Journal of a Sabbatical

August 29, 2000

museum

Today's Reading: Leap by Terry Tempest Williams, The Naturalist in La Plata by W.H. Hudson

Today's Starting Pitcher: Pedro Martinez
Pedro's Strikeouts: 13

This is the next to last week of the Shackleton exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, and I've been wanting to see it since it opened in June. I'm glad I got it together to see it.

The whole thing is well curated. The Frank Hurley photographs are displayed in logical groupings: dogs, ice, the ship, South Georgia, etc. Lots of supporting material about ice, how pressure ridges form, how a ship could be crushed by ice, what the weather was like, and so on added to the impact of the photos.

My favorite part was a separate room with a full size replica of the James M. Caird, the lifeboat that Shackleton and his small party sailed from Elephant Island to South Georgia to get help, surrounded by three screens showing pitching and rolling waves and the position of the moon or the sun, with two sextants set up for visitors to try to take sightings and calculate the Caird's position. Little kids and big kids and oldies and everybody were developing a whole new appreciation for life before high-tech GPS navigation systems. Looking at those waves in the Scotia Sea, having experienced them myself, and looking at the size of the James M. Caird I came away even more impressed with exactly how amazing an accomplishment getting from Elephant Island to South Georgia really was.

In search of the rest room, I wandered through the maritime art and history collection, which was interesting enough for me to plan to tour it after I found the rest room. Lots of stuff on whaling, including the jawbone of a sperm whale with all the teeth intact. Ship models, not just of schooners and tall ships but of humble things like gundalows took up part of a gallery. In fact there are models of both the Merrimack River gundalow and the Piscataqua River gundalow for comparison. Nothing like the full size replica at Strawberry Banke, but handy for readers of the works of East Coast 18th & 19th century authors who can't find gundalow in the dictionary.

I wandered into a room full of the fauna of Essex County. I was a bit startled when I saw an Eastern Coyote specimen since the advent of the Eastern Coyote is recent and well after the "kill 'em, stuff 'em, and put 'em in glass cases" approach to natural history. Turns out it was hit by a car on I495 in Haverhill. I love it. Roadkill as museum specimen. I looked at every bird. They look so small when they're dead and stuffed.

I somehow had the idea that the bones of the great auk that was dug up on Plum Island in 1869 would be in this museum. They're not. Must track down that great auk.

Then it was off to the gift shop in search of a postcard reproduction of Hurley's panorama of South Georgia. Found it, also some matted prints of same, but settled for the postcard. Continuing the astounding run of luck I've had lately in unlikely gift shops, I spotted a Dover reprint of W.H. Hudson's The Naturalist in La Plata on a shelf with books mostly about the natural history of Essex County. How lucky can I get?

I put the radio on to listen to the ball game while I wrote this journal entry and got sucked away from the journal and toward the radio the longer Pedro went without giving up a hit. By the seventh inning I'd shut the computer down and devoted every ounce of my attention to the game. Despite taking a couple of punches from the batter he plunked in the first inning (the first batter), a couple of bench clearing brawls, and lots of delays for various Devil Rays ejections, he took the no-hitter into the 9th. He gave up a single to former Red Sox John Flaherty and that was it. Pedro rocks! Pedro dominates! He's just the best. End of story.