COLLECTORS ARE NOT ALWAYS TAX COLLECTORS!

Rex Burress

It seems that everyone collects something, whether it's nature's curios or art or buttons or many other tangible things considered beautiful and important by the collector. Society thrives on the human characteristic to collect and accumulate objects considered as something of value.

As a boy, I've done shell collections, stamp collections, old coins [new coins too!], and rock collections. A neighbor even made a salt-and-pepper-shaker collection. The five Oroville specialty museums; the Lott Museum with its antiques; the Chinese Temple Museum with its Asian history flavor; Bud Bolt's Antique Tool Museum; the Pioneer Museum with its appropriate relics, and the Feather River Nature Center Museum with an assortment of nature's curios, all consist of objects collected by individuals and donated to the City for public viewing. Additionally, there is a massive collection of old ash trays in the Centennial Cultural Center!

The irony is that a lifetime of putting a material collection together becomes immaterial in the end since “you can't take it with you!” A collector of anything can merely gain some satisfaction, personal enlightenment, sharing, or enjoyment of beautiful objects, for a time, then all reverts to nature in the end [In the beginning, all was molten minerals, and they can become molten again].

Like artist Christo, who assembled “Running Fences and Yellow Umbrella Fences,” and draped them across California hills, then tore them down a few days later, the objective represented the temporal conditions of life and the insistence of immediate appreciation of art and all things beautiful, although the fence-art procedure was all collected in collectible books and photographs!

Many collecting habits develop in childhood when everything is fresh and new and beautiful, when there is a passion to gather things for what-ever reason. Maybe a sort of pride at accomplishment is involved, and a feeling of wealth in accumulating beautiful things. For me, it was the discovery of nature artifacts that caused me to search the outdoors for tangible wonders to fill my shelves—rather like the museum attitude of exhibition. Related exercises of recording discoveries through drawing, journal writing, and photography lingered far into the future. “A boy can become a man, but you can't take the boy out of a man when a deeply embedded relationship with nature is in the heart.”

Thus I climbed thorn trees to raid crow's nests and scaled cliffs to reach bank swallow tunnels—all to add one egg per species to my bird-egg “scientific” collection, or clamored over eroded ditches to find agates, or chased butterflies through the fields to score on a zebra-swallowtail...all to properly enhance my collections. Butterflies and beetles were big for awhile, and though the fervor subsided, the interest in nature continued on and on.

Rock collecting is a special subject that defies adequate explanation, but the joy is reflected in a box of stones sitting by my computer. It contains a few choice specimens collected from far and near that are sparkling reminders of geological formations and excursions into the out-of-doors.

Some claim that the hobby of collecting includes seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever items are of interest to the collector [although Thoreau claimed he had three pieces of limestone on his desk that he threw out because of being dust-catchers while his mind was undusted still!]. It has been speculated that the widespread appeal of collecting is connected to the hunting and gathering that was once necessary for human survival.

On collecting to add to the library of nature: “There is no substitute for collecting and curating specimens for long-term study—not just for scientists studying bio-diversity today, but also for future generations, whose need for clues to the spectacular breadth and complexity of unaltered ecosystems will be ever greater than our own.” --Nathan K. Luian

"What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin." --Mark Twain