Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  Matthews had to make every blemish disappear before November. The job required thousands of hours of painstaking work and had to be done fast. But how? Akeley had demanded that his taxidermists join his expeditions so they could take scientific measurements in the field. Hornaday had pleaded with museums to reject pelts from donors who did not know how to properly collect them. Matthews hired an Alberta bear hunter who did a mean Roy Orbison imitation.

  "They needed me to come down to make forms for skins that were in bad condition," Walker explained. "I can come uncannily close, down to the bump on a Roman nose." He sat hunched over a worktable, darning a bush baby skin. Among taxidermists, Walker is famous for big predators, so I was surprised to see him preserving such a delicate primate. While he drew a threaded needle through the skin, he hummed along with a CD of his brother's bluegrass band, named String 'Em Up, of all things. When he looked up, a big smile spread across his face, and he said, "A song has to sound inspired—whether it is or isn't!"

  As it happens, Walker had found his calling after reading My Way of Becoming a Hunter. Robert Rockwell had published the memoir in 1955, when he was seventy, after a tremendous career mounting all kinds of fabulous creatures for all the big museums, including this one. In 1910, after passing the required civil service exam ("highest score"), Rockwell was offered ninety dollars a month ("excellent") by the Smithsonian and took the job—for nine months (just like Walker). His high expectations, however, were dashed when his "pompous" boss, George Turner (another Ward's graduate), had him transform five decomposing fur scraps into a South American spectacled bear. It was "far from a work of art," but it satisfied Turner. Nothing irked Rockwell more than having to perform taxidermic somersaults for a boss who knew nothing about, say, ungulates. "Those who understand animal anatomy know that the rump of a Grevy's zebra is totally different from the horse and even from the Grant, Chapman, and Mountain species of zebra, but Turner was quite unaware of this," Rockwell observed. "I took care that the hindquarters of my full-size clay model were correctly proportioned, but my boss immediately objected. He often did this, and frequently was in the wrong, as a look at the live animal would have shown him."

  Rockwell went on to become an exceptionally accomplished museum taxidermist, working on the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of North American Mammals. But he felt stifled at the Smithsonian and said so in his memoir. I read several passages to Walker, who nodded his head in recognition. Then he bagged the bush baby and led me around the workshop. "I put the other taxidermists at ease because I have no political aspirations for this place," he said, and for that reason he made an exceptional guide.

  "This is a male lemur, and I had to turn it into a female. I was plucking all the hair off its breast, and I think it shows in its face. There was no form signed on this. It was a forced sex-change operation."

  He continued, "We just finished the koala bear. Had to replace its ears. We acquired two extra ears from Australia. I kept the best one to mount and kept the other for spare parts. Of course, I had to ask permission for that."

  He pointed to the three-toed sloth. Its claws had spiraled out of control from disuse: "You can tell it's from a zoo. Obviously it's left-handed." Moving on, he said, "I don't know if it's a male or a female wallaby, but I gave it a baby."

  He pointed out pages of legal documents and permits that travel with the sea otter because it's highly protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Then he showed me the hippo, made entirely of wax. It sat in a huge wooden crate like a Christmas present in a fairy tale; its gigantic teeth hung down from its gaping mouth—stalactites in a cave. "Died in the National Zoo and was mounted by Brown, who was chief taxidermist here until the late 1950s," Walker explained. Apparently, Brown had yearned for it to die so that he could mount it.

  Finally, Walker showed me the Patagonian hare, or mara, a creature so implausible it seemed dreamt up by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Dolichotis patagonum has the front feet of a kangaroo, the back feet of a bird, and the ears of a rabbit; it is classified as a rodent.

  Walker led me inside the colder of the two giant industrial freezers, which are alarmed. At eight degrees, it was thirty degrees warmer than Alberta in January, and he said, "This is where I go when I feel homesick." I shivered in my T-shirt and cotton skirt as Walker pointed to a dolphin, a clouded leopard skull, bats, and freezer bags filled with tongues, furry ears, and other extremities. Before he reached for the latch, he motioned to the midsection of what resembled a bloody snowman. It was Hsing-Hsing's torso—minus its pelt. I gagged. Walker's face lit up. He nodded, excitedly, and exclaimed, "That's a panda carcass!" The pelt was finally at the tanner's.

  I asked Walker how he liked working at the Smithsonian. He shrugged. "It's credibility in a field where they don't give it," he said. Later, after he left Washington, he was more explicit: "If you are going to survive there, you have to work within that mentality. You get so caught up in people taking credit for this or that accomplishment. If I get recognition, I want it to be real ... The secretary of the Smithsonian knew who I was. But in terms of respectability, the profession has a long way to go."

  Later that day, Matthews brought me outside to see Paul Rhymer, who was sandblasting the okapi's manikin. A green face shield protected Rhymer's eyes; he breathed through a respirator while he scarred up the manikin to give it "tooth" so it would hold the precious skin without buckling. "Sanding alone would have been adequate, but we'll never mount another one of these again," he explained. Because supply companies could hope to sell only around a hundred okapi manikins at best, the Smithsonian team had cast a custom form in fiberglass using Akeley's methods. "Originally, we wanted to compete with this in the World Show, but we had so much snow, and John [Matthews] just had his baby," Rhymer said. He lamented his third-place chameleon. "It had wet paint, a fatal flaw. The pink one won," he said, sanding.

  At six feet six inches, Rhymer stands above the rest, the other taxidermists joke. Both his father and grandfather worked at the Smithsonian. Mostly this fills him with pride; sometimes, however, I sense that it wasn't always so easy. "As a group, we're a little gun-shy about what people think of taxidermists. The way I survived was by making fun of myself," he said. Indeed, he calls himself "a big, bumbling, sensitive, New Age redneck." In the taxidermy world, Rhymer is, politically speaking, exotic. "I'm left of about ninety percent of taxidermists. John almost thinks I'm a traitor," he said.

  He continued, "I've always had a pretty outward claim on my redneck roots. I'm a taxidermist and a good ol' boy, but I was also out on the streets protesting the first Persian Gulf War. I'm pro-gun control, and for a lot of taxidermists, it's all about guns and the NRA [National Rifle Association]. If you don't have a gun, you can't hunt, and if you can't hunt, then you can't have taxidermy. As a consequence, they see conservative politics as their ally, and mostly they are right. I own four guns. I'm okay with handguns, but I don't have one. If my wife wanted one because she didn't feel safe, I wouldn't have a problem with that. But a lot of taxidermists want them. They are very pro-NRA. It is very polarizing, and ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all taxidermists feel very strongly about this. It's not a southern thing. If I depended on deer heads for a living, I might be more ardent, but then I wouldn't be a taxidermist, because that's not my thing. I love the diversity, and birds are my favorite."

  The okapi's pose, like every pose in the exhibit, was established by the concept people and architecturally rendered in a book of drawings called the "casebook." (The taxidermists had virtually no role in determining the content or script of the exhibit.) In this display, the okapi's ten-inch tongue would be reaching for a leaf on an artificial tree. "We sewed up the holes, turned up the eyes [and] ears, and made sure everything's fleshed out," said Matthews. "This isn't a fun job. It's hot out."

  "That's all done from scratch," said Rhymer, lifting the respirator off his mouth to talk. "The way these muscles stack up in the brisket.
The way the collar is shingled with a long cleft down the center."

  "That's museum taxidermy!" boasted Matthews.

  The okapi took "weeks and weeks and weeks" to preserve, but the most complicated mount in the new mammal hall was the orangutan. That is, the bald orangutan. That is, the ten-foot ape that arrived here from a zoo sans skeleton and carcass—the raw data Matthews desperately needed in order to sculpt an accurate form for the skin. Photographs would not do (two-dimensional; indeterminate scale); these taxidermists needed to wrap a tape measure around the torso and take calipers to the cranium.

  If William Hornaday were around, he could have helped. After all, he spent weeks in Borneo, observing, measuring, and skeletonizing orangutans for Tree-Tops. Matthews wasn't leaving Newington for the next four months except to sleep. He had to find the right size orangutan carcass for reference—without whacking one. But where? Suitland, Maryland, it turned out.

  Suitland is where the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center (MSC) is located. The MSC is a state-of-the art storage facility; it contains thirty-six million natural history specimens (wet and dry) and collection items, more than any other museum in the world. The MSC has first-rate laboratories and a specialized library for advanced zoological research. It also had a two-year-old pickled orangutan.

  The orangutan in question had died at the National Zoo and was floating in a four-by-ten-foot ethanol bath with a pickled porpoise and crocodile. Sopping wet, it weighed several hundred pounds. It had a long ventral incision across its stomach and chest, where its internal organs had been removed during its necropsy. Its head had been shoved into its abdominal cavity. Otherwise, it was "beautiful."

  It wasn't bald. It had long auburn hair: fifteen inches on the back of the neck, five inches on the knuckles. Matthews glanced at its gorgeous cape with envy. So did Rhymer. Somehow, they convinced the museum to let them use this skin instead of the bald one. Then they hauled the carcass into a prep lab, where they took measurements; cast its face, feet, and hands in dental alginate (the stuff dentists use to make a mold of your teeth) and Bondo; and skinned it (five hours of emotionally charged work, because apes harbor viruses, and they also intimately resemble humans). After two grueling days, they returned the skinned carcass and skull to the vat (to preserve it for scientific study) and shipped off the skin to be expertly tanned. Nothing could be farther from Borneo or more ecologically responsible. The taxidermists were ecstatic.

  Lab apes and hunted apes might as well be classified as different species. This one had been soaking in ethanol so long that its hands and feet were blistered and its face had become inelastic and distorted—something taxidermists call "losing its memory." Matthews spent two days "relaxing" its face until it "remembered" what it had looked like and wouldn't shift once glued onto the form.

  Walker helped carve the artificial body. Rhymer retexturized its palms and feet, which were as smooth as sea glass, to give them some epoxy life/love lines. When the tanned skin arrived in Newington (long after my visit), they set its glass eyes (brown irises and "nicely dirty" scleras) and rebuilt its ear and nose cartilage.

  Finally, the ape was ready for assembly. Using tricorner needles, two, sometimes three, taxidermists sat and sewed its eight-foot arm span; they sewed the seams down its legs and stitched up its ventral incision; then they sewed its head back on. Thirty feet of ape seams were meticulously joined. "We put thousands and thousands of stitches into it ... an eighth of an inch apart," said Rhymer. As a finishing touch, they hid the seams with epoxy and paint and scrubbed off the excess with Windex.

  I circled the lab until I reached Walker's station. He was disinfecting the bush baby in diluted Lysol. In the 1940s, bush babies were thought to harbor yellow fever. He shook his head, then said with disgust, "Hunted specimens are rarely diseased, because nature takes care of that. They have a real good system: it's called natural selection!" Then he wrung the skin, put it in a plastic bag, flung the bag into the freezer, and drove to the Hunter Motel for a chicken-fried steak.

  In 1829, when the English amateur scientist James Smithson left America his vast fortune ($11 million or so in today's dollars) for "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men" (apparently he felt snubbed by the Royal Society for rejecting one of his papers), the Smithsonian Institution became the first natural history museum to be scientifically organized. It was founded in 1846 and has since become the largest museum complex in the world.

  Seven million people visit the National Museum of Natural History each year. Installing the new mammal hall took three years and involved around three hundred scientists, curators, production people, and designers. It cost $31 million and represented the most ambitious project at the museum in ninety-four years.

  In 1998, an architectural firm began to renovate the West Wing, one of three wings that radiate off the museum's grand rotunda, preparing the way for the Behring hall. The West Wing has fifty-four-foot-high skylighted ceilings and terrazzo floors, the perfect setting for displaying mounted animals—or even administering life insurance programs for soldiers. During World War I, five hundred U.S. government employees subdivided the place with brick walls and got to work doing just that. Zoological displays weren't staged there again until the 1930s, when many of the cases were assembled by William Hornaday.

  Renovating the West Wing was a tremendous job. Skylights were pried open, floorboards ripped out, and old mounts were discovered in the dusty attic. For two years or so, the museum was a construction site. To do their job, the contractors needed a storage area. Space is always at a premium at museums, but it was clear that something had to go.

  One day the museum assembled a team of experts to walk through North American Mammals, a gallery of habitat dioramas similar to the AMNH's, to see if the 1957 hall was worth preserving. The survey team was divided.

  Catharine Hawks, a conservator who has served as an adviser to more than seventy natural history museums, was on that team. She described the process to me one day by phone: "We were asked to walk through the hall and comment on the condition of the specimens. They said because of asbestos and arsenic, you can't move them. We said it's relatively easy, and it is." She went on: "It would have been easy to take down and move the foreground, the background, but I don't think that's what they wanted to hear. I wrote a memo at the time, saying basically it was possible to move the mounts. If they really wanted to preserve all of them, it could have been done. But it wasn't what they wanted to hear. I could see the way things were going. [The dioramas] weren't all sterling and stunning, but it was possible to preserve them in total. But I think the underlying plan was to have the space to do something else."

  I asked Hawks to fax me the memo, and she did. It was addressed to exhibit developer Sally Love and said this:

  Removing the murals is a straightforward conservation project with little in the way of technical challenges. Even the presence of lead white ground is not particularly a problem, because done properly, cutting the murals into panels would be accompanied by very focused, at-source, HEPA Type I dust extraction. The same would be true if the plaster or any other part of the substrate were found to contain asbestos.

  In 1999, the museum, disregarding Hawks's memo, began to dismantle North American Mammals. "The dioramas had been constructed as part of the building, and it was going to be outrageously expensive to preserve the background paintings," James G. Mead, curator of marine mammals, explained to me one day by phone. He paused, collecting his thoughts. He was very sad to lose them. "So ... they ... didn't ... get ... preserved."

  I'm not particularly sentimental, but it seemed rather scandalous for a powerful institution such as the Smithsonian to trash its dioramas. Dioramas are irreplaceable; the Akeleys and Hornadays of the world are long gone, as are the intimate localities they painstakingly selected, then preserved for posterity. Some museums preserve their dioramas at all costs. In 2006, for example, following extensive documentation and conservation, the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa tra
nsported nineteen dioramas from the 1950s and 1960s from one wing of its four-story granite building (also built in 1910) across an open atrium and reinstalled them on the other side. Remarkably, the museum remained open to the public the entire time.

  Before North American Mammals was demolished, Mead and Hawks attempted to save the mountain sheep diorama, with its Canadian Rockies habitat and sheep personally collected by renowned paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott. The former director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Walcott had also served as Smithsonian secretary, and Mead called him a "museum man." The diorama didn't get saved. Neither did Life in the Sea. The mounts for both halls, however, were removed and stored in Newington, where museum officials said they'd stay until a new facility became available at the MSC. That didn't necessarily happen.

  Take the eighty-nine-foot blue whale, for example. When a museum demolishes a hall, it hires outside contractors to do the work. As part of the contract, they are given salvage rights: that is, they own the stuff they remove—electrical wires, panes of glass, eighty-nine-foot-long blue whales. The whale in question was constructed in 1956 under the supervision of the whale biologist Remington Kellogg, who later served as assistant secretary of the Smithsonian. It had a huge fiberglass shell over a wooden structure and resembled an old aircraft. It dominated Life in the Sea for thirty-six years.

  Although Mead knew that Life in the Sea would be replaced by the new Sant Ocean Hall, he didn't think the specimens would be destroyed. He had a good reason to think this. You can't just remove and sell a museum specimen; it first must be deaccessioned. In the museum world, deaccessioning is a formal process that requires certain paperwork and procedures. None of that had happened. But one day Mead heard, to his utter dismay, that the contractor had put the whale up for sale on eBay!