exonerated in this day and age: DNA evidence. This showed that there were, in fact, at least three Hanks the Tank. A single bear wasn’t actually responsible for every pizza raid in the gated community of Tahoe Keys. As it turns out, multiple bears wanted in on the goods.
I’m not entirely sure why this past weekend’s announcement that Hank the Tank had been apprehended with her three cubs (raising a crime family, I see!) proved that they’d actually caught the Hank the Tank, but I’ll go with it. There’s a happy ending, after all: Colorado governor Jared Polis welcomed “Henrietta the Tank” to the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, CO, where she will never have to bust down the door of another four-car garage again.2
I have one question for Gov. Polis, and that question is: “How much money do I have to donate in order to be able to visit Hank and feed her a pizza?”
The bear necessities of life
OK, so, on that note, I want to pan out and talk about something bigger: Rogue animals are funny. But rogue black bears are really funny. Why’s that?
I didn’t get my answer to this question until a few weeks ago, when I wound up at a campground in eastern Kentucky.
See, I am a decently outdoorsy person, and I should probably have seen bears in the wild quite a bit by now. Or maybe not even in the wild, considering the American black bear (Ursus americanus) has acclimated itself pretty well to the suburbs. But I’d only ever seen a bear once — when my boyfriend and I took the ski lift to the top of Hunter Mountain in the Catskills for a scenic ride after our full-day hiking plans had been pre-empted by afternoon thunderstorm forecasts, and saw a yearling bear cross the path about twenty yards in front of us.
But then a few weeks ago I drove to Wiley’s Last Resort, a campground dotted with plastic flamingos and Bernie Sanders campaign stickers, built on the ruins of a 1930s resort deep into eastern Kentucky coal country.3 I’m a participant in the inaugural Appalachian Six-Pack of Peaks Challenge, and I happened to be in Virginia just over the border from one of the “peaks,” High Rock. There aren’t many hotels in the area, but Wiley’s was just a short drive from the trailhead, so I figured I’d stay there. It’s a dreamy, quirky space nestled in a holler just below a highway where trucks full of coal still rumble along the side of Pine Mountain all day. And the nature preserve that houses the campground is absolutely full of bears.
This was initially a cause for alarm (are they like the California black bears that can get into your car even if it’s locked?) but that nervousness went away after I saw my first bear. Because they are big, clumsy, derpy, and just want to eat fruit. I spent an evening drinking Natty Light in a chair on the dock of the resort’s “Walled-In Pond,” watching a bear on the other side of the pond flop around eating berries off a bush. Sure, it could kill me if it wanted to, but I was clearly very low on this bear’s list of priorities. A grizzly on the loose would be scary as hell. A black bear on the loose, unless it’s Cocaine Bear, just isn’t.
Disney got it right:
It’s really kind of an uncanny valley phenomenon. Bears are capable of getting up and walking around on their hind legs to the point that they look oddly humanoid — indeed, recent research has suggested that the legend of the Yeti of the Himalayas is attributable to local bears. (And, may I present to you the very recent headline, “China zoo says its bears aren’t people in bear costumes.) In my current homeland of New Jersey4, “Pedals” the bear went viral online because it continually walked upright due to an injured front paw (sadly, Pedals met his end during hunting season).
So maybe it’s easier to see ourselves in a bear than it would be in, say, a leopard. But in addition to that, bears do everything that we wish we could do. They’re clearly not in a particular rush. Their lives are slow-paced. And their priority, for the most part, is eating. Katmai National Park in Alaska is probably best known these days for hosting “Fat Bear Week,” a March Madness-style bracket for the heftiest bear in the park as the critters chonk up for hibernation season. I, for one, would like to win a bracket for eating more than everyone else.
We see a bear breaking the rules, and it stirs up something in us that taps into how much we want to break the rules. And it does so in a cute, fuzzy way. A human breaking into houses, stealing food, and evading the cops is an uncomfortable novelty at best.5 A chubby pile of fur that looks like a kids’ stuffed animal breaking into houses, stealing food, and evading the cops is adorable. We want to live life slowly. We want to become ungovernable. We want to ease our stressful and often meaningless lives by existing outside the global financial systems!
Hell, I’d be a bear.
Hank, we shall remember thee
We can all rest easy this week, because Hank — er, Henrietta — is going to do just fine. By now, she’s probably already at her new home in Colorado. What I find myself worrying about is us humans, because we may never again get a Hank the Tank to delight us all with its hijinks. That’s because Hank may have been one of the last big sensations of Rogue Animal Twitter.
After all, I learned about Hank in the first place from an enormous trending topic on Twitter where just about everybody was cheering on a 500-pound bear who was crashing through front doors to get to the pizza inside. Now, given the actions of yet another chronically impulsive mammal6, probably about half the people I actually like have left Twitter (er, X) and the algorithm’s priorities mean that the trending topics are almost exclusively about tiresome gender wars or canceled celebrities. So I only really check in about once a day or so. I learned about Hank’s capture because, coincidentally, within about 24 hours of it I googled the famous photo in order to show my brother who had never heard of him. And then the Google search results informed me that a mere day earlier, they’d caught him. Er, her.
I want Hank back, damn it. And I don’t just want me to have Hank back. I want us all to have him be our hero. Sometimes, I just want us all to unite around a big, derpy, food-motivated bear. Niche Discords and WhatsApp groups just don’t do the same thing.
Bear with me…
I couldn’t write about bears without giving you some resources for dealing respectfully with bears in the wild. After all, they’re our wacky neighbors just about everywhere in the U.S., and they can be dangerous, but I’m honestly way more concerned about getting punched by a drunk guy on a plane than I am about getting attacked by a black bear (and I’m confident statistics back me up).
So here’s your bear etiquette, boys and girls (and bears):
As Steve Justice, the caretaker at Wiley’s Last Resort, told me as he tossed me a Natty Light, “Be bear aware!” So afterwards I put that empty can of Natty Light into my locked car to dispose of later. (Don’t ever forget Party Bear.) So in the spirit of being bear aware, here’s the U.S. National Park Service’s guide to dealing with bears, which includes the instruction “identify yourself by talking calmly so the bear knows you are a human.” This assumption that humans talk calmly is hilarious.
When I was in my 20s and sometimes went hiking in grizzly country, we typically used our sleeping bag stuff sacks as bear bags and hung them in trees, which is a really bad idea in retrospect (because then you put your sleeping bags in them, and then your sleeping bags smell like food, and then you sleep in your sleeping bags, and… anyway.) But even today, bear bags (stuff sacks or not) have gone out of favor in black bear country, where bears in some locations have allegedly learned how to pull bear bags out of trees, those li’l scamps. So the preferred alternatives are hard-sided bear canisters or “bear kegs” if you aren’t hiking in a place where the parks and campgrounds have bear-proof storage boxes.
You’re doing all this for the safety of the bears, not just for you. Just like our lord and savior “Hank the Tank,” if a bear gets too accustomed to being around humans, it’s at risk of being shot or euthanized. If you love bears, keep your distance.
And especially, don’t pet them.
No, really. Don’t pet them.
Check out the replies to Polis’ tweet for plenty of complaints about yet another Californian moving to Colorado.
The Whitesburg, KY area was just written up in the NYT — local music and culture organization Appalshop has been working hard over the past year to save its archives after last year’s devastating floods. The floods’ effects are still visible throughout the entire region.
For bear-ter or for w(urse).
See: The North Pond Hermit.
In fairness: Due to recent events I have learned that I actually really like the Tesla Model 3.
So very nice to read you again.
I was just writing about bears, reviewing the forthcoming EIGHT BEARS. Which is very good! People cheer on Hank as an avatar of freedom and stick it to the man, but they don't really want a bear in their kitchen....
Glad you're back here, return soon!