Preservation and Decay

My grandfather’s workshop in Palatka smell of borax, dry feathers, and the damp mold of the St. Johns River. He was a professional taxidermist who specialized in the large wading birds that populated the local marshes, turning dead herons into stiff monuments of flight. As a child, I spent my humid afternoons sitting on a cedar box, watching him insert black glass eyes into the socket of a limp egret. The process was slow and methodical, requiring a steady hand and a tolerance for the biological reality of decay. He spoke very little, except to warn me that the dampness of Florida would eventually destroy anything that was not properly cured.

The river itself was a constant presence, a dark tea-colored ribbon of water that regularly rose to threaten the foundation of our workshop. Each September, the tropical rains would turn our gravel driveway into a shallow swamp, forcing us to move his stuffed creations to the high shelves. I remember the eerie sight of twenty herons, their long necks frozen in postures of hunting, staring down at us from the rafters while the brown water seeped under the door. It was an lesson in the fragile nature of preservation, a realization that we were living in a landscape that actively rejected any attempt at permanence.

Today, the workshop is gone, replaced by a concrete public boat ramp where fishermen launch their fiberglass bass boats into the river channel. The wading birds still populate the shallows near the bridge, but they seem faster and less permanent than the dusty specimens of my childhood memories. My grandfather’s handiwork has likely scattered to various bait shops and historical societies across the county, where they collect dust under the fluorescent lights. Yet, whenever I return to the St. Johns, I find myself looking at the real birds and expecting them to remain frozen, as if their grace were something that could be held forever in place.