A year out of college, determined to find a use for my B.A. in History, I took myself to the U.S. Government Services Administration and made out a job application for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
In my first lesson in government efficiency, the GSA came through with a job for me... in the Botany Department of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
Well, I needed to get my foot in a Smithsonian door, didn't I? And wasn't a History major currently painting my parents' house?
I took the job and decided to view my secretarial position as a chance to observe "Science at Work."
My first obvservation: The Natural History Museum is a self-contained eco-system - a large pond, with departments representing differing habitats, and its employees representing the various species that wade through its murky depths.
Second observation: Scientists were similar to one another - yet unlike any other species of man. Clearly they could not have survived outside the pond.
The Botany Department contained Dr. Chatsworth, Dr. Bruin, and Dr. Smiley (whose names have been changed for their own good), and they themselves required the rarified atmosphere of tropical frogs. Dr. Bruin, for example, religiously avoided conversation with human beings. Dr. Smiley was simply never there.
I thanked heaven for Dr. Chatsworth. He spoke English. Real English: pipe-in-mouth, shirt-tail-hanging, Glory-Days-at-Eton English. He could make anything sound intelligent:
"Xerox is to be capitalized, dear. Not a verb but a proper name, like that of Kleenex. Yes. I'm afraid both have been horribly misused." He was charming. The rest were quite unusual but with good reason: The Botany Department of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History contained the specialists' specialists.
"Doctor Chatsworth?"
"Yes, dear."
"Why is Dr. Bruin listed on this program as a fern expert? Isn't he working on daisies?" (I'd typed up forty species-specific daisy descriptions my first two weeks: 'stamen: 1.3 cubic centipods from the quadrant of fandango.' Dr. Bruin absolutely l-o-o-o-ved daisies).
"Oh, yes, my dear, Dr. Bruin was a fern specialist."
"He changed his subject of interest recently then?"
"Uh, no," he said, thoughtfully. "I believe it's been about fifteen years."
Note to self: Dr. Bruin has failed to inform the Museum of a change in focus, and I will not be the idiot who informs them.
Dr. Bruin, of fern and daisy fame, worked nights only. He would bustle in around 4 pm, wearing dark blue pants and a bluish-white short sleeved shirt (whether he owned more than one of either of these items, I could not say). Assiduously avoiding eye contact as he handed me a sheaf of hand-written daisy descriptives, he would disappear into his office to contemplate his fandangos.
This being the days before government flex time, I asked his young assistant, Cubbie Hole, how Dr. Bruin was able to avoid having to work normal government hours. "Well, uh, the fact is, Dr. Bruin... doesn't really like people."
"Ah," I said, thinking to myself this would explain why Dr.Bruin's own personal assistant worked days. I laughed, "Gee, I hope you don't share his opinion!"
He laughed nervously. "People are all right... I guess."
This perspective helped me understand why scientists were always thrilled to be going "to the field," miserable upon returning from "the field," and referred to "dying in the field" with a jealous reverence.
Dr. Smiley, the Curator Who Was Never There, turned out to be a Marine Botanist "in the field" on a coral reef in Belize. Considering the level of danger inherent to his work, he could have died "in the field" any day, so this man was completely happy. Whenever I received a crackling phone call from Belize, I heard the joy in his voice.
What curators collect on visits to "the field" are stored in the buildings and warehouses of the Smithsonian Institution. I was on a tour of the building once, and we came into an upper floor room - one room away from the dome of the Natural History Museum. Straddling this room were shelf upon shelf of Native American clay pots - large, low, open clay bowls decorated with white and black designs. We walked past fifty of them, then fifty more. Two hundred. Five hundred.
The guide paused, spread wide his arms, and gently intoned, "These pots represent the body of work of Dr. Arrowhead." Apparently, early in Dr. Arrowhead's lengthy curatorial service, he'd taken an "interest" in pots of a particular Native American tribe
Then we walked into the dome room. The shelves, which circled the dome all the way to the top, were filled with... more pots.
At the time, I was working on a Graduate Degree in Collections Management, so I bravely asked, "Aren't curators supposed to pick representative samples?"
"Oh, they encourage that sort of thing nowadays, but he collected these many years ago."
"Can't the Museum get rid of some of them?"
He patiently explained that de-accessioning an item from the bowels of the Smithsonian requires roughly the same effort as passing a bill through Congress. Besides, when people give things to the Smithsonian, they expect the Smithsonian to keep them, for goodness' sake.
I learned so much about the pond in those first three months. My days were filled with daisy nomenclature, typing up Dr. Chatsworth's speeches ("Fellow colleagues, the preponderance of my research involving the Bagamot trees of the Xenu Provence of Tirania is of vast importance to the quality of life experienced by the Nimnixit Fruit Fly of that region..."), and the lunch-hour lectures at Baird Auditorium.
One day I was sent down the hall with a message for another Scientist. I opened the department door and happened upon a woman ina white lab coat. She was at her desk and appeared to be staring hard at a bright red tulip. One vivid tulip, lying on a clean white sheet. She was staring. I was staring. Then her hand moved ever so slightly and I saw she was holding a pencil.
"Hello?"
"Hello," she said, without turning.
"I'm here to give a message to..."
"Just leave it on the desk behind me."
"Okey-dokey. Pardon me, but are you... are you drawing that? I'm sorry. Am I bothering you?"
"Yes and no." She put down her pencil and looked up at me, but I was looking at the art work that lay under her hand.
Magic.
The color, the shading, the texture, the depth of the flower was being captured in a rendering worthy of Albrecht Durer &emdash; detailed to the hairs on the stem... The hairs on the stem? I never would have noticed them but for her exact representation.
"You... you do the artwork on the specimens here?"
She nodded. "Whenever they call."
"How did you wind up doing this?"
She tipped her head and grinned. "I started in anatomy. You know, art for medicine's sake?"
"You mean body parts?"
"Yeah, but I got bored."
"Bored with body parts?"
"Sure. No change, well... except for disease. But every specimen brought in here is different, and, really, each is beautiful in its own way."
"That is certainly some of the most beautiful art I've ever seen." And then, just when I was thinking how pitifully sad it was that only a small cadre of graduate students and eccentric scientists were going to be able to enjoy her work, she smiled. It was a smile both knowing and beatific, and in it she said, Yes, I know. And if you were the luckiest, most talented creature in the world, you might be allowed this job, but I have it. It's all mine. And she turned back to her work.
I realized I was the one to be pitied. The grad work in Collections Management wasn't turning out well - truth was I'd rather paint houses. I hadn't found my passion yet. Not found, not followed - yet. But she had. Oh, she had.
I went back to my desk, awed by what I'd seen, awed by what I'd heard. My Lilly pond suddenly felt way too small.
When Dr. Chatsworth came in that afternoon, I asked, "Any good talks coming up at Baird?"
His eyes lit from within. "Yes! Frogs -What is Seen and Heard! Wonderful stuff!"
"Frogs, eh?"
"Yes! What is Seen and Heard! Bound to be terrific!"
A few days later, I got the letter from the staffing office. The job I wanted at the Office of Public and Academic Programs at The National Museum of American History had come through. Yippee!
And so I moved to the next pond over.
But, after all these years, I still remember a frog is able to catch its prey just by listening: the sounds his supper makes create a vibration in both "ear" lobes. He turns his head until the vibrations are perfectly even, lines his body up with his head, determines the distance by the level of the vibration, and leaps - straight on target. Intuitive, single-minded in purpose - the whole body attuned to an inner need.
The frog leaps into a space both known and unknown, with the purest form of frog fulfillment its reward.
And so it is that a scientist's life-long work can wind up as 3,500 ugly-as-squat clay bowls or as a First-of-its-Kind Living Coral Reef brought up from Belize, South America. And the Smithsonian is a world in which bureaucracy tries to make room for science and, for the most part, succeeds with an amazingly complex eco-system whose rare and unusual species fulfill their inner needs with every leap into the unknown.
If you don't believe me, ask the frogs.
