I flew from Indianapolis to DC this afternoon on the tiniest commercial jet I have ever encountered. I say tiniest COMMERCIAL jet because when I was still in the painful, pimpled, in between stage of adolescence, my mom and dad loaded my brother and me into a six seat Cessna double prop plane to go to New Harmony, Indiana. It was an oddly proximate destination for a family who easily could have fit in a car to drive the two hours to New Harmony from Indianapolis, but rarely has my family done anything the conventional way. So my younger brother and I, he sporting a rat tail and baggy pants with an elastic waste band, me in a garish, teal-striped sweater and glasses so heavy they slid down my nose regularly, loaded into a tin can with wings to discover the colony started by Johann Rapp as a Separatist community of German Lutherans and continued by Robert Owen as an enlightenment-by-way-of-work Utopian community. I never really did figure out how those two themes reconciled with each other. Work and Utopia, I mean.
My parents' reason for the high altitude journey to "the wonder of the west", as New Harmony was called after the economic achievement possibilities of a "working" Utopia became apparent, was that my mom, an art aficionado and conservator of oil paintings, had been commissioned by the city to restore the ancient, yellowed murals that spanned the two story front staircase of the town's museum.
My previous knowledge of the word museum, garnered mainly from the Indianapolis Museum of Art and my mom's books of paintings, was altogether inadequate to prepare me for the wonder, the pure carnival madness, that was this museum. It was grandma's attic, Barnum and Bailey's warehouse, and an ancient toy store all rolled into one Rube Goldberg domino effect of impending disaster. Touching anything would not only leave finger prints in the thick covering of dust, but would start a chain reaction resulting in the table at the far corner of the room collapsing with a shudder after all the objects between your clumsy hand and the doomed table had flown from their resting places to wherever they could cause the most possible destruction and embarrassment. It was not only the most cluttered and nightmarish place I had encountered, but also the most dreamlike and fascinating.
The one object that held the most awe and revulsion, amidst the antique toy trains, stacked leather bound volumes, bell jars covering crumbling bouquets, and gear laden apparatus (for which I could determine no reasonable function), was the taxidermied carcass of Siamese twin calves. It was facing the back wall of the upstairs room behind a glass case, sandwiched between an old rocking chair and a display of dolls, seeming, in my memory at least, to be following my movements beneath the heavy layer of dust on it's four ears, two noses, and single back. The small hand-written explanation for its presence stated only that the creature had been born in New Harmony and had survived for 20 months, much longer than such an abnormal animal was expected to remain alive. At that point it appeared that the town had grown so attached to the calf (or calves) that it was stuffed and placed here in this strange room full of forgotten objects so that out of town guests like me could balk at it's eight legs, two tails, and four eyes. It appeared almost as if the calves were merely stacked on top of each other from the side, but upon a full frontal inspection, it's face left no mistake that this creature had one spine, one torso, and presumably, in it's non-stuffed form, had contained only one set of internal organs.
During my mom's lunch breaks from restoring the museum's murals from her perch atop a rusty, yellow scaffold, we explored the rest of the small city, discovering a rose garden and plant nursery, some modern architecture on the Wabash river, and even a full sized labyrinth. Yet that strange, sad creature covered in dust has been inextricably tethered to my memory of New Harmony far more securely than anything else we found. I think my whole family makes the same association because every time New Harmony is mentioned one of us will blurt out, "Do you remember that calf in the museum? I wonder if it's still there."
I have never been back to New Harmony, and I presume that the calf will not be making an appearance in DC any time soon, so I doubt I will ever see it again. In my memory however, I still wonder if it's watching me through its dust-glazed marble eyes... all four of them.
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