It’s a whale of a job — but somebody’s gotta do it. That somebody is Trenton Dureksen, exhibition maintenance manager at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
His task: Maneuver an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner along the surface of a scale-model Balaenoptera musculus, from tail to nose.
Dureksen’s story was featured at Wired.com, along with a photograph. The image hooked the kid in me, the one who watched Pinocchio and Geppetto get swallowed up by Monstro in Disney’s 1940 animated classic, and who read about the crazed captain in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”
“Wow,” I thought. “That sucker’s big! Huge-big!”
Yup … 94-feet big — weighing a whoppin’ 21,000 pounds.
And it wasn’t like Dureksen’s whale was lopey-dopey, lolly-gagging on the ground. Nope. The colossal facsimile — “its steel skeleton affixed to the ceiling and covered in fiberglass and resin” — was in full flight. That’s why a gigantic, bright-yellow, cherry-picker (looking like it had escaped from a recent “Transformer” movie) was used to access the giant creature.
Fascinated by the whole whale-washing idea, I ended up watching part of an almost hour-long video with nothing but the maintenance manager patiently pushing his magic cleaning wand back-and-forth along the replica’s massive exterior. No commentary accompanied this tedious task — though dramatic music did help give the activity a theatrical bent. (Someone vacuuming a carpet might have looked almost as captivating.)
Writer Laura Mallonee noted that the vast cleaning project took three days to complete and must be accomplished annually.
Imagine. Vacuuming the outside of a whale. Every year. What a daunting challenge. It’s the kind of job Captain Ahab might enjoy doing, were he alive today.
