duck-shaped pain

Our museum is a pretty typical local history museum, full of old cars and Indian pots and items that supposedly once belonged to local residents or businesses. Sort of a mishmash of items -- nothing terrible, but also nothing amazing.

I hadn't been there in six or seven years. I went a few times when I was in grade school, and then once as an adult (didn't have anything else to do that day), and then stayed away for a while. In the meantime, the museum moved to a new, bigger building and retooled many of its old exhibits.

The old museum was particularly fond of Things Under Glass. Pots under glass. Guns under glass. Things stacked on top of things, also under glass. All accompanied by a roughly typed, dingy white label. Sure, there was a diorama or two, maybe even something you were allowed to touch with your hands, but for the most part, the entire museum experience consisted of just looking and trying to avoid glare.

Things have changed slightly. There are now more things you can touch, buttons you can push, and benches to sit on. The essential information presented hasn't changed much, though. And there's still a lot of Things Under Glass, but I guess there's not much else one can do with a display of guns.

My biggest complaint about the entire thing is that someone new to the area, who decided to go to the museum to learn some background about the town, would come away with two ideas. One, that history here ended in 1963, and two, that nothing bad had ever happened in town. Both of these things are untrue.

The secret history of where I live is a subject for another day, unfortunately. But I was really surprised at the gaping holes in the presentation. Or maybe I wasn't surprised -- it's a small museum, not terribly well-funded, and definitely works in civic-booster mode. So it's a lot more suited to the display of old cars and dioramas of hardy pioneers crossing the Rockies than anything else.

While I was there this afternoon, two groups of people were in there with me. One was a family with many small children. One significant change from the old museum is that the current exhibits are a lot more child-friendly. This means less sharp things, more rounded corners, and -- oh yes -- more things that flash and make noise. There was a display of an 1930s-era fire truck that was very popular with the little ones. It was a pretty neat fire truck, as they go. The display included a button that visitors could push to make the fire engine's siren go off. Which it did -- repeatedly. The kids would get bored learning about southwestern pottery or uranium, and they would sneak back to the fire truck and make it make noise again.

This was mildly annoying, but I could remember being really bored by things my parents took me to as a kid, so I could relate, somewhere back in the misty depths of my memory. And since I was there studying how people reacted to the exhibits, it was a learning experience. ( I can see myself writing, "Museum exhibit designers should carefully choose the position of any buttons and/or levers -- placing them where only adults or very determined children can reach them could be an ideal situation.") What made the situation very odd was the second group of people.

This was a pack of little old ladies. They had been brought to the museum by a middle-aged guy, who was taking them out on the town for a day as a good deed or community service, something like that. He was showing them around and loudly explaining to them what they were looking at. I know, because I could hear everything the guy had to say, way over on the other side of the museum. "This is a TYPEWRITER. That is a JOHN DENVER RECORD." (Yes, those two items were on display together in one case, some sort of Interesting Objects of Recent Years exhibit.)

So I heard the guy talking, and then the siren would go off again. This totally unnerved one of the ladies accompanying Loud Man, because every time it would go off, she'd yell at the top of her lungs, "FIRE! There's a fire!" Every single time.

There were some odd installations. One was a replica of a turn-of-the-century schoolroom, complete with a blackboard that visitors could write on, and copies of "authentic 1900s textbooks." Previous visitors, given the opportunity to write any message to the world they wanted on the blackboard, all chose some variant on the I Was Here message: "Bill was here." "Shaunda was here." "Jeffrey 2002." I'm not sure what that means. And one of the textbooks was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich -- very forward-thinking schoolchildren we had around here in 1900, or someone on the museum staff is a smart ass.

On the top of the museum is an observation tower, the tallest structure in town. You can climb up umpteen flights of itty-bitty stairs and get a 360-degree view of things that aren't that interesting to see at ground level. I got all the way to the top, and it was cold and windy. Looking out, I could see my car. I saw some teens in an alley kicking a discarded yellow mattress, over and over. I saw the mall. I saw the chimneys, power lines, air conditioners, and treetops of the Grand Valley. And then I came down.

In happier news, I have something to look forward to! I decided this evening that I needed to go somewhere for spring break, so I looked around for something cheap, and I'm going to San Francisco again, like I did last March. I got an amazingly good deal on the airfare -- $80 cheaper than last year's airfare, which was a great price at the time. And it includes the flight from here to Denver -- normally, that adds $100 to $200 more to the fare, which means I usually have to drive over there in order to fly cheaply. I'll probably end up staying in the same place I stayed last year -- I had a good experience there, it was cheap, and it was easy to get everywhere I wanted to go from there, so why not? Unless anyone has any recommendations, that is. Now I have to figure out what I want to do when I get there -- I've been there enough that there's not anything that I really want to see that I haven't, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.

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