So who wants to be a taxidermist? “I was a meat cutter for fifteen years,” a taxidermist from Kentucky said to me. “That whole time, no one ever said to me, ‘Boy, that was a wonderful steak you cut me.’ Now I get told all the time what a great job I’ve done.” Steve Faechner, who is the president and chairman of the Academy of Realistic Taxidermy, in Havre, Montana, started mounting animals in 1989, after years spent working on the railroad. “I had gotten hurt and was looking for something to do,” he said. “I was with a friend who did taxidermy and I thought to myself, I have got to get a life. And this was it.” Larry Blomquist, who is the owner of the World Taxidermy Championships and of Breakthrough, the trade magazine that sponsors the competition, was a schoolteacher for three years before setting up his business. There are a number of women taxidermists (one was teaching this year’s seminar, “Problem Areas in Mammal Taxidermy”), and there are budding junior taxidermists, who had their own competition division, for kids fourteen and younger, at the show.
The night the show opened, I went to dinner with three taxidermists who had driven in from Kentucky, Michigan, and Maryland.They were all married, and all had wives who complained when they found one too many antelope carcasses in the family freezer, and all worked full-time mounting animals—mostly deer for local hunters, but occasional safari work for people who had shot something in Africa. When I mentioned that I had no idea that a person could make a living as a taxidermist, they burst out laughing, and the guy from Kentucky pointed out that he lived in a little town and there were two other full-time taxidermists in business right down the road.
“What’s the big buzz this year?” the man from Michigan asked.
“I don’t know. Probably something new with eyes,” the guy from Maryland answered. “That’s where you see the big advances. Remember at the last championship, those Russian eyes?” These were glass animal eyes that had a reflective paint embedded in them, so that if you shone a light, they would shine back at you, sort of like the way real animals’ eyes do. The men discussed those for a while, then talked about the new fish eyes being introduced this year, which have photographic transfers of actual fish eyes printed on plastic lenses. We happened to be in a restaurant with a sports theme, and there were about a hundred televisions on around the room, broadcasting dozens of different athletic events, but the men never glanced at them and never stopped talking about their trade. We had all ordered barbecued ribs. When dinner was over, all three of them were fiddling around with the bones before the waitress came to clear our plates.
“Look at these,” the man from Kentucky said, holding up a rib. “You could take these home and use them to make a skeleton.”
Susan Orlean is the bestselling author of The Orchid Thief (which was the inspiration for the film Adaptation), The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, and Saturday Night. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. Her articles have also appeared in Outside, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire. She lives in New York City with her husband, John Gillespie. This piece was excerpted from My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere. For more information, go to www.susanorlean.com.
ANASTASIA M. ASHMAN
My Husband Is Lost Without Me
The master of the road takes a new mistress.
MOST OF THE TIME MY HUSBAND AND I WORK AS A complementary team. He trusts my research skills and intuition to invest money and choose gifts for his mother; I defer to his computational and engineering strengths with taxes and misbehaving electronics. At home in New York City, we face each other at the dining table on twin computers and in the kitchen, one cooks while the other tackles clean up. But when my husband commands the steering wheel of an automobile, suddenly he thinks he can do without me.
“Turn right, honey,” I plead, as we pass a landmark in rural New York State for the third time. “I think that’s the way to the bridge,” I say, wistfully pointing out the window as our car rumbles straight through the intersection. The crinkled map in my lap may offer no clue which gray squiggle represents this wooded country road, but I still think we should have turned right. Call it feminine instinct.
The man of my life is not listening. Nor is he watching the road. Instead, he’s enamored with a new woman in the car. One hand on the wheel, the other is fondling a small Global Positioning System (GPS) unit mounted to the dashboard, the NeverLost Magellan.
Soon a breathy, female voice intones, “Calculating route. Make a legal U-turn.”
My computer scientist husband swiftly complies, checking his mirrors as if the mechanized woman in the dash can appreciate his rigorous driving etiquette. Chafed, I realize he prefers feminine instinct packaged in a high-tech gadget worthy of James Bond.
“Approaching left turn in one mile,” the disembodied lady voice continues. It’s the turn I suggested, but now my husband is convinced. Our car has located the GPS satellites, computed our location and placed us on the grid. It’s all very scientific. My man is bewitched by the small guidance screen highlighting our route in pink. When the car reaches the turn the machine makes the cloying sound of a 1950s doorbell.
Noticing my sour expression, he attempts to lighten my dark opinion of the device, enthusing over the instrument’s slew of advantages: we can clock our time-to-destination, check our maneuver list, magnify the map. We can locate Chinese restaurants in the region and view the next five exits. And then to add insult to injury, he points out that we can receive all this instruction in seven languages, including French, Dutch, Spanish and Japanese.
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
—Katharine Hepburn
But, relieved of my navigating duties and with nothing else to do, I fume. Arms crossed, staring straight ahead, I think, “How galling to be sexy and precise in seven languages!” For all I care, she and my husband can both get lost. I am jealous of a travel gadget.
“Enjoy the sunset,” he finally suggests, sighing, as we approach New York City, master-of-the-road saddled with a crotchety old mistress in the shotgun position.
Then tragedy strikes the happy new couple. Hoping to avoid thousands of vehicles entering Manhattan, my husband discovers he cannot suitably query the on-board guidance computer.
The James Bond woman is lacking in dimension and limits him to simple options: “Shortest Time,” “Most Use of Freeways,” and “Least Use of Freeways.” The expensive little machine fails to factor the rush-hour time of night and the circuitous route we normally prefer to avoid the bottleneck.
Following the robotic navigator’s strategy, soon we are mired in traffic near a bridge we wanted to bypass, and then end up in a tangle of New Jersey roadways before office buildings disrupt our signal and erase the on-screen map. My husband begins to lose his composure.
He’s fidgeting with the machine and swearing, even though the device clearly states when rebooting that “Driver should not program while driving.” This must be the first time he has defied the dame in the dash.
I’m smugly enjoying the dusk as instructed. We merge into an eight-lane highway heading west to California. An obvious mistake. Springing back to life, the computer offers a solution that seems easy but is impossible to execute among the dense traffic and poorly lit roads. Overloaded tractor trailers blast their horns as our car swerves uncertainly.
“What should I do?” finally my husband wonders aloud, jittery, inviting me to help devise a plan.
“Go south,” I coach, eager to cooperate, willing to forgive. Keeping it simple. “We’ll figure it out, sweetie.” The metropolis of Manhattan looms, I am positive we can’t miss it.
But the newly jilted bitch in the dash contradicts me, insisting in her firm and vaguely accented way, “Proceed to highlighted route!”
My husband, looking more like the man I married, reaches over and shuts off the misleading NeverLost. Seductive voice silenced, the screen goes dark. But as the city lights rise be
fore us, I can still see the ghostly trace of her suggested itinerary.
A cultural essayist specializing in tales of personal adventure, Anastasia M. Ashman co-edited the nonfiction anthology Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey. Her writing on art, society, and culture has appeared in publications worldwide, from the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong to the Village Voice in New York. She currently lives in Istanbul with her Turkish husband, where she is at work on a travel memoir, Berkeley to Byzantium: The Cultivation of a California Adventuress.
LAURIE FRANKEL
Mother and Child (and Disco) Reunion
There’s nothing like a road trip for achieving a kind of mushy enlightenment.
THIS IS YOUR BASIC GET-THE-HELL-OUT-OF-DODGE story. Like a kidney stone, I passed eight years of my life in Chicago. Love left me in ’97 and had yet to find me in the two years that followed. Watching my ex date everything that moved and fall in love with the one who stayed still was not my idea of a “good time had by all”—all maybe except for me.
After several reconnoitering trips, the results were in:
1. San Francisco (too expensive, too snobby)
2. Boulder (too hairy)
3. Portland (too Deliverance)
I settle on Seattle. While I am no tree hugger, I like the idea of recycled plastic as outerwear, appreciate John Denver moments and already own four cloth grocery bags. Finding the preponderance of vintage VW buses “quaint,” I sign a lease to live in Fremont (home of the Summer Solstice “bike naked” Parade). I then give notice in Wrigleyville where the closest I’ve been to naked lately is the sight of a pendulous beer gut swinging from a White Sox fan. The sick part is this memory will haunt me with a morbid fondness when I am far away from home.
Because I don’t believe in shipping sentient creatures, I decide to drive myself and my dog, Disco, the 2,000 miles from Chicago to Seattle. I ask my mom to drive with us. Given the prospect of thirty-one hours in the car, I naturally assume my mom and I are on track for a real mother and child reunion, a basic remapping of the outer reaches of familial love, a supernatural bonding implosion. I figure my mom and I are going to make emotion worthy of a retrospective at The Whitney. I have visions of deep and meaningful conversations followed by that awestruck floaty feeling I used to get when my sister and I had hyperventilating contests to see who could pass out first.
People travel for myriad reasons. They travel because they crave adventure. They have dreams they’ve harbored for years that entail tropical beaches and too many margaritas. They want to walk among mystical castles and tragic ruins that harbor tales of passion lived long ago. They travel because they’ve always liked the idea of going somewhere different. They travel because they have two weeks of vacation and a desire to do something amazing with it. I started traveling because I got dumped.
—Jessica Erler, “Roman Womanhood”
The morning of takeoff, I bake a double batch of chocolate, chocolate-chip cookies, buy two super-size bags of turkey jerky, select my top twenty CDs including the ’70s Preservationist Society, give Disco a doggie downer and head for O’Hare where I find my mom and her slim wheelie at Island 3 of the American terminal. I recognize her cotton candy poof of hair bobbing as she looks for me while standing semi-hidden behind the robust build of a fat-ass gentleman. The poof was how I used to track my mom down in the grocery store when I was little. After roaming around I’d walk each aisle looking above the shelf tops for the floating hair.
“Hi sweetie pie,” my mom says giving me a hug, knowing this departure is a watershed event having arrived in Chicago a naïve twenty-six-year-old and now leaving bitter at thirty-four. Disco jumps up, paws on shoulder, to lick my mom and, like a sport, she sticks out her chin for some slobber. My mom is not a “pet person” but because she likes me, she likes Disco.
Within minutes we’re all in the car, buckled up, the three of us gnawing jerky. “Look what I brought,” my mom says handing me Eckard Tolle’s The Power of Now on tape. Last year it was The Art of Happiness. I smile and toss the case on the back seat nailing Disco in the paw.
I hand all maps to the co-captain, put in some Joan Armatrading, hit the 90W and settle in for some hyperventilating conversation.
By Rockford, the dog has quietly vomited and my mom’s asleep. Her head is conventionally thrown back, a cartoon lip pucker rhythmically sealing and unsealing like the opening to a balloon. She expels the softest “Pfooo.” I begin counting, as you would to estimate the distance of lightning, “One one thousand, two one thousand…” Turns out my mom is 3.5 pfooo-miles away from me.
Driving alone gives me time to think:
• Why does “happy” rhyme with “crappy”?
• “Big-boned” means fat.
• Shit makes things grow.
This last thought strikes me as unusually brilliant. I say it out loud to see who’s really sleeping and who’s just pfooo’ing. Disco lifts his head as a nod to Master’s brilliance then promptly nods off again, eye whites flickering forward and back—such commitment to being out of it. I look over at my mom to see how seriously asleep she is. Let’s just say if human eyes could nictitate my mom would put the dog to shame.
Jerky bag #1 is empty which means I’ve consumed enough salt for a family of five…for a year. My not-so-local NPR station is fading as I cross into Minnesota, home of Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Companions. I give up on current events and, without compassion for the sleepy, fumble in the back for the bag of cookies which just so happens to wake the dog and mom.
“You were pfooo’ing,” I say.
“Oh, was I?” she asks sipping some water. “Was I loud?”
Pfooo’ing loudly is a physical impossibility so I know she must still be sleepy. “Yeah, you woke the dog.”
“I’m sorry Disco,” my mom says turning around back to scratch his belly. “Oh, hey. Book time?” she asks. She eats a cookie and slides in cassette #1 of The Power of Now. “My friend Susan thinks Eckhart Tolle looks too much like a leprechaun to take anything he says seriously.”
I take the cassette cover and quickly glance at the author photo. “No, just the opposite.” I find this man so supernaturally fugly that he has just bought himself a lifetime supply of credibility.The last thing I need is a hottie telling me how to be.
Together, we zone out to the lullabic (not a word, but should be) tones of the English-accented reader:
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be.The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
I have my mom rewind this passage six times. Each time I focus on a different section and each time I banish the unenlightened thought I’ll be meeting my husband naked on a bike.
By tape #2 neither of us can remember if we reversed when we should have flipped—nothing sounds familiar but nothing sounds quite new either.
My mother always wanted a son-in-law, but I couldn’t face calling her to tell her I’d be living in a one-horse Tunisian village as the wife of the police chief.
—Bonnie Mack, “Long Drive Through a Small Town”
“Are you waiting for a man or woman to give meaning to your life?” Eckhart, the homunculus, asks. I picture him perched just inside my frontal lobe clutching a four-leaf clover. My mom stares straight ahead and when I look at her she says, “No, not you.”
By tape #4 I am so conscious of trying not to be used by my mind, to be in the now, that I feel like a Zenbot. I think about the miles whooshing past me and how they are sort of my now but just as quickly they are my then and I wonder if the tenets of the book should be modified for road tripping:
Most people don’t know how to listen because the major part of their at
tention is taken up by thinking.
Because I am only an aspiring Lilliputian I think:
• Who do I like better: Air Supply or ELO?
• Are there any circumstances under which I would consider a boob job?
• Why, if Jewish men and women are mixing their gene pools, do the women have rhythm and the men do not?
Feeling brilliant again I say this last one out loud. My mom, who is knitting now—a red, cashmere poncho with fringe—pauses a moment and then says, “I don’t know.”
I nod, knowing it’s one of those unknowable things. I hold my hand out. “An extra chocolate-y one please.” She reaches in the Hello Kitty bag and places a particularly lumpy cookie in my hand.
After a gas-and-pee-and-coke-slushy stop, my mom is driving now. Always open to new taste sensations, I dip a shard of jerky into my slushy and hand it to my mom. She tastes it and nods which means: don’t do that again.
Fed up with now and the power of it, I put in a mixed CD self-titled, “All Covers All the Time” and crank up the Red Hot Chili Peppers doing “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl”:
“What a good wife you would be,
but my life, my lover, my lady is the sea”
First of all, it’s “are the sea” and second, “What a good wife you would be if only I could stop sailing my dick around the seven seas.” As I say this out loud, my mom and I look at each other—front teeth covered in chocolate—and throw our heads back and laugh.
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