Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

tent the next day and rested while Leigh, armed with art supplies, trekked deep into the jungle to find the panoramic vista.

It was forty degrees on the frost-covered mountain, and the air was thin. Akeley, delirious, began to hemorrhage. His pulse weakened, briefly responded to hypodermic shots of caffeine, and then stopped. Hours later, Leigh found the chosen vista and began sketching it, while everyone else worked for the next four days preparing Akeley's burial. They embalmed his body with formalin, which they had brought to preserve plants for the dioramas, so that it would last while they built the casket. Then they dug his grave in the hard lava rock.

In the archives, I found the telegram Mary Jobe Akeley sent to the museum: "My husbands sprit passed November 17th Hemorage. Slope Mikeo. I remain Supervise completion background accessories. Goulla Koodoo according to plan Inform Pomeroy ... Inform families. Friends."

A week later, she wrote again: "But there is a voice from somewhere which urges me to carry on, and in my imperfect way, complete as far as possible the work he planned, and which he talked to me constantly. So I am going hard and driving hard to get the work accomplished by the end of December."

Leigh had already painted a full panorama of Mount Mikeno and Mount Karisimbi, which he would use to create the backdrop of the diorama. (These heavy-framed, diptychlike field sketches now hang in the Explorers Club in Manhattan.) Dr. Jean-Marie Derscheid, the Belgian zoologist who sat with Akeley on his deathbed, took the first accurate topographical survey of the region. And for the next seven weeks, Mary Jobe Akeley and the remaining expedition members furiously collected flowers, moss, grass, twigs, and stems to replicate back at the museum. They even managed to take home an entire gorilla nest and the actual tree trunk where the Lone Male of Karisimbi was killed. Eventually, they left the Congo but not Africa. They still needed swamp reeds from Mount Elgon (lion diorama) and plants from the Rift Valley (greater kudu diorama). Finally, they carefully packed up all the skins, skeletons, and plants and shipped them to New York. The only thing they left behind was Mary's wedding ring; she had buried it with her husband.

Back at the museum, James L. Clark, taxidermist and sculptor, was now in charge. He made several trips to Africa to ensure that Akeley's vision was not compromised. For the next eleven years, Clark, Rockwell, and the other taxidermists mounted the skins, using Akeley's methods. In 1929, seventeen years after Akeley had first presented his plan to the museum, New York City gave the museum $1.25 million for a new wing to house the dioramas, as specified by Akeley, who would settle for nothing less.

African Hall was supposed to be named for Theodore Roosevelt. When Akeley died, the museum had a change of heart and named it after Akeley instead. The idea that an entire hall would be named for a taxidermist (rather than a president) was unheard of. Did this prove that a taxidermist could be an artist?

At Akeley's memorial service, famous people in the arts and sciences praised Akeley the inventor, Akeley the explorer, Akeley the sculptor, and Akeley the conservationist. Yet when it was his turn to speak, Frederic A. Lucas, the museum's honorary director (and a Ward's graduate), could not find the right word to describe his friend's profession. He only knew what not to call him: a taxidermist.

In spite of the thousands of words ... recorded in our ponderous dictionaries, there are some that seem still to be needed, among them one to define the modern taxidermist ... Animator might be suggested for one who puts life into such a hopeless looking object as the skin of a rhinoceros, but for the present we will stick to taxidermist ... So we have only the word taxidermist to cover all grades of preparators including those who have been aptly styled perpetrators, whose work can only be considered as art because it certainly is not nature.

Even Akeley's biographer Penelope Bodry-Sanders (a person so devoted to his legacy that in 1998 she trekked to his ransacked grave and, weeping, expressed a desire to hold his vandalized bones) drew a blank: "There should be a more elevated title for work of Akeley's stature, but there is not."

On May 19, 1936 (Akeley's seventy-second birthday had be been alive), the museum held the ribbon cutting for the Akeley Hall of African Mammals. It contained fifteen animal groups (not forty as originally planned) and eight mind-numbingly real elephants—his scale model come to life. "It has a three-way grip on the brain and the heart," wrote The New Yorker.

Akeley didn't live to see his dream realized. But somehow, twelve-year-old David Schwendeman had convinced Mum-Mum to take him to the museum on members day, which happened to be the same day as the ribbon cutting. David doesn't talk much, but he's told me the story of the ribbon cutting several times, and each time he does, his eyes fill with tears, his arms get goose bumps, and he shakes his head a lot and says "gee whiz" as if it were a dream. Which, indeed, it was: Akeley's, of course, and, as it happened, his own.

On that day, Schwendeman stood in the dark hall with Mary Jobe Akeley, Daniel Pomeroy, and Roy Chapman Andrews—courageous people whom he had read about in magazines—while African drummers pounded tribal rhythms. He was stunned by what he saw: three-dimensional portraits of Africa that transported him to the Rift Valley, the Serengeti, and Mount Kenya. David gazed at the elephant herd slowly crossing the plains, then circled the hall, pausing to admire the mountain gorillas. In the center of the diorama, the huge silverback beat his chest while his family peacefully munched leaves in an artificial habitat that was implausibly real: ferns embedded with spore cases; ripe Ruwenzori berries; lichen-covered moss; and seventeen thousand wax leaves, each made individually by hand. All of