The Story of Ernie, the TaxiDermied Whatever

This is a story about art.  About the untamed wilderness that is southern Montana.  About Ernie, the taxi-dermied whatever.

We picked up Ernie while on a family vacation at Big Sky, a famous ski resort near Bozeman, Montana. In college, a friend of mine who was from Montana once told me that the state's most copious export was unwed mothers.  I can't testify to that, because mostly all I saw in Montana were elk.

There were a couple of other things I remember.  It was summer but the nights were still cool, ideal weather for swimming in the heated pool behind the hotel. At night, while perfecting my backstroke, I got a clear view of the uninterrupted night sky, wide and full of stars.  These textbook constellations remain in my mind's eye even now, matched only by the night sky over the hills of Colorado.  In Delhi, where "sky" is another byword for "smog", I haven't seen the stars even once.  To be fair, I haven't looked very hard.

My sister convinced me we should go for a trail ride through the woods, on the promise that she'd tell the stableboy to find me the oldest, most toothless horse in the state.  Our guide, a lovely pink-cheeked cowboy who won my everlasting affection by calling me "ma'am" - boosted me into the saddle with all the romantic aplomb of a man tossing produce into the back of a truck.  Settled atop the swaying back of a venerable nag, I saw very little of the view besides the ass of the horse in front of me.  Most of my attention stayed focused on the large distance between me and the ground, but every so often the guide would pull up at the top of a hill, gesture widely with one arm, and announce, "This here is quite a view."  And it really was quite a view: greenish-brown land, stretching straight into the setting sun.  Two hours later I dismounted and my knees almost gave way.  "Your knees hurt?" asked the cowboy, looking concerned. I nodded miserably.  "Happens to first-timers," he said, and then let out an ungentlemanly cackle before heading back into the barn.

We ate at a restaurant famed for its "game meats."  The menu, a scrap of paper stained with barbecue sauce, advertised the following: "elk medallions," "elk loaf" and "game burger."  The waiter, unbidden, delivered a lecture on the best way to bring down an elk with a shotgun, completing his explanation with some uncanny gestures.  My father, fastidious, cleared his throat.  "What do you have for vegetarians?" he asked.  "Say what now?" asked the waiter, clearly put out.  The rest of us opted for elk, but my dad got a brownish tower that turned out, on closer inspection, to be one giant mushroom.  To be honest, I don't think he ate anything besides mushrooms at any point on the trip. Maybe some broccoli.

And then we picked up Ernie.  We were driving down some untenanted highway when we saw a sign advertising a taxidermist's shop.  My sister - not normally one for dead animals - insisted that we go in, so we did.  Considering the vast numbers of unblinking fishy eyeballs staring down at us from the walls, the place was surprisingly cheery.  The ubiquitous elk made an appearance in the form of a head mounted over the cash register.  We were told that the elk head was the only piece that was not for sale; otherwise we could have whatever we wanted.  Which, in my sister's case, turned out to a two foot stuffed eagle-hawk-thing, which she insisted that we buy for a princely sum.  She clutched it joyously all the way back to the hotel, where she promptly named it Ernie and decided it would be the centerpiece for an upcoming series of paintings.

Some of these paintings - bright, unexpected, bizarre - would later go on to win national awards, which just goes to illustrate the fact that artists see the world in a way that the rest of us don't.  For many years, we agreed that this was probably the best family vacation we'd ever been on.  The United States, for all its political faults, can lay claim to one absolute and unyielding source of glory: the unmatched beauty of its national parks.  Nothing compares to the hills of Mt. Rainier covered in flowers and fog, the vast forests of Yellowstone or the red and orange splendor of Shenandoah in fall.

That these places are maintained with the near-sacred attention they deserve, and made available to the public at a nominal cost, is a pretty admirable achievement.