NQD: Museum of Natural History

By Jack Carriere

NOTES:

• The pillars in the 2nd avenue station are purple. I don’t remember them being purple.
• the scream of the approaching f-train
• I forgot how humid the subway station can get.
• a transfer to the c train took us up one level to an emptier platform.
• the train conductor making announcements — VERY LOUD!
• blinding blue sky as we left the station, entering the UWS.
• a woman in an orange dress posed for a picture at the front steps of the museum.
• we’re being ushered into the museum. A museum employee is shouting every ten seconds. I feel like I’m in an airport.
• Discussing favourite animals and colonialism in the hall of African animals.
• We breezed past the observable universe, the galaxies, the planets, and the atoms.
• under the dim lights, the frozen wolves look like they could really be hunting us.
• staggered in awe through the hall of biodiversity.
• I’ve waited years to finally stand under this blue whale. I still can’t believe how gigantic this animal is.
• There are a lot of children at the museum today. Otherwise this feels like a mild day for the museum.
• We just finished the lower floor, now waiting for the elevator to hit the top floors. We’re already feeling museum fatigue.
• passing through the primates, I confide in Piper that I would trade my whole life to be a sifaka lemur.
• The Pacific Islands exhibit was colder than the rest of the museum.
• We made it all the way to the dinosaur skeletons before seeing a single selfie stick.
• To my dismay, the northwest indigenous art exhibit is closed for restoration. I wanted to show Piper the piece of BC, my home, that lives here.

QUOTES:

• “These OKCupid adds are really scary! Look at that one! What does that even mean?” — Piper Lewis. The ads are too zany.
• Chunky French bulldog on the subway. “Oh my gosh wait — that dog is being held like a little baby.” — Piper Lewis
• “ Please have your proof of vaccination and ID ready for inspection!” — museum employee
• “do you know your moon and rising signs?” — piper lewis, as we pass by scale models of stars.
• “No! No, shut up! That can’t be real. That has to be an exaggeration.” Piper upon seeing the Japanese spider crab.
• “Wouldn’t that be so scary if you saw that while swimming?…oh wait, it has a cute eye. I think I would be scared until I saw its eye.” Piper, observing the true-to-size giant squid.
• “it’s on the third floor and it’s on its way down,” says an exasperated mom to her daughter. She might be feeling the fatigue too.
• “I don’t want to think too hard about how the museum got a hold of this stuff” — Piper Lewis
• a kid fell down the stairs. Didn’t cry. Just got back up. “Let’s take steps one at a time,” says the child’s dad.

DETAILS:

• My friend Piper and I are outside my apartment in LES. We’re going to the natural history museum. Today is Saturday the 11th.
• A plaque reads “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it is perched — Paul Ehrlich”
• Since the vaccine rollout, the blue whale in the ocean animals exhibit has had a band-aid on its fin.
• We’re standing in front of an enormous sequoia stump that lived for a thousand years. I think about “The Overstory” by Richard Powers. We have been here for a while.
• Tiny scale models of a Polynesian community and a Sri-Lankan dance ceremony in the Pacific Islands exhibit.