Count me among those who never expected to find a whale
hidden at the heart of Iowa City. The ocean is 1113 miles away due east, and
yet farther to the west. But, here I am and here is the whale. The massive
skeleton of a whale, at least, hanging above my head.
Sitting and typing on this wooden bench amongst the dozens
of other skeletal specimens that inhabit one end of Mammal Hall, I look up
through its cavernous ribcage and into the skull, an arching maxilla with a jaw
like two tusks, altogether about the size and shape of a helicopter cockpit. It
is a 42-foot long, 4,400 pound, century-old right whale, and I am peering into
its skeleton, counting the fifty vertebrae that span its steel rod spine and
marveling at its many-knuckled hands not so different from my own.
It is a lady whale, and her name is Mullet Pond.
Mullet Pond, after the coastal landmark whereupon North
Carolina whalers proudly beached the leviathan on Valentine’s Day, 1898.
Instructor and former museum employee Will Thomson documents
the tale, how it took over forty men of the Red Oar Crew to harpoon her and
bring her ashore, and how they rendered her there on the beach. She “yielded
over 750 pounds of baleen and over thirty barrels of whale oil.” An East Coast taxidermist would travel 150
miles to bargain for the bones—flesh-stripped bones with an aroma like a “factory
that had been turned into a home for unexpurgated skunks”—and then he would
send them inland by train, disguised as fertilizer material for cheaper
freight, to museum father Charles Nutting, professor of zoology at the State
University of Iowa. But this was only the beginning. For 12 years the skeleton
of Mullet Pond would be stowed away in a campus attic, unassembled, boxed in
crates, and largely forgotten, awaiting the construction of Macbride Hall and
the industrious knack of exhibit designer Homer Dill, who would order the
hundred-odd pieces and mount them to the ceiling of the gallery above my wooden
bench.*
Barred and bolted straight into the rafters, it is hard to think
that Mullet Pond could have been anything less than eternal fixture of Macbride
Hall, perhaps even the skeleton of the building itself, just missed by the
plaster and paint. But she is not. She was brought to this building. She has an
origin, a story that precedes her arrival here in landlocked Iowa.
And this I find fascinating—not just the long narrative of
the whale, but more so the fact that she has one to begin with. Mullet Pond was
once a skeleton in a body. She was a living, swimming, geyser-breathing animal.
Even in a gallery full of exhibits designed to display taxidermy within its
natural scene, it is too easy for one to forget that these specimens are more
than sculpture behind glass. Though they are extracted from nature, the same
flesh once blushed with blood. They must not be utterly disjoined from the
world just because they are now on display to it. Notice the hole in rib of the
moose—it is the mark of a bullet. See the form of a young human being—it once
had a name, a face, a mind. None of the exhibits have been exhibits forever.
They are the time-frozen vestiges of real stories.
In the stories, an entire museum is given a new sense of
life.
-Nathan Kooker, MNH Volunteer
*
Thomson, Will.
"A Whale for Iowa." Palimpsest 1987: 50-59.
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