a fiberglass fish diorama on a grasslot / a museum of taxidermy’d spoils

           

a fiberglass fish diorama on a grasslot  / a museum of taxidermy’d spoils

 

I Left Minneapolis on the 23^rd of May.  I headed northeast to a touristy hump in the watery North-woods of Hayward, Wisconsin.  I trampled a poor raccoon on my way in on highway B.  I camped with L. Primozic in a cabin on lake Calhoun, we stacked beercans on a fence stake with the permanent campers. I wore my lounging raccoon t-shirt to acknowledge the raccoon death.  I failed to find the meaty corpse as I re-drove my steps in the morning toward the largest fiberglass sculpture to date.

 

The giant muskie ( blank feet long) overwhelmed the grasslot as the focus of an outdoor diarama of mega fiberglass freshwater species—walleye, rainbow trout, coho salmon, rock bass, bluegill, and on.  Every sculpture, shrub, and pile of tires is dedicated to a person passed.   The freshwater museum holds 300+ taxidermy’d fish, native birds, photographic records of largest catches, old outboard motors, and a couple of yeti people. 

 

Each visitor had a camera, the inside of the mammoth fish smelled of powdery perfume and armpit stench.  I sat a bench, did some sketching and drank strong coffee in the sun.  Birds perched and pooped on the fiberglass tail fins and poked their beaks into the hewn wet grass of the sprinkler systems.  As I left, a few guys came in, “what is this place?”  “It’s a museum.”  “oh, we stopped because of the giant fish.” 

 

On the way down to Shelbyville, IN, the place of my youth, as I was driving I-39 south towards Bloomington, IL I saw some cop in the median with a pistil pulled and pointed toward the earth, he fired loudly just as I passed.  I was shocked and another deer was dead.