The Thong Also Rises (17 page)

Taxidermy is now estimated to be a $570 million annual business, made up of small operators around the country who mount animals for museums, for decorators, and mostly for the 13 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; two trade magazines; a score of taxidermy schools; and 3,000 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:

The word in the grooming area was that a 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 area 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 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 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.”

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
.

The master of the road takes a new mistress.

M
OST 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.