The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  To match this scene with the diorama, eliminate the routed wood sign reading CHIMNEYS 1.9 MILES; erase the trees in the foreground, none of them as old as the college kids with the sunscreen. People skip the Gray Fox and Opossum diorama in part because it’s messy; if you’re not careful, you can miss the fox for the greenbriers. But this real scene is even more of a jumble. Sun in my eyes, sweat crawling down my back, fumes of bug dope and diesel. We have to go; the family’s waiting. But it feels good to rest here, leaning against the low granite wall where the artist worked.

  4. PHOTOGRAPH, WALKER SISTERS (1909)

  All seven of them wear the serious expressions that most people held in photos taken then, but there’s something more to it. Could be the stoic cast of mouth and chin, inherited from their father, or the cool stare Margaret Jane gives the camera. Suggesting compromise to her would be a waste of breath; don’t embarrass yourself. Dangerous to draw too many conclusions from the expressions of a single photograph, but I love this one, the severe, witchlike quality of her gaze staring me down from a hundred years ago. She looks like she could get the better of pretty much anyone or anything who crossed her—bear, rattlesnake, park service. They say Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the sisters in their cabin to try and convince them to sell out. I don’t believe it; it sounds too perfect to be true, and FDR’s legendary charm would have fallen short with Margaret Jane. Smooth-talking city man. You can treat with Churchill and Stalin but not with me. Clamp the ivory cigarette holder between your polished teeth. “If you smoke it will only make two people ill,” she used to say, “you and me.”

  “It is said that the oldest sister, Margaret Jane, never courted with any man,” the National Park Service booklet reads. “She apparently selected spinsterhood early in her life and through reasoning and ridicule attempted to influence her sisters in like manner.” Yet something about this, too, feels overly simple.

  5. FIELD WORK (JAMES PERRY WILSON)

  Wilson was an architect by training, and when he lost that job during the Depression, he brought his draftsman’s discipline to his work at the Museum. Other painters fudged the background perspectives, but Wilson worked out a meticulous grid system to account for the diorama’s curved back wall. He couldn’t leave the system alone until he got it right.

  As I page through the Museum’s archives, I come across photographs of the field models the artists made. I wonder if Wilson savored the clash between the wide world in which he painted and the boot-box scene in which he recreated the same place, compressed by a hundred. How much sharper and crisper the box seemed than life. The road behind him and its noise of passing cars, smell of diesel from the truck groaning upgrade on its way to town, bits of broken glass from a beer bottle, thumbsmear gout of old blood bristling with squirrel fur. Pea gravel under his feet, and mica in small bright shelves. None of this made it into the box. He kept what mattered most—geologic features, time of day, quality of light—and left the rest behind.

  6. DIORAMA-CRAFT (VOL. 1)

  Start with a landmark that patrons will recognize. The foreground man collects samples of dirt, stones, grasses, and bushes to carry back to New York. But the animal provides the story. Paint hot wax on the lips of the stuffed raccoon. Make leaves of limped acetate, stems of hot wire. The diorama artist must understand the ways in which light behaves.

  I read article after article about various methods of fabricating leaves. Suddenly I can’t take for granted the magnolia tree outside my window. The leaves are thick, leathery ovals with undersides coated by brown velvet, which can be imitated by dusting the fake leaf with cotton flocking, “applied when the paint is still tacky,” then spraying it with fine coats of varnish. This leaf would look like the real thing, but wouldn’t sound like it, blowing along the sidewalk with a clatter.

  I remember. In the woods behind our house, green onions poked up through rotted leaves. Knobs of algae grew along the bottom of the brook and a sycamore stood beside a gully. Not widely recognizable by a roadside landmark; not known to anyone, really, except me. But made up of smaller, stranger things. Home.

  There was a swampy place under the white oak, dark mud in tussocks where straw stood, emerald fronds of groundsel smelling strongly of evergreen. In February, ladyslippers: jade stems lifting little pink lungs. If you crossed the barbed-wire fence you could hike back to the blackberry thicket, the tallest pines, and the trash dump. Soda bottles, shards of plastic, rusted bedsprings. Just looking at that glittering apron of junk felt dangerous. Never any cobalt milk-of-magnesia bottles, just old mayonnaise jars half-full of congealed slime, thick moss clouding the glass. Never ink bottles or arrowheads, or buttons with an eagle pressed on the top. Never a tortoiseshell comb incised with scrolls, or pottery shards washed white and streaked gray, scraped smooth on the inside or raked while still wet with a blunt tool.

  I remember a childhood afternoon. The scrawls under the loose bark on the fallen pine looked like hieroglyphs. We sloughed off the bark and ran our fingertips over the loops, some of them still packed with sawdust. Pick them clean with your nail and uncover the inscrutable message you yearn to read. Bore holes, perfectly round. Cul-de-sacs just like the ants make in the old jelly jar. Make sure you put a queen in there; she’s the one with wings. Put it in a shady spot and watch them make rooms, just beyond your finger, on the other side of the glass. What wouldn’t I save if I could?

  7. MARGARET JANE IN THE GARDEN

  Crawled slowly down the corn rows, picking stones. Some people said the devil sowed them every winter, a thing she knew to be untrue. In point of fact they floated up through the soil like beans set to boil. She let them lie until spring equinox so they could feed the soil with their minerals. Summer storms fed the garden, too, every time the lightning hit. Manure from the sheepfold she raked into rows and plowed under with the mule. Shed feathers, too; bits of broken clay pots; even her own water, collected in a jug and set in the shade: nitrogen would push the corn to bear. Knew to save butchering blood for the roses—thirty different kinds. Some Mother had planted, others Grandmother, still others she herself.

  She saved seeds in twists of newsprint, labeled in her neat hand. Suffer the lilies to come up on their own, year after year, but the garden for herb doctoring she liked to set out as close to last frost as she could, end of April, start of May. Pieplant, catnip, boneset. Horseradish looked after itself. Couldn’t help a friendly feeling toward something like that.

  She was the oldest, a responsibility she hadn’t chosen but took to heart just the same. Her sisters said she was the fastest at shearing a sheep; reporters (busybodies!) said she was stern. There was a part of herself she kept instinctively close. Hard to feel easy about all these strangers coming down the path. Better the old times, when people wanted what she knew how to provide: horehound syrup for cough, blue cohosh for female trouble, Uncle Charley’s liniment for everything from burns to muscle aches to snakebite. It burned like the hinges of hell and she rubbed it on everything that hurt.

  That was summertime. In the winter they lived off the food they’d stored: cured pork, blue Hubbard squash, preserves in glass jars held tight with ceramic seal lids, apples from Daddy’s trees. Dried cherries. They had never wanted and now, in their later years, Louisa even ran a little to the fat. And here, in winter, Margaret Jane pulled the loom from the loft and tied a skein of wool to its frame. This one would be Double Bowknot. She read the pattern written on plain paper. Slanting numbers penciled in space.

  Could be as simple as this: she did not care to leave. Would spend her earthly life here, where first the mountain laurel bloomed and then the rhododendron, where hemlock rooted by the river. In summer, heat baked a sweet hay smell from the grass; persimmons fell, and ants swarmed the skins to suck clear juice. The preserves she made would last all winter. Frost furring the nail heads, ice slick on the springhouse steps. She knew that hollow in a way nobody ever would again. Could still surprise her—the ice storm that turned to thunder, bobcat showing up in the cor
ncrib with a litter of kits. But sang the songs she dreamed of.

  Few people can be as faithful to a place as she was, and I haven’t been. But I see something in Margaret Jane I recognize. She would not be moved.

  8. DIORAMA-CRAFT (VOL. 2)

  “Artistic Work Demands Good Tools,” says the old taxidermy supply catalog, listing Brain Spoons, Hooks and Chains, and Bone Snips (“No. 3. HEAVY”). The mammalogist for Gray Fox and Opossum would have needed a Bone Saw like this “keyhole type,” with “metal handle, pistol grip, removable blade. Will cut metal, wood, bones. A tool you will use every day. A dandy.” Surely he had a Bone Scraper, which he would have “used for scraping flesh from the skull and other bones” and “taking out eyes, scraping fat from skins and plugging holes with cotton.” After he’d cured the skin and flensed the bones, sculpted a form with the caliper’s measurements, and made a papier-mâché model over which he stretched the skin, he would have needed to sew the skin together with Neck or Hide Needles, “real he-man needles.” Last, he would have tacked lips and lids in place with Taxidermists’ Nails, “extremely useful . . . where a nail is desired which will not show.” But where did he source the possum’s eyes? At the time, the best glass eyes were made in France and Germany, so he might have sent away for them, or hired a glassblower to do some piecework. He would have needed scores of eyes for the collections tucked away in these halls. For the Bongo display, tiny mirrors force light to reflect off the deer’s eyes, creating the illusion of life.

  9. SOME MEMORY OF DAYLIGHT

  Here every detail matters. Plant specialists knew how to prepare the grasses shipped back from the field, placing them in deep freeze and then warmth, mimicking spring to draw out any stowaway bugs. They burned their fingertips on wires heated to glowing, which they sanded down into ribs for a just-unfolded maple leaf. Poured cool, musty-smelling clay over a green persimmon, broke the mold carefully apart, and filled it with wax to make a perfect double. They painted and overpainted it to replicate the whitish bloom, partially rubbed off, that the fruit has in life.

  “Some memory of daylight we carry with us in daytime, even in halls where no daylight enters,” wrote diorama artist F. L. Jaques in 1931, “for who has not marveled at how much better the groups look at night when it is impossible for daylight to influence us?” Sometimes I think he had it all, James Perry Wilson, painting the mountains in the sunshine, then bringing his sketches back to the hulking old museum. The “memory of daylight” he pushed from his mind, turning toward the windowless room he would fill with a vista that stretched to the horizon, set at five feet two inches high, the eye-height of the average Museum viewer.

  Standing in front of the beautifully worked glass-and-wood frame, you feel in your bones, I am here, and, That is there. The three-dimensional work between viewer and background—animals, trees and shrubs, ground—is tantalizingly close, but untouchable. (The wooden rails, placed shin high, speak of the collective desire to lean in.) There is a great gulf fixed between the viewer and the scene, and the artist is the only one who can bridge the chasm.

  The artist wants to deceive, and we want to be deceived. It’s an innocent cheat, or is it? The real danger in creating a closed environment lies in the change that your work imposes on its viewers. Done right, you’ll prevent them from seeing the real thing on its own terms. When I walked through the Museum with Stephen Quinn, curator and historian, one of the first things he told me about was his trip to the Lake Kivu volcanoes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Carl Akeley, famous taxidermist, had sited the Mountain Gorilla diorama and later died. Stephen had been on an expedition charged with the difficult task of locating the clearing portrayed in the diorama. “Then there we were,” he said, “and I looked back, and there was the background.” What he said struck me; not “Mount Mikeno,” but “the painting of it.” But if the artist decides not to recreate the place at all, we lose even a shadow version of reality and are left with nothing.

  I stare at archival photographs of Wilson painting the prairie in the Museum. The scale is all wrong; Wilson is a giant next to the flat-topped mesas in the background. But it’s not just that. From sky to ground, he’s creating a world, God with nine tubes of paint. “His dark shades contained no black,” I read. From three tubes of blue, he made shades of sky that melt into each other so well that you can’t tell where one color begins and the next ends. To stipple the margins, he used a brush made of badger hair.

  When Wilson made the trip to Tennessee in 1952, the Museum’s exhibits department was at high tide. Expeditions set out constantly. Scientists and artists flew overseas, booked passage on ships, or packed the Museum station wagon with gear: barrels and shovels, palettes and paint, calipers, hacksaws, tape measures, razor knives, pulp paper for pressing flowers and leaves, jars of formaldehyde.

  But things were changing. With the advent of motion pictures and television, dioramas felt old-fashioned. Frank Chapman’s famous Pelican Island display that helped convince Theodore Roosevelt to set aside the first federal bird reserve in 1903 was scrapped in 1959. It grieves me to imagine it in the trash, or headed for the city dump on an open scow under a shrieking cloud of gulls. Making this diorama was either an act of faith that what they were doing could still matter, or else a memory under glass. Possibly both.

  Back in the Museum archives, I found a photo titled Buffalo in Cellophane. The stuffed animal stands on a pallet, head bent down to where grass should be. Sticks hold the sheets of cellophane away from his shoulder and haunch. He’s positioned in the niche that will become the finished diorama; a penciled grid marks the wall behind him with low hills and plateaus. Another photo shows Wilson’s visit to the Overland Trail for the diorama’s field studies. He’s set up his easel on the flat ground beside the Museum’s truck, a ’37 Ford. Not a tree in sight. The foreground man, George Petersen, holds a large cardboard box, ready to be filled with shrubs and grasses; a box on the ground holds a big clump of sagebrush. No animals visible in the photograph, no other people; these could be the last two men on Earth, taking careful notes to record what they have seen.

  10. AGAINST COLD FEET

  In this late picture, Louisa and Caroline pose near their cabin with a sturdy little dog. Neither of them great beauties, nor ever had been, and even in their own time people thought them backward and strange. But under their hands the bee balm thrived, and the hives and the honey, and the bachelor’s buttons.

  When their nephews enlisted, the women sheared their sheep, carded the wool, knitted socks from the yarn, and mailed the socks overseas. Said Louisa, “We don’t aim for any of our folks to have cold feet, no matter where they are.” Those socks must have contained bits of grass from the yard behind the cabin. They removed what they could but surely some specks remained, snared in the knots.

  They knew where all their things came from. They papered their cabin with magazine pictures they liked and “scalded the walls” once a year. The only wood that’s cleaner is what still grows in the ground, and what with worm and rot even that’s no sure thing. Except for persimmon, kin to ebony, that grows hard and strong and slow.

  In 1952, the year Museum artists visited the Smokies, reporter John O’Reilly wrote, “More visitors come here than to any other national park. Last year there were 2,300,000 visitors. . . . At times the roads were as jammed as the West Side Highway in Manhattan.” Not long after that, Margaret Jane and Louisa wrote a letter to the park superintendent, asking him to take down the sign to their house. “We are not able to do our Work and receive so many visitors,” Louisa said, “and can’t make our souvenirs to sell like we once did and people will be expecting us to have them.” Apple cakes, dolls, handwritten copies of Louisa’s poetry. “I write poems to sell but can’t write very well,” she said. “I used to write of winter but I haven’t been able to do much for the two last ones.”

  By now, sixty years later, annual visitation to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has nearly quadrupled; this is still the
most visited of all the national parks. So as you drive along the Parkway, you have plenty of time to notice things: an upside-down mansion with upside-down palm trees hanging from its porch; a life-sized Titanic, chopped in half, with a fiberglass iceberg; go-kart tracks, wedding chapels, a nameless store that can be entered only by walking through a giant shark’s mouth. Ease on up to the next red light, trying not to rear-end the truck in front of you. You have to turn on the AC. You have to wait for a table. Because some of the neon letters are burned out, the restaurant sign reads, R UESDAY, which is appropriate, because you are beginning to regret the day you ever decided to visit.

  MORE OUTDOORS FOR YOUR MONEY, say the signs at the camping store, where you can play a shooting game for fifty cents. When you hit the moonshine still, it pings, and when you hit the outhouse door, it flies open and a canned voice hollers. A glossy photograph of Ramsey Cascades, a pretty waterfall on the Little Pigeon, covers the lobby Coke machine.

  What would Margaret Jane think of the billboard advertising HATFIELD AND MCCOY dinner theater? MAKE EATIN’ FUN! it demands. The patriarch wears a battered folding hat and a long white beard. Next to him, a frowning granny raises her rolling pin in a threatening pose. Hardly does justice to the kind of woman who could dispose of any weasel foolish enough to try to steal a hen from her henhouse, as the Walker matriarch once did: “She calmly walked to the wash tub and thrust her hand, weasel and all, under water. It drowned in water stained by [her] blood. She commented that she knew ‘sooner or later, it would turn loose.’” What would Hairy John, Union soldier, make of these ball caps with REBEL stitched across the front? Stacked in the gift shop like cordwood, they say, REBEL REBEL REBEL.