Homes of the Stars

I was up in the “attic” of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History yesterday, on a balcony lined with boxes and metal lockers and drawers with those little metal slots designed to hold a label that says something in Latin, or something illegible in an elegant script, or something neatly typed on a yellowing index card and then, cut to fit. There were boxes of bones labeled “Reburial Only” and a carton that had “Porcupine, Old, Not Cute” scrawled on it in sharpie.

I peered through a vertical window into a lab lined with more cardboard boxes, when I leaned on the door it slid inward, just slightly, it was not locked.  In my head I walked in and let the door swing shut behind me, and I started slicing through the tape that kept the boxes sealed, I pulled out more taxidermied critters, battered foxes and tiny birds with iridescent feathers and slid open a drawer full of butterflies all pinned in place.

I was in the “attic” — in quotes, it’s not a real attic — with a group of travel writers from Gadling, a site I write for. We were all gathered in Washington DC for what was essentially a company meeting, but one with a lot of great activities appended to the minimal hours we spent in a stuffy conference room at the Huffington Post headquarters.

We had a guided tour of the Museum of Natural History with a staffer named Margery Gordon,  an enthusiastic woman who’d been at the institution longer than she cared to admit. I loved hearing her talk about her work, and watching her navigate the questions of this know it all group of writers. She pointed out the Pink Fairy Armadillo — it would fit in the  palm of your hand — and the model of Phoenix the Wright Whale, and a few other interesting oddities that you might slide past as you wander the overwhelming main galleries of the museum. She beautifully navigated the question about how the institution deals with creationists (not by punching them, apparently). And she mentioned, just in passing about how they had the dust from the collision of a star…

Or something like that, I don’t remember the words exactly. When she said stardust, I got covered in goosebumps and I lost focus. There, in one of the galleries upstairs and just down that way, was a piece of the sky. Space, in a glass display box, where I could stand and look at it. This woman, in a bright blue shirt and a string of beads and an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of, well, it seemed like the history of everything, works in a place where every day, she can go see the stuff the stars are made of.

I didn’t want her job, not really, but I got dizzy with the temporal shift of it all, that stardust is of an age I can’t begin to grasp, and then, just over there is a replica of tiny Lucy, that humanoid skeleton found in Ethiopia and the floor of time and history tilted sideways, I felt it all slide out from under me.

I’m in a fairly anonymous hotel room right now. This morning I watched the cars jockey their way on to the bridge that crosses the Potomac River. I can see the Washington Monument, and Congress where, for a decade now, maybe it’s longer, there’s been a pretty aggressive politicizing of science. And in the same city, a home to the stars.

I felt a little silly, a little cliche, standing there wrapped in my own trippy emotions. But there was nothing for it. Carl Sagan’s voice was in my head.

“Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. “