Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

It's a good thing we have fools, however, because a person would have to be incredibly passionate about something to keep it alive for thirteen years of setbacks. From 1912, when the plan was accepted, until 1925, when it was a reality, Akeley got divorced, suffered from depression, mourned the death of Theodore Roosevelt, and served in World War I. He was a major in the Corps of Engineers, where he invented the first cement gun—used to fortify the Panama Canal—but he refused to wear a uniform because if he did, he couldn't call his colonel a "damn fool."

  Finally, in 1925, George Eastman of Eastman Kodak and banker Daniel Pomeroy agreed to fund an expedition to Africa to collect six key animal groups for the hall. "Soon I shall be on my way to Africa, this time accompanied by artists and taxidermists, happy in the knowledge that my years of preparation are ended and my big work actually begun!" Akeley exclaimed.

  He was now past sixty, a national celebrity, his daring exploits featured in every newspaper and magazine. He was also happily remarried to Mary Jobe Akeley and spending every waking hour planning the yearlong expedition. But even in a moment of repose, smoking a pipe in his studio, Akeley looked tired. Deep crevices in his face showed the strain of keeping alive his dream. His hair was now silver, his strong shoulders were slumped, and the scar from the elephant charge ran across his cheek like a river on a well-worn map. "If I die before it is finished," he said, pointing to his scale model, "the whole concept and plan is there."

  Eight grueling months later, the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy Expedition had collected all the skins, bones, and habitat accessories for seven museum groups—a staggering accomplishment. Yet even with many porters, the safari was difficult. Eastman bickered with Akeley. Landscape painter Arthur Jansson had had enough of bellowing hyenas and fled. Museum taxidermist Robert Rockwell shot the wrong immature giraffe, infuriating Akeley. "The trouble with you, Rockwell," he seethed, "is that you are putting your judgment above mine." Rockwell shrugged it off: "As I looked levelly at Carl it came to me that here was a tired, aging man beset by difficulties, yet furiously intent on carrying out successfully the vision of a lifetime."

  Akeley reluctantly checked into a Nairobi hospital with what he said was a fever (malaria and dysentery). The Associated Press reported a nervous breakdown caused by utter exhaustion. Before entering the hospital, he took a detour to the Rift Valley to outline Rockwell's next assignment—to hunt for buffalo on the Tana River, ninety miles northeast of Nairobi. Rockwell, having just killed and flayed five reedbucks, a Grant's zebra, a steenbok, and a hyena, also must have been wiped-out. But his fatigue was nothing compared to Akeley's. As Rockwell eyed him lying on a cot in a land cruiser, barely able to smoke his cigarette, Rockwell said, "If you drive yourself any more than you've been doing, you're liable to leave your bones in Africa."

  "I don't know of any other place I would rather leave them," Akeley said flatly in reply.

  Three weeks later, Akeley was ready for the final leg of the expedition. He was bringing the renowned painter of the American West William R. Leigh ("the Sagebrush Rembrandt") to a lush rain forest on Mount Mikeno in what was then the Belgian Congo—to the vista he had specifically chosen for the panoramic backdrop of the gorilla group: the eleven-thousand-foot saddle between Mount Mikeno and Mount Karisimbi. The "Kivu volcanoes," as Akeley called the part of the Virunga mountain range bordering Lake Kivu, span Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Virunga National Park, the oldest national park in Africa, which Akeley helped establish as a gorilla sanctuary in 1925, is located here. It's also the place where Dian Fossey, the American zoologist who wrote Gorillas in the Mist, was murdered in 1985 while protecting gorillas from poachers.

  The place Akeley had chosen was the mossy wonderland where he had come in 1921 to film and then shoot his prized gorilla specimens: the Old Man of Mikeno, the Lone Male of Karisimbi, and his namesake, Clarence. It's also where he tied himself to a tree on the precipice of a canyon to steady himself while skinning and skeletonizing Clarence.

  Akeley had already mounted these gorillas and two others in New York. He also had the footage of the live gorillas (the first ever taken), as well as footage of his beloved volcanoes. (He invented the first portable motion picture camera just for this purpose.) You might be tempted to think that Akeley already had everything he could possibly need to make a convincing diorama, but you'd be wrong. Akeley wanted the expedition to experience the place firsthand. The only way to truthfully exhale the spirit of any place, Akeley thought, was first to inhale it. That the spot was halfway up a steep, active volcano, whose slopes were covered with thick jungle, mud, and thorny nettles, didn't matter. Neither did the torrent of rain or Akeley's condition.

  So once Akeley was out of the hospital, he and the remaining expedition members left their motor caravan in Kabale, Uganda, and set off, first by canoe and then on foot, to reach Akeley's old camp on Mount Mikeno. The trail followed stupendous waterfalls, thousand-foot chasms, and thick stands of bamboo that had to be struck down to clear a path. After days of twenty-five-hundred-foot ascents and descents in the pounding tropical rain, Akeley, knee-deep in mud and dressed in a Burberry raincoat, broke down and had to be carried by stretcher. Most men would have pitched camp and called it a day, but Akeley wasn't most men; he was a taxidermist.

  Eventually, the group reached a lush wilderness marked by wild celery and lichen-covered vines that dangled from moss-covered canopies. Signs of gorillas were everywhere. Akeley looked up from the stretcher and said to his wife tenderly, "Mary, this is the Kivu at last. Here the fairies play! Isn't this forest the most beautiful, the most ancient in all the world?"

  Conditions were dismal in the dark forest. Sheets of cold rain and sleet pounded the troupe. Akeley staggered the last two miles into his old camp. He was suffering miserably from fever-induced chills and was nauseated. He stayed in his 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 sc
ulptor, 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 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 r
estaurant 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 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.