Nature Collection

I was down in my parents' basement during my recent trip back home to Minnesota, when I noticed something I hadn't seen there before.



"Is that one of your sculptures?" I asked my sister Madeline as she lugged boxes downstairs. She'd just finished driving her stuff back from Detroit to store at my parents' house while she sets up camp in Berlin.



"Naw," she answered, "I think that's Dad's nature collection."



It turns out, what I thought was a sculpture was a nest in a branch. I looked around some more and noticed that the whole cupboard beside it was full of artifacts. Bones, nests, birds, skulls, horns. When did my Dad start his own Natural History Museum in the basement? I brought him down and requested a guided tour.







My dad is a big time hiker and walker. And whether you're hiking in the Wind River Mountains or just walking around Half Moon Lake with him, you're bound to go off-trail at some point. He's got that surgeon's eye for detail, and can spot something in the brush that you or I might never have noticed. "Look over there," he'll say, "Come here for a second. I think I see something." Off he'll go, crunching through the sticks, pushing aside branches. I remember as a child the time he showed us a big puffy white mushroom that, he guaranteed, would explode at the slightest touch and was poisonous (Mom back on the trail, wincing).

He can spot live animals too, especially birds. "Be quiet. See that bird there?" "Where?" "Right there, on the stick that rises straight up next to the one that crosses it." "I don't see it." And then he'd bend down and put his face right next to mine, like his eyes were my eyes, and point right to it. "Oh!" That magic moment when something becomes visible that just a second ago wasn't.



He showed me each of the objects, told me where he'd found them while out hiking. Each one he had brought home, preserved, organized, and stored. The jaw of a small animal. Multiple skulls. A little dead bird. Feathers. Five kinds of nests. And the liscense plates. Good ol' Minnesota plates, nice and battered.