People ask what it's like to work at the museum. They want to know what happens after the doors shut at closing time and the great halls fall quiet—what sort of mischief we get up to in the corridors and collection rooms up on the third floor—what it's like to work late at night in a building where the closets are stocked with the mummified remains of kings and counselors. More than once, coming down the stairs into the public rooms of the museum, I’ve found a young person standing mesmerized by those two words on the staircase: 

STAFF ONLY 

I’m tempted to tell people that working at a natural history museum isn't as exotic as they think. Amazonian botanists get swamped by emails too—sit through boring meetings too—work long hours and nod off on the train home too. But no one wants to hear that. So I bite my tongue and think of something better….

Like this—here’s something that happened recently. 

I was working after hours in the herbarium. The proofs I was editing were stacked on the table as high as a phone book, and all afternoon I had been plodding through the appendices, line by line, species by species, cross-checking collection numbers with the pile of plant specimens from the last expedition and marking things with a red pencil until my eyes stung. When a thunderstorm blew through the city late in the afternoon I was too deep in the work to notice, and the next I looked up the trees outside were thrashing around in the dark. I squared up the stack of proofs and put on my jacket and turned off the lights.

Outside the herbarium the long empty hallway was quiet. The stairwell was deserted, too. On the second-floor gallery all the lights were out and I went past the snow leopard and the fossil cephalopods, past the great horned owl and the triceratops, all of them softened in the dark by a weird luminescence. I padded down the staircase to the great hall. If I hadn’t grabbed the handrail at the last minute I would have stepped in the water.

Which covered the bottom six stairs.

My heart stopped. 

Black floodwater covered the great hall of the museum—from the northern staircases, where a shoal of tables and chairs floated together in a jumble, through the arches to the opposite end of the hall. Out in the center of the hall, surrounded by glassy water, the Tyrannosaurus rex balanced on its pedestal as though on a life raft. Closer at hand the stela of Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil cast an uneasy reflection.

A voice yelled: “Stop, you can’t come through there! We’re flooded out! Stay where you are!”

Just then a canoe emerged from behind the nearest column and a rain-suited figure in its stern propelled it over to the base of the stairs with a thrust of the paddle.

“Get in, I’ll take you over,” snapped Sam. “Come on, get in, let’s go!”

“Wh?” I said.

“Don’t just stand there, get in! Snap snap! There’s work to do, I can’t spend all my time ferrying you scientists around! Are you coming or not? Fish or cut bait! I’ll take you across!”

“Across? Across where?” 

“The doors are bolted shut, OK? We’re all locked down. You can’t get out any of the normal exits. Get in—I’ll take you over to the only one that’s still open.”

I got in dazedly and Sam pushed off grumbling. The canoe glided through a dark soup of floating ticket stubs and brochures and through a grand arch and Sam propelled us out onto the floor of the great hall, which the floodwaters had transformed into a vast reflecting pool. To either side of the hall the galleries and balconies were sunk in darkness, but the chandeliers above cast a light that reflected the columns and arches and statues in the glossy water. In my fuzzy-headed state all I could do was gape. For all I knew we were drifting through one of those photographs from the old World’s Fair, where gondolas crisscrossed the Grand Basin by evening; or emerging onto a strange new lake with Joliet and his voyageurs two centuries before that; or puzzling our way through some wet and murky metaphor. As we paddled under the T. rex a sandhill crane watched from its dark case in the corner.

I tried asking a question—it came out nonsense—Sam answered it anyway. “Storms like these, that get the lake all whipped up, see, then if the Roosevelt station loses power or the pumps break down it’s just a matter of time, the old storage tunnels fill up fast, there’s no way to stop it, the water comes up through the basement.”

“But all the specimens—all the stuff downstairs—all the exhibits…!?”

“Oh, you don’t worry about those. We know what to do, we’ve been through it before. It happens more often than you’d think. Everything’s as safe as can be, the flood-doors are locked down, they’re watertight….”

But I was picturing the scene down in the basement, filled with black water, where the bronze Masai spearmen faced off against the bronze lion, circled by curious lake trout, and the western lowland gorilla stood peering out of his glass box like an explorer in a submarine. Sam stopped paddling. Over by the totem pole workers in yellow waders were splashing around with big flashlights. 

“It was LT4 again! Told you so!” shouted one of them.

Sam grunted and switched off the walkie-talkie. The canoe glided forward again—past the Nature Walk, where a recorded wood thrush song was playing, past the Egyptian temple, through a pair of fluted columns. “Watch your head,” said Sam, maneuvering us into the Hall of Mammals. It was darker here and the way ahead was perfectly black, but to either side of us the dioramas glowed dimly under emergency lights. They had stayed dry inside and looked now like inside-out aquaria; the water lapped against the glass. We paddled past the stuffed ibexes on their mountainside and the Indian rhinoceros, globally vulnerable, snuffling around in its plaster-of-Paris mudpit. Sam steered around a bench in the middle of the hall and we glided past a family of water buffaloes that would be up to their bellies once the water poured in.

The canoe came to a stop next to the orangutan diorama. Sam pointed a flashlight at the metal rungs leading up the wall into the darkness. “Climb up there. You’ll find a ladder going down the other side—base of that ladder there’s an exit—you’ll find it.”

“Sure you don’t need any help?” I said. “With…?”

“We’ve got a team on it,” said Sam. “Look, the water’s peaked—I need to get back. Go now—go get your beauty sleep.”

I started up the metal ladder in the darkness. After a few rungs I had ascended above the orangutans and their durian tree, above the sloth bear and the hyenas and the leopard, to a place with a view of the whole length of the hall. The sense of light-headedness hadn’t passed. A sentence from a diorama label came to me suddenly—“They swing easily from branch to branch with their strong arms and curved fingers”—and suddenly, looking down at the animals to either side of the flooded-out hall, I felt overcome by a desperate tenderness for their old fur and glassy eyes.

The emergency exit was easy to find. Outside the storm had passed and the sky was dark and cloudless, but the wind was freezing and in the direction of the lake I could hear the big waves crashing. I climbed over a balustrade and found myself at the feet of the brachiosaur. Over by the south entrance a fire truck had just pulled up into a glare of emergency lights. I turned away and went down the hill wrapping my coat closer, eyes watering in the wind. At the base of the hill I turned to look again at the grand façade of the museum, backlit in its majesty by the delicate blue-green light that streamed out its windows. 

The wind pushed me all the way to the train station.

The next morning I expected to find a circus of emergency vehicles. Instead I found Sam sitting at the guard booth, greeting the morning’s visitors with a nod. The doors were open and the great hall was full of guests and in the morning sun flooding in through the skylights the white marble floor was dry and glittering like a South Sea pearl. 

“How on Earth?!” I said.

“I’ve seen worse,” said Sam, yawning.

“You guys are incredible!”

“Just doing our job….”

“And you’re still here?”

“Where else would you want me to be?”

“Why don’t you go home and get some rest?”

“I’ll sit a while longer—then I’ll go.”

A long line of schoolkids trailed in and Sam high-fived each of them sternly as they passed. Over the genial rumble of the crowd a wood thrush was singing.

“Can at least I get you a coffee?” I said.

Sam yawned again.

“Sure. Anything to keep the lights on….”