It's 10:37 on a Tuesday morning. It's time to leave for my job at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Working in a museum, I wear the same thing: loose jeans, white Walmart socks, a white (sometimes black) turtleneck, and my fuchsia conservation shirt. The uniform simplifies my morning, and the only preparation I typically have to do is pull the pink shirt from the laundry.
I meet the other intern, Celia, at the portal entrance, and we wait until 11 o'clock to retrieve our conservation cart and start working.
Our cart consists of a lot of detritus -- a pile of Tupperware containers, some empty, some neatly stacked together, some full of microfiber clothes that are organized by function, color, and functionality.
Two 5-gallon Home Depot buckets hold individual fake leaves taken from the exhibit. They add realism to the exhibit, but get in the way of vacuuming and are too tedious to clean one-by-one, so we collect them for Gretchen to run through her dryer. She finds that a light cycle is enough to remove the dust but not hurt the leaves.
Another bucket lined with an organizer holds full microfiber clothes and cut up pillowcases, used to put over the exhibits' motion sensors. In various pockets are various types of brushes -- anything from a fluffy makeup brush to a bristled fan brush to wide flat paintbrushes
Much of conservation is learning through experience. You can use all of the brushes or only one, but some do work better than others. When we ask Gretchen what works best while cleaning, she sometimes says "whatever works best."
She does have a few tips though. For the ground, she found that tapping Swiffers underneath plants was better than lugging the vacuum around. She told us that makeup sponges work well, but Celia and I both realized we hated them because they degrade.
My weapon of choice is a cheap wooden flat brush, the kind my father buys at Home Depot to be used then immediately thrown out. It has two pieces of painter's tape wrapped around its handle, which fits comfortable in my hand. Its wide head but thin line of bristles makes it useful for dusting both broad leaves and tight crevices.
Alongside it I typically carry a small fluffy brush for small and delicate foliage, a brush that looks like a pan flute, which I use to gently dust large flat tree leaves. Celia has her own arsenal of tools: her main squeeze being a large black fluffy brush, a wider pan flute brush and a bristly fan brush.
I approach each plant systematically, or else I'll get overwhelmed by the fronds. When dusting, I work top to bottom, as the dust from the top leaves settle to the lower ones. I typically start in the back, choosing a quadrant of the fern and working my way down. I grab the tip, and bristle my brush along its leaves. These ferns are hardy: Gretchen said they're just store-bought.
Depending on the shape of the exhibit, Celia and I will split the exhibit. We started first at opposite sides, working towards the middle. But as we got to know each other better, we began working closer together. That is, until we realized we chatted more than we cleaned, and had to separate ourselves, now with headphones to help us focus.
At this stage, it's more difficult to tell the dusted versus undusted fronds. But that typically means you're not cleaning well enough. However, some dust is harder to remove, as not all dust settles nicely on the surface. Over time, dust will embed itself an the object, giving it a dull, desaturated look. That's why we water.
For watering, we use small damp cloths to wipe the leaves and loosen the dust on the surface. The technique is still the same, except working top to bottom doesn't matter as much. This is where the leaves truly begin to look clean. After watering, the leaves regain their greenness and shine. We fluff them so they appear fuller and livelier, not as if two interns manhandled them.
Gretchen always tells us that we're doing a great job, but sometimes it's difficult to see the progress we make. We are doing something, we see it in the dust clouds, stingy water and vacuum filters. But dusting creates a small, minute change, one that you wouldn't notice if you weren't looking. It wasn't until I saw the Apatosaurus and Diplodocus exhibit next to each other -- from above -- that I saw the vibrancy of the Apatosaurus exhibit.
The annual tradition of cleaning the Dinosaur Hall only began a few years ago, and it shows in some of the hidden cracks of the exhibits. Gretchen says that the annual cleaning should get easier and easier as we continue to clean each year.
