Wandering around huge cities is always interesting. Large foreign
cities are even better - especially if random experiences are the
goal. I have discovered that my personal principle of travel - and
perhaps life - is that I want to push beyond the knowable - the
finite - and taste - even for a few minutes - a sense of the
infinite, that step just beyond comprehensibility. Asian cities are
the perfect terrain for these explorations.

I was in Beijing, China, on a hot humid, absolutely stifling
Saturday afternoon. I had no obligations and was just roaming
around the northwest corner of the city on my bicycle.

I was getting more and more hot and dazed from the heat and I just
wanted somewhere cool to hide out for a while. It was mid-afternoon
in a non-descript neighborhood without any little cafes or shops.

At last I saw my refuge; the Beijing Museum of Natural History. I
parked my bike and paid the miniscule admission fee and, even
though the place was not air conditioned, it was an old solid
building in the shade. I was willing to go anywhere to get out of
the heat.

I had apparently dropped in right after a major exhibit somewhere
else. The place was deserted.

I was accustomed, after living in China for the previous several
months, to being the only white face in sight, but this time I was
merely the only human - in a building crammed with preserved
mammals, strange feathered and scaled bird-like things - from
Pterodactyl-like monsters to penguin-looking hybrid stuffed toy
looking creatures, and, of course, massive fish and other
sea-inhabiting critters of all sizes and shapes on display across
every wall and hanging from the ceiling. There were several
fish/mammal combinations that looked suspiciously near-human.
Suddenly I could understand dazed, malnourished, lost and exhausted
sailors envisioning mermaids or other fears and fantasies of the
unknown.

It gets worse.

I was tired and probably dehydrated and on the verge of heat stroke
- and did not want to go outside again - so I kept wandering.

The displays had Chinese characters only, so I had to rely on my
bare bones knowledge of animals and geology to even remotely
comprehend what I was seeing. Most were species found only in China
or somewhere across the mountains, jungles and deserts of Asia. I
could barely identify - even in the most general terms - these
strange creatures and reconstructed skeletons in all kinds of
unexpected sizes and shapes. I couldn't distinguish the
contemporary from the long extinct.

Even without being able to read the descriptions, I knew I was
seeing amazing things. One was a massive Plexiglas cube holding one
of the extraordinarily rare Coelacanths - a gigantic fish thought
to be long extinct and only found in the fossil record until one
was snagged in a net in the 1930s off the coast of Africa.

I had read about these in a comic book when I was a little kid. I
never thought I would see one in the flesh. It looked absolutely
prehistoric. It was huge - with tiny fins and industrial sized
scales - and huge ominous bison-like eyes. In fact it looked like
an underwater version of some kind of cumbersome neolithic
buffalo-like creature. This thing was clearly not built for speed.
Or was it? These had only been accidently snagged - never observed
in motion.

On earth, bison are essentially unstoppable - as this creature must
have been. Only four or five of these sea bohemoths had ever been
caught - and only a few were on display anywhere in the world.

I made my way into an adjoining larger room. Where there was a
large open display area. Clearly a large display had been taken
down for a tour. As I progressed, I saw massive opened wooden
crates with the display half unpacked. Then I looked up and saw
photos of the original exhibit - it was something like a
brontosaurus. There were other displays of horse, dog and
chicken-sized reconstructed skeletons. But this was the big one.
Many of the individual bones hanging halfway out of the boxes were
my height.

These were clean bones - most were perfectly preserved - as if they
had just been taken from a recent specimen.

And then I did the one thing you are never supposed to do to with a
specimen like that - I touched them. And as I did, a million
questions flooded through my brain; what were these creatures? When
did they live? How did they live? What did they eat? Were there any
left in hidden corners of the world? What creatures currently alive
descended from these indescribable beings? Were King Kong,
Sasquatch, Yeti or the Loch Ness monster descendents - remnants
even - of these bones? How could such massive skeletons remain
intact for so many centuries? How and why did these creatures meet
their end? Were there ever humans who witnessed their fierce
thrashing across the earth?

After about forty-five minutes alone in there, an older woman came
out and spoke to me in English. She was the director of the museum
and gave me a guided tour and answered a few - but only a few - of
my questions. For once in my life, I didn't have very many
questions. I was too weary and just had no idea what to say.

She was cordial and seemed at home among these haunting fragments
of another time. I was a foreigner in every sense of the word. I
was the alien - the most out of place life-form - in the building.
On the continent. On the earth it seemed...

Like much of my time in China, I felt dazed, disoriented and as if
I had stepped into a dreamlike reality that I couldn't describe or
even fully believe. Sections of China have been "modernized" and
sanitized for the tourist trade, but it doesn't take much effort to
find one's self over the edge and well into the incomprehesible...