My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Susan Orlean

  For the next several decades, taxidermy existed in the margins—a few practitioners here and there, often self-taught and usually known only by word of mouth. Then, in the late 1960s, a sort of transformation began: The business started to seem cleaner and less creepy—or maybe, in that messy, morbid time, popular culture started to again appreciate the messy, morbid business of mounting animals for display. An ironic reinterpretation of cluttered, bourgeois Victoriana and its strained juxtapositions of the natural and the man-made was in full revival—what hippie outpost didn’t have a stuffed owl or a moose head draped with a silk shawl?—so, once again, taxidermy found a place in the public eye. Supply houses concocted new solvents and better tanning compounds, came out with lightweight mannequins, produced modern formulations of resins and clays. Taxidermy schools opened; previously, any aspiring taxidermist could hope to learn the trade only by apprenticing or by taking one of a few correspondence courses available. In 1971, the National Taxidermy Association was formed (the old society had moldered long before). In 1974, a trade magazine called Taxidermy Review began sponsoring national competitions. For the first time, most taxidermists had a chance to meet one another and share advice on how to glue tongues into jaw sets or accurately measure the carcass of a squirrel.

  The competitions were also the first time that taxidermists could compare their skills and see who in the business could sculpt the best moose septum or could most perfectly capture the look on a prowling coyote’s face. Taxidermic skill is a function of how deft you are at skinning an animal and then stretching its hide over a mannequin and sewing it into place. Top-of-the-line taxidermists sculpt their own mannequins; otherwise they will buy a ready-made polyurethane foam form and tailor the skin to fit. Body parts that can’t be preserved (ears, eyes, noses, lips, tongues) can be either store-bought or handmade. How good the mount looks—that is, how alive it looks—is a function of how assiduously the taxidermist has studied reference material (photographs, drawings, and actual live animals) so that he or she knows the particular creature literally and figuratively inside out.

  To be good at taxidermy, you have to be good at sewing, sculpting, painting, and hairdressing, and mostly you have to be a little bit of a zoology nerd. You have to love animals—love looking at them, taking photographs of them, hunting them, measuring them, casting them in plaster of Paris when they’re dead so that you have a reference when you’re, say, attaching ears or lips and want to get the angle and shape exactly right. Some taxidermists raise the animals they most often mount, so they can just step out in the backyard when they’re trying to remember exactly how a deer looks when it’s licking its nose, especially because modern taxidermy emphasizes mounts with interesting expressions, rather than the stunned-looking creations of the past. Taxidermists seem to make little distinction between loving animals that are alive and loving ones that are not. “I love deer,” one of the champions in the Whitetail division said to me. “They’re my babies.”

  Taxidermy is now estimated to be a five-hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar annual business, made up of small operators around the country who mount animals for museums, for decorators, and mostly for the thirteen million or so Americans who are recreational hunters and on occasion want to preserve and display something they killed and who are willing to shell out anywhere from two hundred dollars to mount a pheasant to several thousand for a kudu or a grizzly bear. There are state and regional taxidermy competitions throughout the year and the world championships, which are held every other year; two trade magazines; a score of taxidermy schools; and three thousand visits to Taxidermy.net every day, where taxidermists can trade information and goods with as little self-consciousness as you would find on a knitting website:

  “I am in need of several pair of frozen goat feet!”

  “Hi! I have up to 300 sets of goat feet and up to 1000 sets of sheep feet per month. Drop me an email at frozencritters.com . . . or give me a call and we can discuss your needs.”

  “I have a very nice small raccoon that is frozen whole. I forgot he was in the freezer. Without taking exact measurements I would guess he is about twelve inches or so—very cute little one. Will make a very nice mount.”

  “Can I rinse a boar hide good and freeze it?”

  “Bob, if it’s salted, don’t worry about it!”

  “Can someone please tell me the proper way to preserve turkey legs and spurs? Thanks!”

  “Brian, I inject the feet with Preservz-It. . . . Enjoy!”

  The word in the grooming area was that the piece to beat was Chris Krueger’s happy-looking otters swimming in a perpetual circle around a leopard frog. A posting on Taxidermy.net earlier in the week declared, “EVERYTHING about this mount KICKS BUTT!!” Kicking butt, in this era of taxidermy, requires having a mount that is not just lifelike but also artistic. It used to be enough to do what taxidermists call “fish on a stick” displays; now a serious competitor worries about things like flow and negative space and originality. One of this year’s contenders, for instance, Ken Walker’s giant panda, had artistry and accuracy going for it, along with the element of surprise. The thing looked a hundred percent pure panda, but you can’t go out and shoot a panda, and you aren’t likely to get hold of a panda that has met a natural end, so everyone was dying to know how he had done it. The day the show opened, Walker was in the grooming area, gluing bamboo into place behind the animal’s back paws, and a crowd had gathered around him. Walker works as a staff taxidermist for the Smithsonian. He is a breezy, shaggy-haired guy whose hands are always busy. One day, I saw him holding a piece of clay while waiting for a seminar to begin, and within thirty seconds or so, without actually paying much attention to it, he had molded the clay into a little minklike creature.

  “The panda was actually pretty easy,” he was saying. “I just took two black bears and bleached one of them—I think I used Clairol Basic. Then I sewed the two skins together into a panda pattern.” He took out a toothbrush and fluffed the fur on the panda’s face. “At the world championship two years ago, a guy came in with an extinct Labrador duck. I was in awe. I thought, What could beat that—an extinct duck? And I came up with this idea.” He said he thought that the panda would get points for creativity alone. “You can score a ninety-eight with a squirrel, but it’s still a squirrel,” he said. “So that means I’m going with a panda.”

  “What did you do for toenails, Ken?” someone asked.

  “I left the black bear’s toenails in,” he said. “They looked pretty good.”

  Another passerby stopped to admire the panda. He was carrying a grooming kit, which appeared to contain Elmer’s glue, brown and black paint, a small tool set, and a bottle of Suave mousse. “I killed a blond bear once,” he said to Ken. “A two-hundred-pound sow. Whew, she made a beautiful mount.”

  “I’ll bet,” Ken said. He stepped back to admire the panda. “I like doing re-creations of these endangered animals and extinct animals, since that’s the only way anyone’s going to have one. Two years ago, I did a saber-toothed cat. I got an old lioness from a zoo and bleached her.”

  The panda was entered in the Re-Creation (Mammal) division, one of the dozens of divisions and subdivisions and sub-subcategories, ranging from the superspecific (Whitetail Deer Long Hair, Open Mouth division) to the sweepingly colossal (Best in World), that would share in twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of prizes. (There is even a sub-sub-subspecialty known as “fish carving,” which uses no natural fish parts at all; it is resin and wood sculpted into a fish form and then painted.) Nearly all the competitors are professionals, and they publicize their awards wherever possible. For instance, instead of ordering just any Boar Eye-Setting Reference Head out of a taxidermy catalog, you can order the Noonkester’s #NRBERH head sculpted by Bones Johnson, which was, as the catalog notes, the 2000 National Taxidermy Association Champion Gamehead.

  The taxidermists take the competition very seriously. During the time I was in Springfield, I heard conversations analyzing s
uch arcane subjects as exactly how much a javelina’s snout wrinkles when it snarls and which molars deer use to chew acorns as opposed to which ones they use to chew leaves. This is important because the ultimate goal of a taxidermist is to make the animal look exactly as if it had never died, as if it were still in the middle of doing ordinary animal things like plucking berries off a bush or taking a nap. When I walked around with the judges one morning, I heard discussions that were practically Talmudic, about whether the eyelids on a particular bison mount were overdetailed, and whether the nostrils on a springbok were too wide, and whether the placement of whiskers on an otter appeared too deliberate. “You do get compulsive,” a taxidermist in the exhibit hall explained to me one afternoon. At the time, he was running a feather duster over his entry—a bobcat hanging off an icicle-covered rock—in the last moments before the judging would begin. “When you’re working on a piece, you forget to eat, you forget to drink, you even forget to sleep. You get up in the middle of the night and go into the shop so you can keep working. You get completely caught up in it. You want it to be perfect. You’re trying to make something come back to life.”

  I said that his bobcat was beautiful and that even the icicles on the piece looked completely real. “I made them myself,” he said. “I used clear acrylic toilet plunger handles. The good Lord sent the idea to me while I was in a hardware store. I just took the handles and put them in the oven at four hundred degrees.” He tapped the icicles and then added, “My wife was pretty worried, but I did it on a nonstick cookie sheet.”

  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.”

  IN THE SEMINARS, the atmosphere was as sober and exacting as a tax law colloquium. “Whiskers,” one of the instructors said to the group, giving them a stern look. “I pull them out. I label them. There are left whiskers and there are right whiskers. If you want to get those top awards, you’re going to have to think about whiskers.” Everyone took notes.

  In the next room: “Folks, remember, your carcass is your key. The best thing you can do is to keep your carcass in the freezer. Freeze the head, cast it in plaster. It’s going to really help if your head is perfect.” During the breaks, the group made jokes about a T-shirt that had been seen at one of the regional competitions. The shirt said PETA in big letters, but when you got up close you saw that PETA didn’t spell out People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the bane of all hunters and, by extension, all taxidermists; it spelled out “People Eating Tasty Animals.” Chuckles all around, then back to the solemn business of mounting flying waterfowl: “People, follow what the bird is telling you. Study it, do your homework. When you’ve got it ready, fluff the head, shake it, and then get your eyes. There are a lot of good eyes out there on the market today. Do your legwork, and you can have a beautiful mount.”

  It was brisk and misty outside—the antler vendors in the parking lot looked chilled and miserable—and the modest charms of Springfield, with its mall and the Oliver P. Parks Telephone Museum and Abraham Lincoln’s tomb, couldn’t compete with the strange and wondrous sights inside the hotel. The mere experience of waiting for the elevator—knowing that the doors would peel back to reveal maybe a man and a moose, or a bush pig, or a cougar—was much more exciting than the usual elevator wait in the usual Crowne Plaza hotel. The trade show was a sort of mad tea party of body parts and taxidermy supplies, things for pulling flesh off a carcass, for rinsing blood out of fur—a surreal carnality, but all conveyed with the usual trade show earnestness and hucksterism, with no irony and no acknowledgment that having buckets of bear noses for sale was anything out of the ordinary. “Come take a look at our beautiful synthetic fur! We’re the hair club for lions! If you happen to shoot a lion who is out of season or bald, we can provide you with a gorgeous replacement mane!” “Too many squirrels? Are they driving you nuts? Let us mount them for you!” “Divide and Conquer animal forms—an amazing advance in small-mammal mannequins, patent pending!”

  The big winner at the show turned out to be a tiny thing—a mount of two tree sparrows, submitted by a strapping German named Uwe Bauch, who had grown up in the former East Germany dreaming of competing in an American taxidermy show. The piece was precise and lovely, almost haunting, since the more you looked at it, the more certain you were that the birds would just stop building their nest, spread their wings, and fly away. Early one morning, before I left Springfield, I took a last walk around the competition hall. It was quiet and uncanny, with hundreds of mounts arranged on long tables throughout the room; the deer heads clustered together, each in a slightly different pose and angle, looked like a kind of animal Roman forum caught in mid-debate. A few of the mounts were a little gruesome—a deer with a mailbox impaled on an antler, another festooned with barbed wire, and one with an arrow stuck in its brisket—and one display, a coyote whose torso was split open to reveal a miniature scene of the destruction of the World Trade Center, complete with little firemen and rubble piles, was surpassingly weird. Otherwise, the room was biblically tranquil, the lion at last lying down with the Corsican lamb, the family of jackdaws in everlasting, unrequited pursuit of a big green beetle, and the stillborn Bengal tiger cub magically revived, its face in an eternal snarl, alive looking, although it had never lived.

  A Place Called Midland

  In Midland, Texas, it’s not the heat, it’s the lack of humidity. Almost total lack
of it, or so it seems, especially when you first arrive and step out of the chilled Midland International Airport and into the dry-roasted air. Midland has the kind of air that hits you like a brick. After a few minutes, your throat burns. After a few days, your skin feels powdery, your eyelids stick, your hair feels dusty and rough. The longer you spend there, the more you become a little bit like the land—you dry out and cake and crack. Not until I spent time in Midland did I fully appreciate the fact that the earth has an actual crust, like bread that has been slowly baked. I became convinced that if I stayed for a while, I would develop one, too.

  Midland is a city of ninety-nine thousand, in the middle of the region known as the Permian Basin, a platform of sediment and salt capped with a wedge of rock that covers roughly a hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles of West Texas. Most people, if they know about Midland at all, know that it is where Baby Jessica McClure was rescued from a well thirteen years ago and where George W. Bush grew up and later started his business career. (“I don’t know what percentage of me is Midland,” he once said in an interview, “but I would say people, if they want to understand me, need to understand Midland and the attitude of Midland.”) Both associations suggest a city that is innocent, idyllic, congenial—the kind of place where people fish fallen babies out of wells and young men make fortunes in old-fashioned ways. But Midland struck me as weirder than that—its simplicity deceiving, its character harder to uncover and know.