A Love Letter to the Milwaukee Public Museum

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Photo via Milwaukee Public Museum - mpm.org

Milwaukee Public Museum Hell Creek Exhibit

I have a tattoo of the Milwaukee Public Museum, my Hinge announces. It’s the most popular part of my dating app profile. Strangers ask if it’s the T-rex, the butterflies, the snake button. Many ask me if I have the building. This used to confuse me, until I realized they thought I meant the Art Museum. 

I don’t have the building, though I’d argue the unremarkable squareness of the outside is part of its charm. I don’t have the T-rex, though it looms large in the memory of my eight-year-old self, the loud booms of footsteps and roars embedded in my brain from years of creeping around the corner, hoping it’d be a little less scary this visit, hoping I was a little braver this time around. 

“I have a little square display case”, I type over and over again. “It’s filled with the Wisconsin State fossil, a conch shell, a butterfly, and the rattlesnake.” Matches ask if I’ll take them, if we can go there on our first date. I always say no. I need to vet them first. It’s not enough for them to guess correctly that the Wisconsin state fossil is a trilobite, or for them to tell me they were a dinosaur kid. You don’t take a first date to your temple. You don’t ask a stranger what they do for fun while standing in front of the place that made you. 

Paleo Kid? 

The Milwaukee Public Museum made me. I wasn’t a dinosaur kid, I was a paleontologist kid. My mom has a drawing of adult Kate done by second grade Kate saved in a box in her basement. In it, I’m holding a trowel, standing next to a fossil sticking out of the ground. Underneath, second grade Kate scrawled that I was going to be a paleontologist who wore earrings and a dress when I grew up. 

I wanted (and still want) nothing more than to follow in the footsteps of my hero, my grandfather, Paul Gordon Hayes. He was (and still is) a gentle, funny, brilliant man. His collection of collections—fossils, sorted by geologic time; shells of all shapes and sizes; every edition of National Geographic printed before 2004—loomed large in my childhood. His only flaw - he’s not a paleontologist. 

From 1962 to 1995, Paul was the environmental reporter for the Milwaukee Journal. He wrote about energy, about acid rain, about population growth. And when the Museum held dinosaur digs or sent a team down to Costa Rica to build the rainforest exhibit, he went too. If you pass through geologic time, brave your way past the t-rex, turn the corner around the ice sheet and take a left once you enter the rainforest, you’ll find a small, mounted picture of the team of scientists and museum staff down in Tirimbina, the reserve where they collected the samples for the exhibit. Paul is the one with his knee up on the truck, hat and sunglasses, looking cooler than I’ve ever looked in my entire life. 

Hundreds of Visits 

My grandmother Philia, though not pictured, was there too—she has stories of picking ticks off a deer carcass, dropping hundreds of them into a glass jar with tweezers. She and my grandfather took my sister and I to the museum hundreds of times when we were little. We knew all the secrets—the rattlesnake button, the Schlitz can at the bottom of the ocean floor, the wooden ball in the mouth of the Chinese lions. We were there for Halloween, trick or treating in the streets of old Milwaukee. We were there for Christmas, peeking into the Polish and Greek windows in the European village to look for the dishes we’d eat at our own tables. 

Eventually, inevitably, I grew up. I moved a full 70 miles away to Madison, where I found myself seated in an auditorium in the Geoscience building, listening to a lecture on evolution. Three degrees and eight piercings later, I’m a climate change ecologist, studying how ecosystems change as the planet warms. Sometimes I even wear dresses. 

All the Floors 

Recently, during the Museum’s Milwaukee Days, I took a date. We showed up late in the afternoon, leaving only a few hours to take in all four floors. I tugged him by the hand, moving quickly to see as much as we could. I slowed down in front of the muskrats, placed unremarkably next to the bathrooms and the bubbler. In college, I took a history class with famed environmental historian Bill Cronin. I learned about Carl Akeley and his muskrats when I wrote my term paper about the Museum.  

If you’ve ever slowed down to take in the Victorian dioramas that greet you at the top of the stairs, you’ve learned the subtle point and power of Akeley’s approach. Before Akeley, museums often displayed their collections in those beautiful but sterile wooden and glass cases. Akeley is given the credit for placing animals in front of a painstakingly painted curved backdrop, staging them in motion, in their environment. We paused for a long time in front of the muskrats and their dam, taking in the skill of the painting and its scale, details like the mollusk hidden in the dam, the dynamism of each animal in movement. 

I saw with fresh eyes how much depth and care goes into each display. Little details everywhere: the t-rex depicted in the 30-day calendar of earth’s history is the same you’ll encounter for yourself a few steps away. The scientist stuck disappointedly in his office, forever gazing at the rainforest outside his window, has a mug I’d like to imagine was stolen off someone’s real desk and a copy of that week’s Milwaukee Journal. You look down from the prehistoric halls of Mayan and Aztec art to peer at the modern Columbian market below. Everywhere you look, the museum showing you, not telling you, that history is alive and all around us. That, like the muskrats, we humans are best understood in our environments. Walking through the museum, discovering its secrets, makes you feel smart, feel curious, feel brave. 

Standing for Science 

I need that bravery right now. I’ve spent the last decade developing a career in science—my research looks for ways to keep us away from the tipping point of widespread permafrost thaw. It’s federally funded. The grants that pay my salary will likely be under review for whether they contribute to the “woke” agenda or help advance values like diversity, equity or inclusion. 

I know the museum will change. It’s a remarkable privilege that it has remained unchanged for so long, a snapshot of so many childhoods. I’m sure the new building will be beautiful on the outside, that the snake button will find a new home, that generations of kids will have the chance for generations of butterflies to land on their noses. The website for the new building promises they’ll provide the kind of Easter Eggs Museum fans love to discover. They assure us, this will not be a museum full of screens. 

I will be mourning the Museum I know and love. I’m choosing to face the change with the same bravery that keeps me in science and swiping on dating apps—I’m choosing to hope for the best. I have to believe that the people behind the new Museum will do what they can to make you feel smart, feel curious, feel brave. We need that bravery now more than ever.