Wyoming, and what happens when you pull over

I had not planned to stop in Pringle, South Dakota. We were driving west through the Black Hills to take a day trip to Wyoming when … I spotted it — a large sculpture made entirely of bicycles, welded together on the roadside outside of town, going nowhere and completely magnificent. We pulled over. My kids ran through its arches and tunnels. We took pictures. We left 10 minutes later having seen something none of us expected.

That stop set the tone for the next two days.

Just off I-90 near Sundance, Wyoming, I pulled off at a spot I'd found in the Atlas Obscura database: the Quaal Windsock — a 1950s Beechcraft Twin Bonanza airplane, 45-foot wingspan, mounted on a 70-foot pole above the highway. Mick and Jean Quaal loved the old plane but couldn't justify the $200,000 it would have cost to restore it to flying condition. So instead, they put it back in the sky another way. It pivots with the wind. The propellers still spin. We stood there and watched it turn for a while, and then we got back in the car.

We had come to this corner of Wyoming for Devils Tower, the strange flat-topped rock column that erupts from the plains northeast of Hulett like something from another planet — which, if you grew up watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it essentially is. In Lakota tradition it's called Bear Lodge, and the grooves running down its sides are the claw marks of a great bear who chased children to the top while the rock rose to protect them. Prayer flags tied by Native visitors flutter at its base. Rock climbers (I'm one of them) move slowly up its columnar basalt faces far above. It is one of the more genuinely strange and beautiful places in America, and it deserves every word that has been written about it.

But this essay is not about Devils Tower.

Hulett is a small, old-timey Wyoming town about 20 minutes from the Tower. We were driving through it, windows down, when I saw the sign: Deer Creek Taxidermy. I said what I always say in these moments: Can we stop?

We stopped.

Atlas Obscura has hundreds of taxidermy places in its database. Our community has written about anthropomorphic Victorian taxidermy — dead kittens at tea parties, dead hamsters playing cricket — and about taxidermy loan libraries where you can check out a full-grown tom turkey the way you'd check out a book. We have taught bird taxidermy and mammal taxidermy online to thousands of students. One of our most dedicated community members — a woman named Caroline Mazel-Carlton who has visited more than 1,000 Atlas Obscura locations — told me she has loved taxidermy since she was 2 years old, and that her friends have, on multiple="multiple" occasions, had to extract her from taxidermy backrooms while on trips.

I had always found this odd. I had not yet understood it.

Bobbi Butler was behind the counter at Deer Creek when we walked in, keeping an eye on her granddaughter at the same time. She gave us the tour without hesitation. The walls were covered: deer, elk, bears, steers, animals arranged in postures of frozen alertness. Some looked calm. Some looked intense, even furious. My 8-year-old, a vegetarian, moved quietly from mount to mount, studying each one.

Then Bobbi said: "So the guys are out back, and they're actually, I don't know if you'd like to see, but they are skinning a mountain lion."

Of course, I said yes.

Outside, a mountain lion lay on its back, legs suspended in the air. Blood across the chest, deep red at the neck. Two men worked efficiently and without ceremony. My son looked at it and said, "That's disgusting."

One of the men looked up. "Good, we needed more help. If everybody holds a leg we have enough people."

Bobbi explained: the animal had been harvested by a hunter who'd brought it to Deer Creek to be mounted. "When it comes back from the tannery," she said, "then we do all the artistic stuff." One of the men popped out a claw — enormous, curved — and held it toward us. "You want to see the dangerous stuff? Look at this."

My son, the vegetarian, looked at the claw. He did not look away.

Back inside, Bobbi walked us through the full process. Animals come in wet and go straight into the freezer. When it's time to work, they thaw the skin and glue it over a high-density foam form sculpted by specialists to the exact shape of the animal. "We order the foam," she said, "then we take the skin out of the freezer and thaw it out, put glue all over the form, stretch the skin over it, sew it up down the back, put glass eyes in, and tuck the nostrils and eyelashes in." She showed us mounts mid-process, pins still holding the skin in place while it dried. I asked whether the eyelashes were preserved from the actual animal. Yes, she said.

My son asked if they'd done a cow. They were working on one. A monkey? Yes. A whale? No.

He thought about this. "I think it would be cool to do a rat."

I had come to Wyoming for Devil's Tower. I left thinking about what Bobbi Butler's work actually is — not preservation of death, exactly, but an argument that something was worth remembering and looking at in new form. The foam form. The glass eyes. The real eyelashes tucked carefully into place. Someone decided this animal's specific likeness, its particular claw, deserved to last.

The Quaals' windsock had been put in the sky because they loved a plane too much to let it rust on the ground. The bicycle sculpture in Pringle was welded to the roadside for no navigational reason whatsoever. Bobbi's mountain lion will hang on someone's wall for decades.

Maybe the purpose is the same in all three cases. Someone saw something worth presenting in a new way. Someone said: Look at this, and look what I did with it.

Caroline would have stayed for hours. I think I'm starting to understand why.

— Louise

Ps - I hope you are enjoying my quest to complete my 50 states. Email me anytime with your own questing stories or travel suggestions at ceo@atlasobscura.com.