With all the trouble in the world, with Covid19 and civil unrest, I find that my mind wanders here and there without much purpose. Prodigious inspiration eludes me, replaced by melancholy, and it seems as if the world itself has spun beyond much that I want to consider as "sane." As I lay in bed, thinking on the various things that spiral through my skull on a nightly basis and keep me from sleep I recalled a childhood memory.
It's not uncommon to think of something better, of a better time a better place. The thought and memory was a specific one in fact, Los Angeles, 1988 or so. I was about 6 or 7 years old and my parents had signed me up for a science camp at Exhibition Park near the campus of USC in the museum of Science and Industry. I remember the class in bits and pieces. A big room, other children, a kindly tutor or teacher that had us paste cotton swabs to a paper or something to allude to clouds. I remember there were colorful dioramas, wooden shelves with glass fronts filled with rocks and beakers and who knows what else.
I remember meeting my parents on the steps of the museum, of wandering the rose garden, of enjoying the fountain (I was and still am obsessed with fountains). There was an IMAX or a theater there too which we enjoyed, but my greatest and most favorite thing to do, and that was visit the Museum of Natural Science and Industry.
The museum is deceptive in its design. On one side, the parking lot sign, its flat gray concrete, polished like glass. On the other its a rising dome, with red brick and stone structure that has always reminded me of the rise and porticoes of Monticello. There are many rooms in the museum, filled with fossils and recreations of natural places and creatures. There are gems, there are displays, but mine is always both a predictable and a unusual mind.
The unusual part of me always remembers the smell of the place. I don't know how to describe it, but the moment you enter the museum, there is a "cool" smell, like wet stone. It lingers and makes things feel clean and yet ancient somehow. I heard once its the smell of wet limestone, but I once smelled wet limestone and it wasn't quite the same. I don't know what it is, but its one of my favorite smells.
The predictable part of me is much easier to guess. The main entrance of the museum features a huge coffered ceiling, with marble floors, tall columns that gleam of rose, gold, and white. In my elder years, I saw this same effect in the Louvre to stunning effect. For me though, 6 year old me, under four feet tall, one thing and one thing alone held my gaze in that main hall. That, of course, were the two dinosaurs skeletons. They stand beside one another, a large T-rex bearing down on a Triceratops. These are, without a doubt, the most iconic dinosaurs for any 6 year old boy or girl to recognize, but for me, they were especially so.
Now, I know cynical readers will say, "They're not real" or "Those are just recreations" or even "That's not actually a T-rex, there's no complete T-rex skeletons." I don't care. I don't care to know at the moment, and I may never know to care unless I get the chance to go back. Even if I do, to me, they will always be as I described them. That is what they are, that is what they represent. They represent the KING of Dinosaurs, and the Horned Helm that stood against it.
The exhibit is glorious, and in the decades since I last visited, it has thankfully not changed. The T-rex still stands, bearing down on the Triceratops, huge jaws open as the plant eater lifts up a foot and brings its head around to defend itself. A part of me almost imagines a "Night at the Museum" scenario with these two kicking around a football or soccer ball between one another when the snot-nosed kids like I was aren't around to see it.
Yes, 6 year old me always stood before the titans in awe. They were giants, the exuded power, imagined thoughts of soggy jungles bathed in red light. Of swamps and huge flowering plants, enormous insects and ever-present heat. This primeval world was different from what I knew. These creatures, now bone, had flesh. They lived and breathed. I could imagine the texture of their skin, like leather meeting scale, or the hot puffs of their breath. I could hear the sounds of roar or bellow, and I could think about their lives.
Such things lived long before I was born, and existed long eons beyond the frail extent of our humanity. My father once told me that compared to the span of Dinosaurs humankind's history is a fingernail on an extended arm. So, as the world falls down, as we linger with masks on our faces and tear things apart. As civil discourse becomes civil unrest, I think back on this simpler time. I think about when things made sense. When I stood before giants.
(Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles: https://nhm.org/sites/default/files/styles/wysiwyg_full/public/2019-03/160225_5o1a9257_architecture_mp.jpg)