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

this in front of a simmering panorama of the Virunga range, whose volcanic smoke seemed to billow out of the glass and into Central Park. The only thing missing was Akeley's grave.

It was like peering out of a canvas tent onto bright, enchanted Africa—an Africa that existed only briefly in the early 1900s, when nature and a man with a prophetic quest to document a vanishing world intersected at exactly the right time.

4. HOW THE ORANGUTAN GOT ITS SKIN

ERECTING A MAMMAL HALL in a post-expedition world is something like building an indoor skiing facility in Dubai or planting a tropical rain forest in a mall café in New Jersey. And that's mostly because, as one taxidermist put it, "it isn't cool to go out and whack endangered species."

Nevertheless, in 2003, the Smithsonian was in the throes of the most stupendous undertaking at the National Museum of Natural History since it opened on the Mall in 1910: the making of its Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals. Smithsonian lead taxidermist John Matthews was in charge of the animal preservation team, and he needed to hire a master sculptor. So he called panda forger Ken Walker to see if he'd take the job.

Walker wanted it—what taxidermist wouldn't?—but obtaining a visa was difficult. The first time he had applied to work in the United States, he was rejected for, as he puts it, being "uneducated." "I wasn't offended," he says. He applied again. This time he wrote "artist" on the form. Again his application was denied. "They classify me as a hobbyist" he says, livid. "I've decided to dedicate my life—which is really all I've got—to this, and for someone to diminish what I do because of their personal perspective offends me. It all boils down to prejudice."

Finally, with the help of the Smithsonian, he obtained a visa as a "specialist." But before he packed up his red toolbox and shipped off a few capes to mount in his spare time (well, more than a few: twenty-one orange-footed martens, six black bears, four wolverines, three fishers, and one grizzly bear), he hung 690 pounds of moose meat in the family freezer—enough to feed his wife, son, and daughter while he was away for the nine-month contract. ("There's no steroids," he explains. "It's good stuff.")

I hadn't seen Walker since the WTC in April, and he was still gloating about taking Re-Creations with the panda. "A polar bear would have made a better panda," he said, mulling it over. "I can get a polar bear for a hundred dollars a foot ... but I can't bring it into the United States." Since everyone loved the panda, he figured he'd become rich by selling fake pandas to museums and wealthy collectors, and this kept him happy while he cast galago tongues and retrofitted old giraffes at the Smithsonian.

He had been at the museum for seven months, living in a rented room in La Plata, Maryland, when I visited the taxidermy lab there. It was a hot, sticky week in July—for an Albertan, insufferable. Yet adapting to the muggy climate had been far easier for Walker than adjusting to life at the largest museum complex in the world.

You see, in Alberta, Walker answers only to himself. ("My independence is more important to me than anything," he says.) At the Smithsonian, he had a boss (John Matthews); his boss had a boss; his boss's boss had a boss. The line of bosses led directly to the chief justice of the Supreme Court and the vice president of the United States. There were bosses to tell him how to handle the scientific specimens, bosses to tell him how to pose each animal in each case, even bosses whom he had to consult before making the most minuscule change, such as trimming an artificial branch that obstructed a colobus monkey (denied!). At the Smithsonian, he could not monkey around. He had to behave. He had to attend an orientation where he learned that inappropriate behavior—sexist behavior—was not tolerated. Walker was afraid that he'd compliment a curator's dress and be fired. Even weekends were a strain. Although his coworkers invited him to go out with them in the city, he preferred to stay in Maryland and fish. I thought he'd love the capital; he hated it. Too conservative? I asked. "No. Too liberal! The first thing Hillary Clinton did when she moved into the White House was take down the mounts. John and I want to write a letter to Bush asking him to reinstate them!"

The taxidermy lab where Walker worked was actually in Newington, Virginia, a Beltway community of industrial warehouses and shopping centers. The lab was set back off the road on a lot that resembled a construction site. A bulldozer was parked in the rubble outside, and the sign in front read POTOMAC VALLEY BRICK.

When I visited, Matthews suggested that I stay at a nearby motel and he'd pick me up in the morning. The place he recommended was a 1954 roadhouse called the Hunter Motel. The Hunter's restaurant just happened to be the taxidermists' favorite place for chicken-fried steak, and while the restaurant did have oodles of rustic charm, the motel itself left something to be desired. It was directly under an I-95 exit ramp, and I could hear pickup trucks revving their engines in the parking lot all night. My room featured fake wood-grain veneer—nine distinct tree species laminated to make the headboard, the TV stand, the lampshade, and so on. The hollow door to the room had no deadbolt, and someone had scrawled the hunter in thick marker on one of the pillows, which had the whiff of a horror movie. Since I couldn't sleep, I thought about scary things. Thankfully, I didn't know what had happened to the Hunter's previous owner (allegedly gunned down), and the scene in Lolita where Humbert Humbert takes the nymphet to the seductive Enchanted Hunters hotel had escaped my mind. I was, however, consumed with