How to Stuff a Pug: A Day at the Taxidermist’s
October 2013
Curran Manzer’s walls are covered in dead animals.
His taxidermy shop is on the edge of Springfield, about a mile east of the last strip mall on Highway 126. In his showroom a black bear stands over a water fountain meant to look like a creek. A pug stares eagerly upward from his bed in the corner, as if someone were teasing him with a biscuit—but he doesn’t move.
“That’s Chaos,” Manzer says. “His owner’s making payments on him, she’s got about $300 to go.” Smaller animals are run through the freeze-dryer—an expensive machine to run, Manzer explains. During October – peak hunting season – big game animals take priority until they collect enough pets to run a freeze-dry load.
Manzer opens the doors to the workroom where he and colleague John Eden are working this Thursday morning. Unpleasant fumes pervade: a potpourri of burnt bone, ammonia, and what Eden calls “the pure smell of death.” Big black flies buzz around small chunks of flesh on the ground, fur pelts hang over old office chairs, and dried blood is smeared on the concrete floor. Manzer sits down at a desk to inspect a cougar, which bears its teeth at him.
In the back corner, the head of a large male elk is laying on its cheek, propped up by its perfectly symmetrical antlers, and trailing a 6-foot hide of dark brown fur.
Today Eden will begin making a European mount of this elk, whose eyes are still intact and staring at Eden’s feet. “We gotta skin the head, cut the antlers out, then we gotta blast out the brains,” he says.
A European mount is the exposed skull of the animal, not the familiar head and neck stuffed and staring from a wall. The process of removing the skin and prepping the skull takes several months. It’s a job that requires patience, precision and attention to detail, says Eden.
He sits on his knees, cradles the elk’s head between his legs, and begins to cut with his pocketknife. He cuts around the antlers and begins to peel up the flesh, revealing a layer of white fat marbled with bright red blood.
He moves from the top of the head to the mouth. Blood oozes as he cuts along the perimeter of the elk’s gums, making a squishy sound. With bloodied hands he cuts around the teeth, continuing to alternate his incisions to remove the skin in one piece.
Before the brain matter is blown out into a bucket, the animal’s eyeballs are removed. “Lately we’ve been boilin’ ‘em to make ‘em into super-bouncy balls,” Eden says. “See that mark on the wall?” He points across the room. “That’s from when we shot one through a PVC pipe.”
The next step involves what they call “the bug room.”
Above the garage is the attic, wherein “the bug room” exists. Inside, a civilization of little black insects hum as they crawl around fresh animal bones. “African flesh-eating beetles,” Eden declares.
Commonly known as the dermisted beetle, this species feeds on animal products and has a lifecycle of about twelve days. “They get all the extra flesh off in a few days, but we have to let ‘em run their cycle,” John says as he holds up a beetle-covered skull with his bare hands.
Manzer says the bug room is what makes his taxidermy shop unique. “Most people just don’t want to deal with bugs,” he says.
Once the flesh is off, the next step is to “cook” the skull. Most taxidermists boil the skull in a grease-cutting solution, but Manzer and Eden warn against this. They say that boiling is too harsh on the connective tissue that binds the cranial bones together. “We simmer ‘em,” says Eden, which makes them stronger over time.
A simmered skull is nearly finished. When it’s done drying in the large, skull-filled back room, Eden gets to pull out his paintbrushes. Since the natural color of animal bone is a dingy yellow, he’ll paint it with a potent concentration of hydrogen peroxide to bleach it out.
Before mounting the finished piece on a wooden plaque, Eden will submerge the skull in a pot of acetone and plastic beads to form a seal around it. “The acetone melts the plastic,” he says, “which makes it shiny and keeps it from chipping.”
It will take a day or so of drying before Eden can begin the sealing process, but that doesn’t mean he and Manzer get a break. “We’ve got a pile of about five pets in the back,” says Manzer. “That means it’s almost time to run a load in the freeze-drier.”
No New Neighbors
October 2013
The dispute over the construction of Eugene’s first cohousing development continues this week after a group of community members opposing the project requested that the record remain open for further argument following the City of Eugene public land-use hearing, held on October 2.
Many residents of the River Road community that surrounds the Oakleigh Meadow lot, where Oakleigh Meadow Cohousing (OMC) has been proposed, have organized in an effort to keep the proposal from being approved. The plan – which includes 28 single-family units, a common house, shared garden, and parking for 47 cars – will fill the entire 2.8-acre, river-front lot, an area currently used by much of the neighborhood for recreation and as an unofficial off-leash dog area.
Several of the community members in opposition wrote to the Eugene Weekly after last week’s hearing to warn of the environmental harms that the housing complex would bring. “OMC will destroy the meadow and encroach into the sensitive riparian area along the Willamette River,” said Paul and Ceila Heintz. They argued that the plan is “not compatible or harmonious” with nearby land uses.
Now, the opposition has a chance to submit evidence to support its claim that OMC will have a negative impact on the neighborhood. According to the city’s public record, community member Bryn Thoms is arguing that an appropriate Traffic Impact Analysis was not conducted, and that the development will bring more than the regulated 100-trip per day “threshold” set by the city. The opposition is also arguing that OMC has not presented sufficient evidence as to how they are addressing issues such as land fill (to bring the land above the flood line), storm water runoff, and retainer walls in their design.
The Eugene Planning Department has zoned the Oakleigh area as ‘R-1’, which restricts all building and land use to single-family dwellings. Because of this, OMC has been designed according to the city’s regulations for single-family homes, which dictate setback, occupancy, lot size, and maximum building height. “We’re not getting any exceptions from the city here,” said project manager Will Dixon. “Everything we’re doing is standard procedure for building in a residential neighborhood, and the design meets all of the land use regulations.”
Dixon currently lives with his wife and two sons on Oakleigh Lane, down the street from the proposed cohousing community. They plan to move into OMC upon its completion. Dixon says that tensions between neighbors are running high, and the issue has split the community—his close friend and next-door neighbor is part of the counter effort against OMC. “Our kids play together…it’s an uncomfortable situation to be in.”
The owners of the Oakleigh lot, who have lived in the neighborhood for nearly 30 years, bought the land four years ago to make sure its use remained in the best interest of the community. “They’re the ones building the development,” says OMC member Laura Fishehrut. “They thought cohousing would be a positive thing, attracting conscientious people who care about the land and the community.”
The cohousing concept comes from Denmark and is based on the idea of participation and collaboration between residents in the design and management of their community. According to the Cohousing Association of the United States, the idea was first implemented in the U.S. thirty years ago by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, a team of architects who formed the cohousing development firm that is designed OMC, CoHousing Partners, LLC.
The California-based team has designed and built over 50 cohousing communities around the country, and explained to OMC members that having to face neighborhood opposition is normal when proposing a large housing complex with many families. “They just keep telling us to be patient,” said Dixon.
McCamant and Durrett told OMC’s members that they have often received apology letters from people who were initially against a cohousing development, and they shared one such letter with the members of OMC. In it, the lead organizer against a proposed community wrote that, since the construction had been completed and the new co-housers had moved in, “I couldn’t appreciate them more…our fears turned out to be unwarranted.”
The city’s public record for the case will be held open for two more weeks. The members of the OMC project are optimistic that their plan will be approved. Dixon and the rest of the 18 families behind the project hope the strong sense of community that is characteristic of cohousing will eventually resolve the disagreement.
“I think that it’s just really different than what they’re used to,” said Dixon of his current neighbors. “But I think once it’s done they’ll come to appreciate it.” A final decision from the city is expected by mid-November.
Old Medicine Under New Healthcare
October 2013
Sariantra Kali holds a dinner plate covered in woody brown specimens, which crackle as she pokes through them with her finger. She points to a delicate brown coil: “Dried cicada skins,” she says. There are a few golf ball-sized pumice stones and several ashy pieces of bark. A tuft of white fuzz dangles from the grey body of a former silk worm. Kali picked up this mixture during a recent business trip to China. “It’s brewed like tea and used to treat brain damage symptoms, like seizures,” she says. “But you have to cook it outside—it smells terrible.”
Kali is a licensed acupuncturist and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) specialist in Eugene. She treats a wide range of physical and mental conditions using only herbs and acupuncture, as taught in the ancient Chinese practice.
Alternative medicine is nothing new; in fact, medicine doesn’t get much older than the ancient Chinese approach. But when Cover Oregon, the state-run online marketplace for health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), launched last week, it included in its options a new provider—Oregon’s Health Co-op. The Co-op is one of 24 new member-controlled insurance companies in the country under the ACA. Like all ACA providers, the Co-op offers a standard bronze, silver, and gold medal plan – bronze plans have a higher deductible with lower monthly cost, gold plans have lower deductible with higher monthly costs – to individuals or families, as well as employers. What’s different about the Co-op is that all earnings are reinvested in members’ coverage. Because of this, all of the Co-ops plans include access to more providers than ever before, including naturopaths, acupuncturists, and Traditional Chinese Medical practitioners, like Kali.
Acupuncture and other holistic practices are something today’s generation of 20-somethings to consider if they’ll be shopping for new insurance plans as they approach the new nation-wide cut-off from parents’ insurance plans at age 26, says Kali. “I see a lot of students for stress-related symptoms like acne,” says Kali. She treats these symptoms based on the Chinese belief that they’re caused by an imbalance of heat within the body. “I’ve treated patients whose skin clears up in one week, after spending years fighting it.
This is the first generation to get to choose from a menu of healthcare options, which means that demand for alternative medical treatments like those prescribed by Kali might increase—or perhaps decrease, if the bug tea is too smelly.