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

an Italian movie I had recently seen called The Embalmer (2002). This movie centers on an Italian guy named Peppino Profeta. Profeta is a taxidermist and, as it happens, a homosexual dwarf. He has a greasy comb-over, a raspy asthmatic laugh, broken teeth, an amputated finger, and a stockpile of disfigured stuffed animals. When Profeta's not misusing his taxidermy skills by preparing human corpses for the Mob, he likes to molest his handsome apprentice, who doesn't seem to mind.

In the morning, I stood outside the Hunter waiting for Matthews. It was hot in the sun, even at eight A.M., and I paced back and forth in the parking lot as I-95 became choked with commuter traffic. I wondered what the area had looked like pre-highway. Today the Hunter seemed unsuitable for hunting of any kind. You'd be lucky to see a Norway rat cross this migration of honking SUVs.

Matthews soon pulled up in a black pickup, a shiny Ford with a bumper sticker that said sportsmen for bush. I followed him under a train trestle, then along a winding industrial road that switchbacked past blank warehouses. As I drove, I thought about how lucky I was that the museum had granted me permission to tour the lab. I'd wandered through the most amazing museum halls; now I was going to see how a mammal hall is made from scratch. It was an exceptional opportunity, sort of like visiting Ward's Natural Science Establishment, because the Smithsonian can get any specimen it wants—even a Tasmanian wolf, a marsupial that became extinct in 1936. Its universal dragnet is backed by the U.S. government. More important, it owns the National Zoo.

Plus, I had heard that after the opening of the new hall, the museum might shut down the lab. This might be the end of taxidermy on a grand scale at the Smithsonian. It might be the end for John Matthews. It felt like the right historic moment to be here.

In twenty minutes, we were at the lab. The taxidermists, who were putting in ten- to twelve-hour days to make the deadline, had been at work since six A.M. Their official hours were six A.M. to four P.M., Monday through Thursday, but lately they had been working every day. "We've done ninety percent of the skinning and seventy-five percent of the mounts," Matthews said, leading me inside the cool cement-block warehouse.

The lab was monstrous: fifty thousand square feet of taxidermy divided into three huge rooms. The front room had the computer, a sofa, a coffee table, and an immature giraffe in a gantry (posed for a water hole group). Boxes and crates lined the walls. Inside any given crate might be the rare skin of a black-footed ferret or the world's largest moose. For the past two years, the most amazing creatures had been arriving from zoos, primate labs, and research centers around the world. The skins came in plastic coolers and FedEx boxes; they came packaged in huge wooden crates and foam-lined containers. Medium-size mammals—frozen raccoons and lemurs—were shipped overnight in coolers with hinged lids. One time, a primate lab forgot to include a colobus monkey's detached head and had to send it express the next day.

Beyond that room was the actual workshop, and past the workshop was a twenty-five-thousand-square-foot storage area containing shelves upon shelves of trophies (private donations) and historical mounts extricated from old dioramas. Imagine Ikea if Ikea sold only stuffed animals.

A museum storeroom is a sad and spectacular place to see. Only when you walk past shelves loaded with Galápagos tortoises, black-maned lions, elephant skulls and rows of stiff domestic dogs, huge vipers from the 1800s, and the first preserved gorillas can you begin to grasp the incomprehensible slaughter committed by museums whose lust for nature in the form of collecting expeditions was boundless. While researching this book, I was exceptionally lucky to tour the British Natural History Museum's Wandsworth facility in south London with fish curator Oliver Crimmen (who periodically visits the animals so that they aren't forgotten). It's a humongous, maximum-security, climate-controlled animal morgue. Each specimen—there are thousands—is a death as well as a reincarnated life lovingly preserved by some taxidermist at a given point in time. They are frozen records, dilapidated facsimiles, time capsules of vanished worlds, testaments to an era when British imperialism dominated the race to acquire the most "type specimens" (the archetype, the standard to which all others are measured) for its national collections. Wandsworth is a heart-rending record of what humans are capable of doing when they love something too much.

Before we entered the workshop, Matthews checked his e-mail. He was visibly on edge, and everyone knew why. The big opening was in mid-November—only four months away—and four months is nothing in taxidermy.

Except for the stars-and-stripes button-down shirt he had worn to judge mounts at the World Show, I had only ever seen him in a Smithsonian shirt. The Smithsonian sun logo appeared on his chest day after day, like a sailor's tattoo of a heart with the word mom in the center. He owns around two dozen Smithsonian shirts; the one he had on that day was red.

Matthews grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and has a strong Yankee accent and a New Englander's reserve. He is broad-shouldered and muscular, with clear blue eyes, thick graying brown hair, and a prominent handlebar mustache that brings to mind a daguerreotype.

Matthews mounted his first specimen, a rabbit, in an after-school program when he was thirteen. "I just liked to see how things came apart and went back together," he said. "I've always liked animals. I loved nature, loved to watch it ... It's strange. I just kept picking up animals that were hit on the side of the road, and then people started bringing me things to mount." For a while, he ran his own taxidermy studio on Cape Cod. He's also worked at a nuclear power plant and spent some time building ships. Sometimes rich hunters hired him to accompany them