Moose is Loose–New Yorker story
Here’s a story I wrote for the New Yorker, which they just put online:
Bullwinkle’s Revenge
Last March, Rob Forbes was driving from San Francisco to his weekend house in Glen Ellen, California, when he spotted a trailer pulled over on the side of Route 121. According to stencilled letters on the side of the rig, it was selling “Antler Lighting.” Forbes, the founder of Design Within Reach, the contemporary home-decor chain, is a man with a philosophic approach to design (“People know me for making connections that aren’t obvious”) and a penchant for sourcing unusual products (“My best find this year is a pair of vintage green Oaxacan candlesticks”). He pulled over. He recalled recently, “I thought, What is this guy doing selling antlers in a place where most people would be ashamed to kill a deer?”
The man selling antler lamps—white-tail deer chandeliers, elk wall sconces—was Spud Fulford, a resident of West Nine Mile Creek, Montana, who travels four to five times a year to Northern California to sell his wares. “I do pretty good in areas where people have built mountain homes and are looking to decorate,” he said.
What caught Forbes’s eye was a single moose-antler lamp, with two brass light-bulb fixtures, for three-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars. “Every once in awhile I’ll see something natural and say, ‘That’s just incredibly beautiful design,’” he said. “It’s not gilded, or painted white, or wrapped in glass and ceramic. It’s just a piece of pure nature and you can’t do better.” Forbes asked if he could buy the moose antler by itself, without the light bulb fixtures.
Fulford explained that he wasn’t in the antler-selling business; he was in the antler-lamp-selling business. So Forbes asked where he got his moose antlers, on account of their being some of the best design objects he’d ever seen, superior to anything Eames or Gehry created. (“They have a decorative baroque character—they are Nature’s Big Bling,” he later wrote.) Fulford, impressed by the intensity of this moose appreciation, put Forbes in contact with his antler broker. “At this point I didn’t know what I was going to do with moose antlers,” Forbes recalled, “but I knew I had to track them down.”
In June, Forbes flew to Helena, Montana to see the antler broker, Roy Rasmussen. Each shed, barn and stall on Rasmussen’s property was crammed with different varieties of antler: elk, white tail, mule deer, moose, the occasional red deer. “All combined, we probably have seven or eight tons of antlers,” Rasmussen said. “We’ve got ten thousand pounds of just elk antlers.” As for moose, Rasmussen explained, they don’t have antlers; they have paddles. And, because moose shed their paddles in December and January, they can be plucked from the ground by entrepreneurial pickers who comb the countryside after snow melt. The pickers then funnel their finds to brokers like Rasmussen, who sells them from five to twenty dollars per pound, depending on the quality of the paddle. Forbes recalled, “As we were talking, Roy was picking up the moose paddles and throwing them around to separate them and I kept saying ‘Be careful,’ and finally he says, ‘You do realize that moose fight with these things?’”
After selecting seventy-seven pounds of the most aesthetically pleasing specimens, Forbes hosed them off and shipped them back to San Francisco. “I totally scored,” he said. “It felt great.” The moose paddles sat in a closet for several months, waiting for inspiriation to strike. In mid-August, it did. Forbes recalled, “I opened a newspaper and it was filled with all this moose stuff about Sarah Palin and I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’”
Forbes, an Obama supporter, decided to donate his private stash of moose paddles for a one-of-a-kind Democratic fund-raiser. He posted photos of the moose paddles on his design Web site under the headline, “Support Moose and Obama—Quickly,” for prices ranging from fifty-two dollars to three-hundred-and-eight dollars. “Our Moose and Caribou cousins have received national media attention in the run-up to the election,” the Web site read. “Their position has been exaggerated and sometimes even deliberately mischaracterized (though I would not want to imply that Moose are a monolithic voting bloc), so we are re-purposing the Moose this election year.” The goal was to send all proceeds—not just profits—to the Obama campaign. “Your Moose paddle will hopefully serve as a reminder that a person like Obama did get elected despite all that he (and we) have been through,” Forbes wrote. “Spud might not know that his work is serving a political cause, but Bullwinkle would be proud.” Soon orders poured in from California, Florida, Oregon, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New York. Forbes shed all his paddles—in the amount of eighteen-hundred-and-eight dollars—in two days.
Original story can be found here:
