The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  Not long after Doris had a son, Gordon, her tempestuous marriage ended in divorce. But she hung on to both her child and to an important recreational relic of the relationship: Freikörperkultur, naturism. She remained a devoted nudist. Living in harmony with the outdoors promoted vigor and happiness, and took out all the fuss. The pastime linked Doris to Europe, but she practiced at a local colony called Lake Como. (“A Family Nudist Resort Since 1941.” “Go Barefoot All Over!”) A resident-owned co-op, Lake Como offered a motel, cabins, tents, and activities like tennis and volleyball tournaments. Members ate at the Bare Buns Café and took their libations in the Butt Hutt. Doris, both a Lake Como member and employee, worked in the kitchen and as a housekeeper. Slick with suntan oil, lips white with zinc cream, she mowed people’s yards. Outside of the community she worked as an elementary school cook, all together saving enough money to buy a patch of property and a mobile home at the sandy edge of Lake Como, where she raised her boy alone in the bone-soaking sear of central Florida.

  This was the late sixties, early seventies. Petite and slightly pigeon-toed, Doris wore big glasses and shoulder-length hair. Her skin and eyes were coffee-bean brown. When clothed she favored sandals, plaid shirts, and shorts or miniskirts. She was hardworking, genial, and extremely (and evenly) tanned. “She adds an extra thirty minutes for small talk,” the Tampa Tribune once reported in a story referencing her charity work delivering hot meals to the homebound.

  One day in the Lake Como lunchroom, she stumbled into a slender, bespectacled fellow in his early forties named Bill Prokopi, a bachelor and non-nudist who had dropped by on a whim. Bill was an elementary school music teacher, originally from Canada, whose family had moved to Winnipeg from Ukraine. A musician, Bill had come to Tallahassee for college, to study with a composer he admired, and had never left, never married, never found anyone, until Doris. He invited her paddle-boating and then to a movie. Afterward he told her, “I’m going to Canada, and when I come back I’m going to ask you to marry me. Think it over.”

  They married on May 17, 1973, Bill in a gray suit and crimson tie, Doris with her hair up, wearing a white lace minidress with bell sleeves. On August 13 of the next year, Doris gave birth to their only child, Eric.

  Doris’s boys were nearly fifteen years apart, Gordon practically out the door while Eric was still in diapers. Bill’s mother disliked that her son’s family lived in a trailer “like gypsies,” so when Eric was two, she helped them buy a small, brown-stucco house, with an attached garage, on four-tenths of an acre in Land O’ Lakes, population 31,000, a half hour north of Tampa.

  The hundreds of lakes in the aptly named place ranged in size from glorified ditch to boat-worthy, with names like Red Bug and Treasure. The Prokopis lived on Grove Lane, in the Lake Padgett neighborhood, atop what was once an orange grove. Their three-year-old house was ranch-style, with several small bedrooms, two baths, shag carpet, and sliding patio doors. They ate their meals at the dining room table, surrounded by Doris’s collection of German beer steins. Bill always thanked Doris for cooking, and every time she went somewhere, he walked her to her car. Doris’s devotion to Eric occasionally seemed to irritate Bill, who told her, “That’s for the husband, not the son.”

  Doris liked to put Eric in a bicycle seat and ride him around the neighborhood. She took him with her when she cleaned houses at Lake Como or shopped for clients or drove them to the VA hospital. He never had a babysitter or went to nursery school or day care. On their daily walks, Doris and Eric collected aluminum cans together, shaking them free of snakes. Whenever they saw something interesting, they picked it up.

  Eric wasn’t averse to other children or afraid of them, but he never seemed to mind being alone. His talkative parents sometimes wondered what he might choose for himself in life. Bill hoped his son would like music. His own chosen instruments were the accordion and the bassoon, and he directed the choir at the Ukrainian Orthodox church where he was a member. For Eric, Bill suggested the saxophone. Eric went along, hating it; suiting up in a blue satin uniform and a plumed helmet to perform Del Borgo’s “Canterbury Overture” in the school symphony did not do it for him. “I don’t like it—you have to tell Dad,” he told his mom. Bill was duly notified. Eric abandoned the uniform, relaxed his embouchure, and quit music altogether, but for the ambient sound of his father’s classical records and opera on his Sunday radio.

  Doris had heard that you weren’t supposed to force children into activities, so she told Eric, “You choose.” He had tried karate and a few other things, but decided to focus on swimming. Doris coached him herself, pleased to have perhaps transmitted the water gene, seeing as how Bill couldn’t swim at all.

  Eric wasn’t the top swimmer, but his dedication and focus impressed the coaches of his club teams. Land O’ Lakes High had no swim team, so Doris lobbied the school system to let Eric function as a squad of one. Local newspapers ran stories about “Prokopi, the ‘unknown swimmer’” whose coach was basically his mom. “Swimming is in his blood,” Doris told the press. When Eric made it to the state championships, a Tampa Bay Times columnist wrote, “OK, so the Gators have a little trouble with relays, but this is for real.” Reporters generally withheld observations about Eric’s most pronounced personality trait, though one did not—

  To say Prokopi is quiet would be to suggest that Picasso was a painter. “It’s no big deal,” Prokopi said, possibly on his way to setting a personal record for most words spoken to a stranger. “I just want to swim. My friends know. That’s enough.”

  When Eric did speak, his words tended to snag like a faulty zipper. He didn’t stutter; rather, he put distance between words, as if measuring what he wanted to say. The pattern required patience of his listeners, and perhaps frustrated them. “Why do you swim?” people would ask. “I just like it,” Eric would answer. He expressed himself in other ways, like pounding the pool in the backstroke or goofing around with a stink bomb at school. A couple of times he flew paper airplanes against the rules, and ran in class, also against the rules. “Defiance of authority,” wrote the defied authorities. Doris would tootle up to the school in her VW bus or her station wagon and shrug her freckled shoulders. What trouble? This boy was just being a boy. Doris had always done the talking for him.

  Eric performed at the top of his class, making almost all A’s in his Advanced Placement and honors classes. Doris, an enthusiastic archivist, documented the grades, the swimming medals, the newspaper clippings, the teachers’ compliments on Eric’s hard work and positive attitude, the notices from the free-meals program that fed her boy breakfast and lunch. The family photo collection showed Eric in a high chair, being spoon-fed by his unclad mom; standing as an altar boy among the religious iconography at his father’s church; gazing into a picture book called The Age of Dinosaurs; hoisting a swim trophy; wearing a scuba suit; holding a parakeet; holding a turtle; holding a chicken; holding a puppy; holding a red-breasted macaw; kneeling beside a skeptical-looking pelican, wanting, clearly, to hold it. At home, he kept lizards, turtles, a rabbit. The first big fish he ever caught, Doris mounted as a trophy.

  Bill wanted Doris to stay home, but Doris believed it impractical for a family of four to try living on a single annual income of $18,000. A wartime childhood and a frugal life had taught her to save dribbles of money. Shopping at thrift stores, she thrilled at bargains. At one point she and Eric started their own company, handing out half-fanciful business cards—

  DORIS AND ERIC PROKOPI

  Chimney Sweeping and Grass Cutting

  On weekends, the Prokopis often drove down the Gulf, to the beach town of Venice, where Doris had an aunt who lived within walking distance of the dunes.

  Roughly three million to twelve thousand years ago, Florida emerged from ice and warmed beneath a shallow ocean. Over time, sea levels dropped enough for the beginnings of the landmass that we now recognize as Florida to surface. Animals of this epoch, the Pleistocene, walked back and forth between continents. In balmy, interglacial
periods, extraordinary creatures lived abundantly in the waters and on land—saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, mammoth, mastodon. The megafauna included birds with twelve-foot wingspans, armadillos the size of Volkswagen Beetles. Florida had beavers the size of small bears, horses the size of dogs, dogs the size of gerbils. Their corpses wound up in rivers or drifted to the ocean floor, to be covered and preserved by sediment. “Hardly a roadcut or realignment of a ditch is made in Florida without some fossil being turned up,” S. J. Olsen wrote in 1959 for the Florida Geological Survey. Fossils surfaced during quarrying and dredging, and during the paving of parking lots. They became so popular as collectors’ items that hobbyists formed societies where they could share their finds.

  Natural history lovers often build collections around what they can easily hunt. In Wyoming, the gateway fossil may be Eocene fish preserved in paper-thin rock slabs; in Kansas, it may be prehistoric sea lilies. South Dakotans might collect turtles; Moroccans, trilobites; Germans, traces of dragonfly pulled from the plattenkalk. In Dorset, on the southwest coast of England, collectors hunt ammonites and more on the beaches, where the high bluffs slough off with each passing storm. Montana and Utah yield extraordinary dinosaurs.

  Florida’s gateway fossil is shark teeth. Sharks have swum the oceans for over 300 million years; a single shark may sport up to three thousand teeth at a time, losing and replacing them like a tabby sheds hair. The teeth litter the ocean floor as blue and yellow and black baubles, often still shiny with enamel. Their various shapes—witch’s hat, fat comma, small awl—denote the animal’s onetime habitat and behavior. The wee tooth of a bull shark may fit on a fingertip, like a thorn; the teeth of megalodon, which patrolled the early waters like a huge submarine, grew nearly 10 inches long, dwarfing those of its daintier descendant, the great white.

  The broad shallows and calm waters around Venice made shark teeth so easy to find, the town long ago nicknamed itself the Shark Tooth Capital of the World and began hosting an annual festival in May. The beach was always filled with people who walked slowly, looking down, as if an entire town was out searching for a lost contact lens. Collectors sat in the surf with homemade sifting screens and waded in with box dredges. The souvenir shops sold handbooks like Let’s Find Fossils on the Beach: “With patience, a pail, your eyes all seeing, and your back strong, you, too, can become a collector of the ages.”

  Eric was maybe five when he found his first shark tooth at Venice, its serrated edges like the tines of a miniature pocket comb or the rim of a new dime. The tooth wasn’t just a souvenir; it once lived in the real mouth of a real animal that swam in a real ocean not unlike the one licking his bare feet. “The important thing to remember is that vertebrate fossils truly represent life,” read one handbook. “They are not just dry bones but are animals that ate, drank, fought, and reproduced much in the same manner as similar animals are doing today.”

  Eric pocketed the tooth, hooked.

  CHAPTER 3

  GARCIA, KING OF THE ICE AGE

  IN OLD WEST TAMPA, THERE LIVED A SON OF NEW YORK NAMED Frank Garcia. His parents, Cuban immigrants employed by Tampa Linen Service, were good caregivers, but Frank couldn’t help feeling his father might have worked a little harder on warmth. After failing first grade, Frank decided he could forgive his old man for comments such as “You’ll never be a brain surgeon,” but he never forgot them, and he went on to live as if he had something to prove. As a fourth-grader he won a soap-selling contest. In high school he played the saxophone exactly once, then started a band. His many jobs included shoe shiner, lawn mower, milk shake maker, and door-to-door crab salesman. On the first date of his life, romantically overcome, he let loose a round of “That’s Amore.” The woman to whom he crooned “What’s New Pussycat?” married him. Undeterred by divorce, he married five times more, ultimately on a covered bridge to a woman who shared his enthusiasm for open skies, big guns, and old bones.

  As a young man Frank wore his hair bushy, his mustache bushier, and an earring. His sleeveless shirts showed off his ropy arms, which, tanned in perpetuity, were the color of a fresh cigar. His voice was pleasant to listen to, and he smiled a lot, a divot in his chin. The media sometimes called him Florida’s best-known paleontologist, and Frank was known to refer to himself as “the most interesting man in the world,” but for the better part of his early adulthood, before his license plate read ICE AGE, he worked as an insulator, wrapping industrial pipes and boilers in asbestos-laden cement.

  People told Frank he had a beautiful voice, often comparing him to Johnny Cash. At one of his jobs he liked to sneak onto the PA system and announce, “Hello, this is Spanish Cash,” then anonymously serenade listeners with songs he had written. One time, the furious supervisor, unable to figure out who was haunting his airwaves, got on the loudspeaker and vowed that Spanish Cash would “never, ever work at a Florida Power and Light job again.” Frank rebutted with a tune he called “Super Snake.” He claimed to have once walked off a job because the boss ordered him to quit laughing so much.

  One day when Frank was about ten, he went fishing with his grandfather at Lake Okeechobee, over 700 square miles of natural freshwater near Palm Beach. As he waited for strikes, Frank noticed fossil sand dollars embedded in the spoil of dredged limestone. He dug out one of the fossils, cradling in his hands what he later called “the fuel of my life.”

  Frank couldn’t quite manage to excel in school, but he loved the library, where he came across books about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs had never been found in Florida because the Mesozoic layers are thousands of feet below the surface—the closest outcrops were said to be near Selma, Alabama, and Tupelo, Mississippi. That didn’t stop Frank from fantasizing about making magnificent discoveries. As an eighth-grader, he found mastodon bones embedded in a bank of the Hillsborough River at low tide. Another time, he found a bone he couldn’t identify, and took it to a University of South Florida paleontologist for identification.

  A camel, the paleontologist told him, examining the specimen.

  “We had camels in Florida?” Frank said, learning that for thousands of years Floridians have come across the fossil remains of prehistoric creatures usually associated with contemporary Africa.

  Frank was getting into natural history just as gem and mineral shows came to include fossils. Not long out of the navy, he stumbled into a fossil museum housed in an RV, owned by a native Texan named Joe Larned, who wore cowboy shirts and a shark-tooth bolo tie. Larned, a former World War II air force mechanic, was a “science fanatic” who especially liked talking about meteorology, and often mentioned the coming of a new ice age owing to “man’s slash-and-burn tactics.” He worked in maintenance at a phosphate mine and lived in Polk County, east of Tampa, an area called Bone Valley because so many fossils have been found there. Companies like International Minerals & Chemical Corp. allowed the public to hunt fossils on their property, and when Larned led field trips, some collectors drove all day to join him. “You realize you’re the first human being to ever see that,” he would tell the new owner of an old bone. “When that was laid down there, we weren’t even on the drawing board.”

  Larned started a tin-shed museum called Bone Valley Museum, later selling the collection to the town of Mulberry for $30,000. He lived the way Frank decided he wanted to live. The first time they went hunting together, Frank realized he’d found something that he could do happily for the rest of his life.

  Frank also wanted to be known for having contributed to science. When his cousin found a strange fossil horn, Frank drove him to Gainesville to have it identified at the Florida Museum of Natural History (FMNH). The museum had seized on the public’s growing interest in fossils by creating the Florida Paleontological Society, with a newsletter called The Plaster Jacket, named for the protective casing used to transport specimens from excavation sites to the lab. The society educated and inspired the public while unofficially monitoring who was out there hunting, and what they were finding.

  Frank arranged
for his cousin to show the horn to Dr. David Webb, the museum’s curator of vertebrate paleontology, who worked on Pleistocene animals. He expected to meet “the typical scientist-type fellow,” someone who “looked intelligent and dignified—maybe reserved” yet was delighted to find Webb dressed not unlike his mentor, Joe Larned, in a cowboy shirt and a white hat. The fossil horn so impressed Webb that he asked Frank’s cousin to donate it to the museum, later determining it to be that of an extinct deer. Frank had a similar fossil in his collection, so he sent it to Gainesville; Webb thanked him with a cast replica. “I think what impressed me most about Frank—and it’s a feeling that I think anybody involved in paleontology shares—was that really deep sense of mystery,” Webb later said. “You’re touching the past, you’re somehow getting a new understanding of ancient life.”

  Expanding his search area, Frank taught himself how to scuba dive. In the rivers he found Pleistocene mammals as well as spear points and scrapers and harpoons, some made of ivory. On land, he befriended mining executives who let him go deep into the cuts. He found “the world’s largest dolphin skull,” a rare Amebelodon site, the “only known prehistoric giraffe skull” of its type, a sperm whale jaw, the “biggest giant sloth claw ever,” and dugongs—sea cows. The dugongs included the first in situ example of a new pygmy species, which a Smithsonian scientist later named after Frank: Nanosiren garciae.

  When you see a skeleton on display in a natural history museum, you’re seeing the end of a process. Fossils are never found clean and neat like in the movies, ready to lift whole after a few swipes with a hand broom. Some skeletons are articulated, which means connected or intact, but most are either strewn about or crushed or jumbled, like a box of dropped toothpicks. A fossil embedded in rock matrix often must be lifted as a whole. Extracting it can entail hardening degraded bones with a cyanoacrylate adhesive (the active ingredient in Super Glue), and digging a trench around the base until the block rests on an earthen pedestal. The block is then layered with a protective material (like aluminum foil), covered in plaster-soaked burlap or paper (which hardens like a cast on a broken arm), and carefully flipped and fully jacketed. The plaster dries white, resembling a blob of chalk or a misshapen sarcophagus or, from a distance, when still in the field, a patch of rogue snow. When it is sawed open in the lab, the contents may look like nothing but dirt and bones cupped in half a giant egg. Preparators spend long, arthritic hours scraping and blowing, chipping and blowing, chiseling and brushing, millimeter by millimeter, until the fossil is clean. Frank still knew hardly any of this when he came across the extraordinary dolphin skull. He had never jacketed a fossil in his life, but he had seen it done. He drove to Bartow to buy plaster. Once back at the site he realized he’d forgotten to get burlap, so he took off his jeans, cut them into strips with his pocketknife, and jacketed the skull with the britches right off his backside.