My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (3 page)

“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 such 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.

Being inconspicuous is Midland’s most conspicuous feature. It used to be called Midway, because it was halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso. When it was determined that there was already a Midway in Texas, it was renamed Midland, as if nothing else about it could inspire a name. A current city slogan is “Midland: In the Middle of Somewhere.” Previous slogans have included “Midland: Most Ambitious City Between the Oceans” and “Midland: Oil, Livestock, and Financial Center of the Permian Basin.” Recently, the more buoyant seventies slogan “The Sky’s the Limit” has been revived, since Bush has said that it embodies the Midland he knew.

Originally, Midland was a depot on the Texas & Pacific Railway. It outlived and outgrew the other flyspeck towns in the basin—now vanished cotton and cattle outposts like Boone and Slaughter and Toad Loop and Fighting Hollow and Bounce—by wooing oil companies to locate there after the first West Texas gusher, the Santa Rita, was tapped in 1923. In the late twenties, a hopeful businessman built an ornate office tower to enhance Midland’s prestige and named it the Petroleum Building. And in the thirties, houses were literally picked up and moved from the neighboring town of McCamey to Midland in order to attract employees of Humble Oil. By the mid-fifties, Midland was where the oil company engineers, geologists, leaseholders, and attorneys lived; its sister city, Odessa, was home to the tool pushers and roughnecks.

The only measure of time that really matters in Midland is oil time. Recent history is divided into two periods. There was the mid-seventies through the early eighties, when OPEC was controlling the market and crude went up to an unimaginably high thirty-five dollars a barrel and was expected to go as high as a hundred: a Rolls-Royce dealership opened in town; Midland Airpark had a waiting list for private hangars; and powerboats were beached in nearly every driveway. And then there was 1986, and the years after that, when OPEC flooded the market, the price per barrel dropped to nine dollars, and the FDIC became the biggest employer in the county.