As a person who loves all things history - or science - related, I have always enjoyed visiting museums. And, wherever I have lived, I have always made it a point to locate the local museum or historical society and learn everything about the place I have chosen to call my home - regardless of how long or short a time I plan to spend living in that community.
That being said, having grown up in Washington, DC surrounded by a plethora of museums that seems to grow every year, I always found something new around the corner of every type of museum. Every time I return to Washington, I visit again, because exhibits are forever changing. Even art museums have their unique place in our culture.
Recently, I paid a visit to the local museum in the small town in which I currently reside to examine a small display regarding the history of the local railroad - the Manitou Springs Broadmoor Cog Railroad - affectionately referred to as the Cog around these parts. Despite the controversy it raises among local leaders, who would rather have it shuttered than to create traffic congestion throughout town, I found the history fascinating and realized that it does, indeed, deserve a place in the local museum, just as does the history of the numerous springs and the healing spas that arose here during the pandemic known as tuberculosis, similar in many ways to the Covid-19 pandemic under which we currently reside and that has altered our world and changed our place in the universe forever. Or, at least in our generation.
I have visited numerous museums built to honor various incidents, such as 9/11, the Holocaust, the landing of the pilgrims and the rise of seafaring cultures along the Massachusetts shore. It is also where one museum, in particular, comes to mind from a visit several years ago. In Salem, there is a seaport museum that has an exhibit dedicated to that awesome, fearsome, yet awe-inspiring creature of the deep - the whale. Star of a famous novel and a Star Trek movie, whales are the largest mammal on the planet.
But, despite my interest in history, I visit museums to feel fear.
I have a clear memory of myself as a child in Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. I am following behind my parents and siblings as we walk down a narrow hallway. Bored and half asleep, I am tracing my fingers absentmindedly along the wall when - suddenly - I become aware that my hand is not touching plaster, but rather a massive open eye. As I stand there, frozen, struggling to comprehend that what I had thought was a wall was, in fact, a giant replica of a sperm whale, my tiny mind first knows terror. I have been awestruck and a little afraid of whales ever since.
Through the years, my reactions to museums have mellowed and, to the best of my recollection, I have not cried in one since I was 10 (robot dinosaurs, in case you were curious). Museums rarely take me to the threshold of true fear anymore, but I continue to visit them, content to revel in fear’s sister emotions: anxiety, uncertainty, and awe.
Once at Fort Knox in Bucksport, Maine, I lingered in the catacomb-like tunnels too close to sunset and was left with only the fading blades of sunlight filtering through the turret windows to guide me out of the exhibit. As the steps in front of me grew harder to see, I panicked for a moment and, suddenly, I was a child again: lost in the woods for the very first time.
In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I explored USS Albacore entirely by myself, without anyone to make sure I did not touch any of the dials or gauges. Alone in a submarine, I was filled with the sense that I was somewhere I ought not to be, and I crept through the empty vessel with the same knot in my stomach and grin on my face that I had when I would sneak into my parents’ closet.
Frequently, I will find myself in a history museum, staring at some forgotten Egyptian prince marked with the date 2,000 B.C. Each time I ponder how this statue came to be as many years before Christ as I came after him; each time I am numbed by my own insignificance.
I do not do these things out of masochism or nostalgia. I do not visit the past to bury myself in it. Rather, I do it to keep my life moving forward.
Today, in the aftermath of shutdowns and quarantines, it is easy to drift along the path of least resistance. Every hotel room, airport terminal, and department store has been scientifically designed to make us feel entirely at home. Museums are the opposite of this. In a black-and-white world, they are a bouquet of color. They are the statistical outliers to society’s homogenized curve. They are buildings dedicated to taking you out of your element - castles with winding, unfamiliar floor plans, full of artistic wonders, deteriorating taxidermy, and the treasures of civilizations. They exist to bring you face-to-face with the unknown in a world where there is so little of that left.
A good museum is like the first day of school. It should make you nervous. It should confront you with things you have never seen and ideas with which you have never wrestled. It should force you to blaze new trails through the virgin gray matter of your brain.
And, so, I visit museums. I do it with a prayer that I will find myself alone in a room with something that makes my pulse quicken. I do it with the hope that I will find something that will terrify me as completely as that ominous, probing eye.
Because, looking back on it today, I realize that it was not the whale itself that I feared, but the fact that it was so close and I was so blind to it. In that moment my presumptions disappeared, and I could not escape the fact that I am a tiny thing and the world around me is so terribly, beautifully large.
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