Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (5 page)

“Well,” Wilson replied coolly that first afternoon, unfazed, from behind his wooden desk (obviously he gets asked this sort of question all the time). “As you can see, we're a small natural history museum with an emphasis on curiosities and technological innovation.” He paused, and then went on: “We're definitely interested in presenting phenomena that other natural history museums seem unwilling to present.” He could apparently sense that I was still a bit bewildered. “The name lends a sense of what's inside but doesn't refer to a specific geologic time,” he offered, helpfully. He then reached into his drawer and pulled out a pamphlet. “Here, this might be useful.”

The image on the pamphlet's cover was of the same archaic head as on the banner outside. “
THE
MUSEUM
OF
JURASSIC
TECHNOLOGY
—
AND
YOU
,” the headline around
the head announced portentously. Inside, the pamphlet opened with a General Statement:

There immediately followed a small map, captioned “JURASSIC,” which in every other respect looked exactly like a map of what the rest of us might refer to as Egypt. An arrow identified what in any other rendition would get called the Nile River Delta as “Lower Jurassic.”

The text (which turned out to be the transcript of a visitor-activated slide show that ordinarily runs, accompanied by that same echt-institutional voice, in a small alcove over to the side of the entry—it just happened to be out of order that afternoon) went on to offer a treatise on museums in general:

And so forth. At times stupefyingly specific, at other times maddeningly vague, the text went on to trace the museological impulse through its dark oblivion in the Middle Ages on into its subsequent regeneration during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when

Highlighting the singular collections of John James Swammerdam, Dr. Matthew Maty, Ole Worm (and his “Museum Wormianum”), and Elias Ashmole, the pamphlet went on to note how in the early days such treasure troves were the exclusive preserve of various social elites. For this reason, the pamphlet seemed to hold the late-eighteenth-century American painter Charles Willson Peale in particularly high esteem. His remarkable emporium in Philadelphia

“Rational amusement,” the pamphlet explained, was the Peale Museum's intent, but also, by a curious irony, its undoing:

The Museum of Jurassic Technology itself, the pamphlet went on to explain, traces its origins to “this period when many of the important collections of today were beginning to take shape.” In fact, many of the exhibits in the MJT, according to the pamphlet, were originally part of smaller and less well-known collections, such as the Devonian and Eocene. In the slide-show version, inspirational music of a certain generic, oleaginous consistency would now swell up as the narrative built toward its close:

All of which helped, and didn't.

“Um,” I tried again, after having finished the pamphlet, “but I mean, how specifically did this museum get started?”

“You mean
this
museum?” Wilson begged clarification.

Well, yeah.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, the seed material, I guess you could call it, for the current collection—the Flemish moths, for instance, the ringnot sloth—that exhibit's not up right now—a few of the others—came down to us through the collection of curiosities
originally gathered together by the Thums—that's Owen Thum and his son, Owen Thum the Younger, who were botanists, or I guess really just gardeners in southwestern Nebraska, in South Platte. In some ways their collection was like those of the old European nobility, only on a kind of homespun Midwestern scale.”

Owen Thum, Owen Thum the Younger, and Hester Boxbutte Thum

When was this?

“Oh, in the first half of this century—say, the twenties for the father, and on into the fifties with Owen the Younger. But then a man named Gerard Billius essentially stole the material. It's a complicated story, but Billius was a man with money, also from Nebraska—in fact I think also from South Platte. I'm not positive, I could look it up. Anyway, he saw some value in the collection and he befriended Owen the Younger—who, let's face it, was a kind of bumpkin, not very sophisticated—and he got Owen the Younger to write a deed of gift to him, Billius, into his will. Billius was a lawyer. As the years passed, Owen the Younger and his wife, Hester, began to sense Billius's true nature and they tried to retract the deed but it had been written in such a way as to be unrevocable. After Owen the Younger's death, his wife, Hester, got into a terrible confrontation with Billius—she was trying to deed the collection over to the Nebraska Historical Society instead—and it all ended up with her drowned in her backyard pool under highly suspicious circumstances.”

When did he say this was?

“Oh, this would have been in the late fifties. Anyway, so the collection went to Billius. Only, he quickly lost interest in it—I guess it turned out not to have the importance,
or anyway the financial potential, he first saw in it. So then—well, I get a little hazy here, I've never been quite sure how it got from Billius to Mary Rose Cannon, or anyway to her family. I think maybe she was his granddaughter or something—she's from Nebraska too, or maybe Texas. Anyway, though, she was a person whom we'd known indirectly for some time, and then about ten years ago she sort of gave the material over to us. A nice woman, although we've kind of lost touch. But anyway, that was the start.”

It was also, as I would subsequently come to recognize, a quintessentially Wilsonian narrative: ornate, almost profuse, in some of its details, but then suddenly fogging over, particularly as one gets closer to the present. Such stories usually both perform and require a kind of leap.

What about the stink ants?

“Well, those we first heard about, let me see, I think it was on a PBS special actually, and we immediately realized we wanted to include a specimen in our collection. However, tracking one down proved incredibly difficult. None of the usual outlets had ever heard of them or could lay their hands on one. Finally we tried the Carolina Biological Supply Company in Portland, Oregon.”

Carolina Biological Supply … 
in Portland, Oregon?

“Yeah,” Wilson assured me. “And that's where we ran into Richard Whitten.” He thereupon launched into another byzantine saga, this one about a certain phenomenally gifted bug amateur who had his own spectacular collections of beetles and butterflies but had all kinds of other qualities as well (he was a great lover of song and
singing and had had a lifelong ambition to sing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and one day just piled his family into a van and headed to Salt Lake City, where he rented a tux and then secretly insinuated himself into the choir during one of their concerts—all kinds of other stories), and he was the only one anywhere who proved capable of laying his hands on any stink ant samples, and he kept the museum regularly supplied.

And how, for instance (by now I'd started choosing my words carefully) had Geoffrey Sonnabend and Madalena Delani, um, entered his life?

“Well, I first came upon Sonnabend when we were trying to expand an exhibit we used to have on memory. Those three empty portholes in the back of the museum—I don't know if you noticed them. Well, they used to contain an exhibit contrasting the memory theories of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. I myself tend to be pretty forgetful, so memory's always been an interest of mine. For instance, Plato suggests somewhere that memory is like an aviary inside your head, with all these birds flying around, such that you might reach in for a ringdove and accidentally pull out a turtledove instead. And we represented that through a wax hand holding a stuffed bird. Anyway, we were planning to expand that exhibit with a fourth porthole, evoking the work of Hermann
Ebbinghaus, who was a great turn-of-the-century German researcher—in fact
revitalized
the whole field. He'd generate thousands of nonsense syllables, have people memorize series of them, and then chart the decay in their retention of the series, ending up with this kind of storehouse model. Fascinating work.

The Platonic conception of memory

“So, anyway, I was at the University Research Library over at UCLA one day, leafing through their Ebbinghaus books, when I just happened to come upon Sonnabend's three-volume
Obliscence
the next call letter over. It seemed like nobody had looked into those books in ages, they hadn't been checked out in years, but I started reading—Sonnabend himself tells the story about the theory's genesis, about Madalena Delani and Iguazú Falls in the preface—and I was completely bowled over. In part, I suppose, it was the romance of this theory that seemed to foretell its own oblivion. And then, just a few days later, I happened to be listening to Jim Svejda's ‘Record Shelf program on KUSC, the local classical-music station, and he was doing a whole hour show devoted exclusively to Madalena Delani—that, for instance, is how I first found out about how she died. It was an incredible coincidence—in fact, everything associated with the story is like a tissue of improbable coincidences—how they almost met, how they didn't, what either of them were doing there at the Falls in the first place. And those kinds of coincidences are also a special interest of ours here at the museum. We contacted the Chicago Historical Society and a fellow there named Rusty Lewis helped us enormously, particularly with the Gunther connection. The whole thing just grew and grew.”