My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (2 page)

A FEW YEARS AGO
I was asked to speak on a panel about travel writing. A week or two before the panel, the catastrophic attacks on the World Trade Center took place. During the weeks and months that followed the attacks, nothing seemed to matter—or at least nothing except those things that could be shown to matter even through the heavy shroud of that event. The panel on travel writing went on as scheduled, and one of the first questions we were asked was what we thought would happen to travel writing in the new world that 9/11 seemed to have brought forth. I thought it was a legitimate question. Should anyone write about—or read about—what it’s like to snowshoe through Alaska or raft in Costa Rica when the world seemed to be falling apart? Would anyone in his or her right mind have any interest in leaving home when the universe seemed so threatening? What I said then, and still believe, is that human beings are stubbornly and persistently curious and that I can’t imagine we will ever lose our desire to know about what lies beyond our immediate horizon. At a time when the world feels chaotic and frightening, writers who go out to see it and describe it seem more important, not less. Even fluffy, expository stories about pretty places matter if people are less inclined to travel, since then the writer acts as the reader’s proxy, bringing back the world that most people might be reluctant to go out and see for themselves. At the most elemental level, the world’s troubles are the result of people turning inward and turning away from whatever and whoever is different and unfamiliar. If a writer can make even one reader feel more open to someone or someplace new, I think he or she has accomplished something well worth doing.

What do you get for all this travel? Lots of frequent-flier miles, of course. I’ve ended up with a passport that is stamped, ink stained, dog-eared, creased, and in need of supplemental pages to accommodate the piling on of seals and visas. Also, I am seized repeatedly by epiphanies (or what I mistake for epiphanies) about how to travel well: how to conquer jet lag (stay up until the proper time to sleep, no matter how bad you feel); how to master suitcase selection (I’m now very big on wheelie bags and down on soft luggage); how to pack (never go anywhere without a sweatshirt, a string of pearls, and a big, elegant scarf, which can be used as a dress, a shawl, a skirt, a shrug, a blanket, or a tent, and try, try,
try
not to overpack); and how to find my bearings in a new place (hang out in a coffee shop, strike up a conversation with anyone willing to talk, read the local papers, spend a day walking around downtown, stop in at garage sales and open houses and flea markets and fairs). Travel quietly.

Probably the most valuable lesson I’ve learned after these years of travel is how to bear being lonely. There is nothing that has quite the dull thud of being by yourself in a place you don’t know, surrounded by people you don’t recognize and to whom you mean nothing. But that’s what being a writer requires. Writing is a wonderful life—a marvelous life, in fact—but it is also the life of a vapor, of floating in unseen, filling a space, and then vanishing. There are times when I’m traveling, when I’m far from home, that I am so forlorn that I can’t remember why I chose this particular profession. I yearn to be home so fiercely that I feel as though my heart will pop out of my chest. And then I step out and see the world spread out around me. I know where I’m heading: I am heading home. But on the way there, I see so many corners to round and doors to open, so many encounters to chance upon, so many tiny moments to stumble into that tell huge stories, that I remember exactly why I took this particular path. The journey begins again; the story starts over; I gather myself and go out to see what I can see and tell it as best I can, and the beckoning of home is always, forever, there, just over the next horizon.

HERE

Part One

Lifelike

As soon as the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships opened, the heads came rolling in the door. There were foxes and moose and freeze-dried wild turkeys; mallards and buffalo and chipmunks and wolves; weasels and buffleheads and bobcats and jackdaws; big fish and little fish and razor-backed boar. The deer came in herds, in carloads, and on pallets: dozens and dozens of whitetail and roe; half deer and whole deer and deer with deformities, sneezing and glowering and nuzzling and yawning; does chewing apples and bucks nibbling leaves. There were millions of eyes, boxes and bowls of them, some as small as a lentil and some as big as a poached egg. There were animal mannequins, blank faced and brooding, earless and eyeless and utterly bald: ghostly gray duikers and spectral pine martens and black-bellied tree ducks from some other world. An entire exhibit hall was filled with equipment, all the gear required to bring something dead back to life: replacement noses for grizzlies, false teeth for beavers, fish-fin cream, casting clay, upholstery nails.

The championships were held in April at the Springfield, Illinois, Crowne Plaza hotel, the sort of nicely appointed place that seems more suited to regional sales conferences and rehearsal dinners than to having wolves in the corridors and people crossing the lobby shouting, “Heads up! Buffalo coming through!” A thousand taxidermists converged on Springfield to have their best pieces judged and to attend such seminars as “Mounting Flying Waterfowl,” “Whitetail Deer—From a Master!,” and “Using a Fleshing Machine.” In the Crowne Plaza lobby, across from the concierge desk, a grooming area had been set up. The taxidermists were bent over their animals, holding flashlights to check problem areas like tear ducts and nostrils and wielding toothbrushes to tidy flyaway fur. People milled around, greeting fellow taxidermists they hadn’t seen since the last world championships, held in Springfield two years ago, and talking shop:

“Acetone rubbed on a squirrel tail will fluff it right back up.”

“My feeling is that it’s quite tough to do a good tongue.”

“The toes on a real competitive piece are very important. I think Bondo works nicely, and so does Super Glue.”

“I knew a fellow with cattle, and I told him, ‘If you ever have one stillborn, I’d really like to have it.’ I thought it would make a really nice mount.”

That there is a taxidermy championship at all is something of an astonishment, not only to the people in the world who have no use for a Dan-D-Noser and Soft Touch Duck Degreaser, but also to taxidermists themselves. For a long time, taxidermists kept their own counsel. Taxidermy, the three-dimensional representation of animals for permanent display, has been around since the eighteenth century, but it was first brought into popular regard by the Victorians, who thrilled to all tokens of exotic travel and especially to any domesticated representations of wilderness—the glassed-in miniature rain forest on the tea table, the mounted antelope by the front door. The original taxidermists were upholsterers who tanned the hides of hunting trophies and then plumped them up with rags and cotton, so that they reassumed their original shape and size; those early poses were stiff and simple, the expressions fairly expressionless. The practice grew popular in this country, too: By 1882, there was a Society of American Taxidermists, which held annual meetings and published scholarly reports, especially on the matter of preparing animals for museum display. As long as taxidermy served to preserve wild animals and make them available for study, it was viewed as an honorable trade, but most people were still discomfited by it. How could you not be? It was the business of dealing with dead things, coupled with the questionable enterprise of making dead things look like live things. In spite of its scientific value, it was usually regarded as almost a black art, a wholly owned subsidiary of witchcraft and voodoo. By the early part of the twentieth century, taxidermists such as Carl E. Akeley, William T. Hornaday, and Leon Pray had refined techniques and begun emphasizing artistry. But the more the techniques of taxidermy improved, the more it discomfited: Instead of the lumpy moose head that was so artless that it looked fake, there were mounts of pouncing bobcats so immaculately and exactly preserved, they made you flinch.

For the next several decades, taxidermy existed in the margins—a few practitioners here and there, often self-taught and usually known only by word of mouth. Then, in the late 1960s, a sort of transformation began: The business started to seem cleaner and less creepy—or maybe, in that messy, morbid time, popular culture started to again appreciate the messy, morbid business of mounting animals for display. An ironic reinterpretation of cluttered, bourgeois Victoriana and its strained juxtapositions of the natural and the man-made was in full revival—what hippie outpost didn’t have a stuffed owl or a moose head draped with a silk shawl?—so, once again, taxidermy found a place in the public eye. Supply houses concocted new solvents and better tanning compounds, came out with lightweight mannequins, produced modern formulations of resins and clays. Taxidermy schools opened; previously, any aspiring taxidermist could hope to learn the trade only by apprenticing or by taking one of a few correspondence courses available. In 1971, the National Taxidermy Association was formed (the old society had moldered long before). In 1974, a trade magazine called
Taxidermy Review
began sponsoring national competitions. For the first time, most taxidermists had a chance to meet one another and share advice on how to glue tongues into jaw sets or accurately measure the carcass of a squirrel.

The competitions were also the first time that taxidermists could compare their skills and see who in the business could sculpt the best moose septum or could most perfectly capture the look on a prowling coyote’s face. Taxidermic skill is a function of how deft you are at skinning an animal and then stretching its hide over a mannequin and sewing it into place. Top-of-the-line taxidermists sculpt their own mannequins; otherwise they will buy a ready-made polyurethane foam form and tailor the skin to fit. Body parts that can’t be preserved (ears, eyes, noses, lips, tongues) can be either store-bought or handmade. How good the mount looks—that is, how alive it looks—is a function of how assiduously the taxidermist has studied reference material (photographs, drawings, and actual live animals) so that he or she knows the particular creature literally and figuratively inside out.

To be good at taxidermy, you have to be good at sewing, sculpting, painting, and hairdressing, and mostly you have to be a little bit of a zoology nerd. You have to love animals—love looking at them, taking photographs of them, hunting them, measuring them, casting them in plaster of Paris when they’re dead so that you have a reference when you’re, say, attaching ears or lips and want to get the angle and shape exactly right. Some taxidermists raise the animals they most often mount, so they can just step out in the backyard when they’re trying to remember exactly how a deer looks when it’s licking its nose, especially because modern taxidermy emphasizes mounts with interesting expressions, rather than the stunned-looking creations of the past. Taxidermists seem to make little distinction between loving animals that are alive and loving ones that are not. “I love deer,” one of the champions in the Whitetail division said to me. “They’re my babies.”

Taxidermy is now estimated to be a five-hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar annual business, made up of small operators around the country who mount animals for museums, for decorators, and mostly for the thirteen million or so Americans who are recreational hunters and on occasion want to preserve and display something they killed and who are willing to shell out anywhere from two hundred dollars to mount a pheasant to several thousand for a kudu or a grizzly bear. There are state and regional taxidermy competitions throughout the year and the world championships, which are held every other year; two trade magazines; a score of taxidermy schools; and three thousand visits to Taxidermy.net every day, where taxidermists can trade information and goods with as little self-consciousness as you would find on a knitting website:

“I am in need of several pair of frozen goat feet!”

“Hi! I have up to 300 sets of goat feet and up to 1000 sets of sheep feet per month. Drop me an email at frozencritters.com . . . or give me a call and we can discuss your needs.”

“I have a very nice small raccoon that is frozen whole. I forgot he was in the freezer. Without taking exact measurements I would guess he is about twelve inches or so—very cute little one. Will make a very nice mount.”

“Can I rinse a boar hide good and freeze it?”

“Bob, if it’s salted, don’t worry about it!”

“Can someone please tell me the proper way to preserve turkey legs and spurs? Thanks!”

“Brian, I inject the feet with Preservz-It. . . . Enjoy!”

The word in the grooming area was that the piece to beat was Chris Krueger’s happy-looking otters swimming in a perpetual circle around a leopard frog. A posting on Taxidermy.net earlier in the week declared, “EVERYTHING about this mount KICKS BUTT!!” Kicking butt, in this era of taxidermy, requires having a mount that is not just lifelike but also artistic. It used to be enough to do what taxidermists call “fish on a stick” displays; now a serious competitor worries about things like flow and negative space and originality. One of this year’s contenders, for instance, Ken Walker’s giant panda, had artistry and accuracy going for it, along with the element of surprise. The thing looked a hundred percent pure panda, but you can’t go out and shoot a panda, and you aren’t likely to get hold of a panda that has met a natural end, so everyone was dying to know how he had done it. The day the show opened, Walker was in the grooming area, gluing bamboo into place behind the animal’s back paws, and a crowd had gathered around him. Walker works as a staff taxidermist for the Smithsonian. He is a breezy, shaggy-haired guy whose hands are always busy. One day, I saw him holding a piece of clay while waiting for a seminar to begin, and within thirty seconds or so, without actually paying much attention to it, he had molded the clay into a little minklike creature.