By Tea Krulos

Last winter, I visited the Milwaukee Public Museum for what will probably be the last time in their current location. Saying good-bye can be hard, but it was important for me to pay my respects. The museum has a lot of emotional geography for me. Just a few blocks away, construction has made rapid progress on a shiny new museum. It’ll be here before you know it.

I remember running across the dimly lit cobblestones in the Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit as a kid. I stared up in terrified awe of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, towering above a felled Triceratops with a big chunk bitten out of it. There were school field trips and later in life there were first dates, talking about how Wes Anderson would go googly-eyed over the time capsule of design fonts and color palettes of the old diorama displays.

My most striking memory related to the museum comes from one frigid day in late January 2017, when I sought refuge there after I decided to leave a toxic relationship. The time leading up to this will always be remembered by me as absolutely miserable. I conducted a crude experiment that January. I noted if the relationship that day was good, bad, or just ok with a smiley, frowny, or non-plussed face each day on the calendar with a Sharpie. Toward the end of January, the calendar confirmed what I already knew. Wrapped in a blanket sitting in my office chair, my skin itchy from the dry winter, I stared, teary-eyed, at a month of mostly frowns, and a few straight horizontal lines with dot eyes above them. I realized that it was important to leave immediately. But I had no idea where to go.

I quickly stuffed a backpack with things I thought I might need– some clothes, a toothbrush, that sort of stuff, then I walked blinking into the winter sun. I knew I needed to get out of the neighborhood right away and I wanted to go somewhere where people didn’t know me and I could hide out and think. The universe hit me with an answer– my sanctuary could be the Milwaukee Public Museum.

My memories of that day at the museum are both incredibly vivid and a dream-like haze at the same time. I spent hours wandering around, looking at every display in the building, witnessing all of Mother Earth’s history.

I saw a diorama of the Silurian period, depicting what Wisconsin looked like 410 million years ago—an ancient reef with cone-shaped, squid-like nautiloids swimming and hunting trilobites scattered on the seabed below them. Fast forward 35 million years later, and there is ichthyostega, a cute bugger of an amphibian, sticking their snout out of a plexiglass pond, contemplating dry land, and a full-size model of a stegosaurus, smiling benignly in the Late Jurassic another 240 million years after that. Crystals and meteorites, fossils and skeletons.

Then the humans started walking around and the museum had a wide range of their antics around the globe over thousands of years. In the European Village, showcasing what traditional households looked like, I peered through a window and saw a German man, content, sitting at his kitchen table, whittling, his trusty schnauzer sitting on a chair next to him, staring at him intently. Revisiting the Streets of Old Milwaukee, I was seeing my hometown a couple hundred years ago, the saloon, the Usinger’s sausage shop with a mannequin carefully arranging a platter of plastic meat, and I visited the granny sitting on her porch in a rocking chair. She used to slowly rock back and forth but no longer does—I assume because people were a little creeped out by it.

I saw it all. Beadwork by indigenous Wisconsinites, Hopi pottery, the interior of a Japanese samurai sword workshop, Javan wooden puppets, Balinese dance costumes, Polynesian war clubs, gongs and rattles from Cameroon, and Australian aboriginal bark paintings.

It was a blur of artifacts and explanatory placards. I saw items from ancient Egypt and Greece [Greek kylix (wine cup) with women playing lyre and flute, c.530-520 BCE], things of war [Colt-Burgess Lever Action Carbine, .44 Caliber, 12 Shot Repeater c. 1883] ESCALATORS→ Second Floor, things of beauty [Headdress worn by dancers in the famed Feather Dance of the Zapotecs of the Oaxaca Valley, Mexico] ←RESTROOMS, animals from near [Wisconsin Mammals] and far [Savannas are inhabited by browsing animals such as the prehensile lipped black rhinoceros, impala and kudu].

I sat down on a bench for a while and reflected on…everything. My spinning head was starting to slow down. It was the right place at the right time for me. My subconscious must have known I was in desperate need of a perspective of several million years. Your little life and your sad, dumb little problems aren’t even a grain of sand here. Oddly that made me feel just fine, I was a quiet passenger on Planet Earth.

I’d look at some displays, then find a bench and sit there, staring off into space, observing my fellow humans. I saw groups of kids looking in wonder at a mastodon skeleton. There was an elderly man contemplating a diorama depicting the construction of the Temple of Ramesses III. I especially had curiosity looking at couples. Some looked happy and smitten, others bored and annoyed. It was the moving display of the whole pizzicato of the human experience. I watched the people passing by and tried to ignore a shadow of loneliness falling over me.

By late afternoon, the museum had become deserted and quiet. I listened to the echo of the escalator clacking on an endless loop and it dawned on me that I had no plans beyond hiding out here for the day. I didn’t want to leave. I began thinking that maybe I could hide somewhere and spend the night. I needed a spot to curl up like the desert fox burrowed underground in the Land of Sun: The Southwest display. I was, as the Talking Heads sang, “just an animal looking for a home.”

The third floor seemed like the best option for this. I could set up camp behind the family of rhinoceroses in The Savanna Bush or hide out in a dark corner of the recreation of a Guatemalan public market. But the best option seemed to be in the Circumpolar and Asia wing, a display where you could enter a facsimile of an igloo with a bench inside, a scene of an Netsilik Inuit woman behind plexiglass, tending to a fake fire.

“Life inside the igloo was cramped but comfortable,” the placard read. “Seal oil, burned in stone lamps using moss or animal hair wicks, provided heat and light. Fur-lined snow benches provided comfortable working and sleeping areas.”

Maybe I could just rest here, pretend to feel the heat of the seal oil fueled flames and fall asleep, warm in my winter jacket. Or maybe I could just live there, like that guy who lived in an airport in Paris for 18 years.

It was time to face cold reality. I came to terms with the fact that I had to leave, so I headed down to the lobby, then called one of my sisters, asking if they could take me to my parent’s house, so I could sleep on their couch. Every day after that was easier.

The museum will change. Change is sometimes inevitable and that is okay, even great sometimes.