“I don’t know,” Crawford said, adjusting his gear. “I just bought it yesterday.”
Mitchell reached for the orange flippers Crawford was holding, and said, “You’re not gonna need those where you’re going.”
“Them there’s for a swimming pool at home,” Bobo explained.
Seconds before they jumped into the water, Crawford asked, “What happens if we get separated?”
Bobo said, “Good luck to ye.”
Below the surface, sunlight instantly disappeared. Silty murk rose up to meet the divers as they descended, levels of diminishing visibility that Crawford said “redefined dark.” The current bumped him along the bottom, where he neither saw nor felt any logs. When he surfaced, spooked, Mitchell met him with the boat and they moved to shallower water.
“You find ninety percent of ’em with your feet,” Bobo explained. “I can tell you the difference in a pine, an oak, or a cypress with my feet.”
Pretty soon they found a cypress log, about 15 feet long and 4 feet in diameter. After winching it to the surface, Crawford said, “I tell you what, there was something about being down there with that log—knowing that the last person that touched that log was probably a hundred years ago.” He later told Mitchell, “That’s what I love about what you guys do, man. You get to touch, feel, unearth history like this.”
Eric had started deadheading to supplement his fossil income, partnering with a scrappy older diver and roofing contractor named Joe Kutis, who lived near Gainesville. Joe and his wife, Charlene, looked after Eric like a son. When Eric and Joe hunted fossils together, it wasn’t always with pure intentions. One night, they spray-painted a couple of bicycles black, rode into a quarry, past No Trespassing signs, and dug till dawn.
Eric found that he could net $40,000 in ninety days pulling logs and spend the rest of his time on fossils. For years he’d owned an old secondhand pickup, but now made enough money to buy a new Ford F350, the vehicle he was driving when he showed up for his date with Amanda.
“He drives a truck?” Amanda’s mom said when Amanda called home to say she had met the man she would marry.
“No, Mom, you don’t understand,” Amanda said. “This truck is like the price of a Ferrari.”
Amanda was as blond and outgoing as Eric was dark and quiet. “Your constant smile and pleasant manner make everyone want to be part of your inner circle,” one friend would someday tell her. Her mottos included Go big or go home. She wore her long hair straight, with big sunglasses often shoved on top of her head. Her collar was popped, her headband was Burberry. Her wrists were layered in what she called “good Virginia silver.” Instead of keeping an inventory of earrings, she consistently wore one good pair, the narrow gold hoops her parents had given her on her eighteenth birthday. Instead of buying a dozen different handbags, she believed in investing in one good one, like the Louis Vuitton Neverfull tote. Amanda liked to say that good clothes and nice hair meant nothing if you carried a cheap purse, and that with the right bag, you could get away with sweatpants and flip-flops.
Amanda had one sibling, Jeff, who was finishing up at Duke, on his way to becoming a dentist in Richmond. Their father, Maurice, was a Williamsburg pediatrician. Their mother, Betty, was a copper-haired Tennessee native who wore headbands and ballet flats, and spoke in a smooth, throaty drawl. Amanda had inherited her father’s dimples and upbeat outlook, and her mother’s grace and elegant taste. Maurice and Betty had divorced not long after Amanda went to college, and Maurice had remarried, but Betty still lived in the house of Amanda’s childhood, in Kingsmill, a gated resort on the James River.
By land there were two ways into Kingsmill, each marked by a guardhouse staffed around the clock. The two thousand or so permanent residents lived on streets with colonial names like Archers Mead and Winster Fax, and with access to tennis courts, swimming pools, playgrounds, a marina, fire pits, playgrounds, and a PGA golf course. The Grahams lived on a cul-de-sac, in a modest, two-story shake-shingle house outfitted in early American antiques and Oriental rugs. The heart of the house was the kitchen and breakfast area, with a redbrick fireplace and a large window overlooking the fenced backyard. At holidays Betty decorated mantel and hearth with dense arrangements of aromatic greenery and gilded candlesticks, tucked through with glittering ornaments. She insisted upon cloth napkins and nice silver, and would sooner die than serve a takeout meal without first transferring the food to a pretty casserole dish. She often told Amanda, “Treat your friends like guests and your guests like friends.”
The exacting standards occasionally wore on Amanda, but she admired her mother’s hostessing skills and her talent for making ordinary moments feel special. For a football-themed party, Betty carpeted the house in temporary Astroturf. For a breakfast party, she sent a limo around to fetch all the children. For Amanda’s “rock ’n’ roll” sixteenth birthday, she allowed everyone to tag the walls with graffiti, then painted over it afterward. Amanda absorbed her mother’s instinct for making everything feel pulled-together. Riding the school bus home, she’d spot certain drab houses and fantasize about giving them makeovers. When she envisioned her own dream house, she saw it white and stately, the driveway lined with palms.
At Tennessee, Amanda majored in psychology with an emphasis in animal behavior, thinking it would be cool to be the next Jack Hanna yet cheerfully admitting to friends that she enjoyed college more for the social perks than the scholarship. As a senior, she applied to SeaWorld in Orlando, making it clear that she wanted to be in the water with the animals, not standing on the side of the pool. They assigned her to Discovery Cove, where she enjoyed interacting with tourists, preferring to address a crowd of hundreds over a cluster of three. One of her favorite things to do was grab a dolphin’s fin and let the animal zoom her through the depths of the pool. Hair streaming, she imagined herself a mermaid.
As a graduation present, Amanda’s parents had planned to give her a safari trip to Africa, but now that she worked at SeaWorld they’d given her a laptop. When she stumbled upon Eric in the chat room, she hadn’t been looking for a boyfriend. She had seen women’s ambitions ruined by the confinements of the wrong relationship and had vowed not to let that happen to her. Still, she believed that if you were in a place that you loved, doing work that you loved, you were bound to meet the right people. Eric was a fellow diver, an adventurer, a self-starter. “Mom, he has Dad’s work ethic!” Amanda told her mother, and Betty had to think about that.
On their Santa Fe River date, Eric was not able to say how much he already liked Amanda, but she never hesitated to speak her mind. “You’ve been hiding that all day?” she said when he finally took off his shirt. After diving, they went out for Amanda’s favorite food, cheap Mexican, and made plans to see each other again. “I miss you so much already,” Eric emailed her two days later. “I love that you are always smiling and laughing, it makes me feel so good. I hate to be around people who aren’t cheerful. I’ve never met anyone who is as happy as you all the time.” He liked her face, her eyes, her sense of adventure, her “neat freak” tendencies, and her independence. “Not that I’m cheap, but I like that you are willing to pay your share when we go out,” he told her. “You are smart and you seem to know a lot about a lot of different things. I am never bored listening to you talk; maybe that’s why I don’t say as much as you want.”
Eric wanted to visit Amanda in Orlando, but first he had to do the Denver show. The second time she ever saw him, he was pulling out of town, towing a trailer. Weeks later he told her, “Before I met you I was scared I would never meet the right person and I would be alone forever. You are that person. I’m glad you see it as a partnership and not a pair of handcuffs….I can’t wait to see where our lives will go together.”
CHAPTER 7
BIG GAME
AMANDA FOUND ERIC’S WORK INTERESTING AND MYSTERIOUS. He would come home covered in scrapes and bug bites, hauling the bones of creatures she couldn’t begin to identify. The first time they went on a
serious fossil dive together, she quickly found a mastodon tooth and thought, Pfff, this is easy, but she never found anything good again. She and Eric could be looking at exactly the same spot and she would miss the fossil hiding in plain view. Eric seemed unafraid of anything, except heights, and as far as Amanda could tell he could do anything except ice skate. She liked to say that he was happiest working in places where a killer might dump a body. “Eric is perfectly proportioned between Reality Guy and Cool Adventure Guy,” she told friends, often recalling the time she watched him chainsaw a log while standing barefoot on that log in a river. “He’s Superman,” she’d say. “If you’re ever stranded on a desert island, you’d better hope Eric is with you.”
She liked that as a self-employed businessman Eric could set his own schedule—this would be important once they started having children. He was financially stable and spontaneous—if she mentioned Las Vegas, he’d say, “Let’s go Friday.” He loved the water as much as she did. They both liked to stay busy. Ten years hence, Amanda wouldn’t be able to remember a single fight. Eric got sad but never angry, and he never raised his voice. At one point, she listed on paper all the reasons she loved him. He replied simply with, “I don’t love you because you are beautiful, but thank you. I don’t love you because you are always smiling, but thank you. And I don’t love you because you love me so much, but thank you. I just love you because you are you.”
Amanda had always thought of an engagement ring like a tattoo: you’d best be careful about letting someone else pick it out. So as marriage seemed inevitable, she described her ideal ring to Eric, then waited. In October 2000, they went on vacation to Atlantis, a Bahamas resort known for its scuba- and shark-diving adventures. Amanda was sure Eric would propose, but the vacation came and went, and nothing. “Oh, did you want to get engaged in the Bahamas?” Eric said once they were home. They went back to Atlantis and Eric proposed on the beach. Amanda left Paradise Island wearing six carats’ worth of diamonds in a custom-made platinum setting.
They announced their engagement in the newspapers, listing Eric as a “commercial paleontologist,” a job title Amanda thought was fine. Paleontology meant “the study of fossils,” did it not? Eric knew all the Latin names and owned more paleontology books than Amanda realized existed. She had never known anyone who read scientific papers for fun.
As they tried to decide where to make their life together, they never considered anywhere but Florida. Gainesville, a couple of hours north of Land O’ Lakes, felt familiar, right-sized, and affordable. They rented a house where they would live after the wedding, and in the meantime bought a patch of property and started thinking about building a place of their own.
In late September 2001, Eric and Amanda met their family and friends in Williamsburg. They had thought about postponing the wedding after 9/11, but decided to carry on. The night before the ceremony, they held a rehearsal dinner in historic Yorktown, on the York River, at the Watermen’s Museum, which honors those who make a living by water. Eric had warned Amanda that public speaking made him anxious and that he might be too shy to give a toast, so Amanda stood before the crowd, holding a flute of champagne. “Now, I’m sure everyone knows Eric is pretty quiet, but that’s one of my favorite parts about him,” she told everyone. “You see, Eric is an amazing listener and close observer. He sees things that crazy, hyper people like me usually miss.” She went on to say, “Not only does Eric not hold me back from my dreams, he makes them happen.”
The next day, Amanda walked down the aisle on her father’s arm at Williamsburg United Methodist Church, in a white strapless gown, her bouquet of orchids and baby pineapples studded with seashells that she and Eric had collected on diving trips. At the reception, at Kingsmill, a sand dollar crowned the bride’s cake. The groom’s cake was festooned with white-chocolate megalodon teeth.
Eric and Amanda honeymooned for weeks in French Polynesia, where Survivor, the reality TV show Amanda really wanted to be on, had just filmed its fourth season. When they got home to Gainesville, they moved into the rental cottage. Once Eric cleared their new land, it was so valuable they sold it and bought nine acres across the road.
There were now so many fossils on the market, it was possible to earn income buying and reselling other dealers’ finds. When Frank Garcia decided to unload more of his collection, which he liked to call his “retirement fund,” Eric bought it for $75,000 and resold it in parts. Two months after the wedding, he went digital and opened an eBay account under the handle floridafossils. He didn’t enjoy the administrative tedium of photographing and posting shark tooth after shark tooth, or shipping the merchandise, or keeping the books, or dealing with customers, but eBay was an easy new way to grow a global clientele.
Tucson remained the linchpin, though. Tucson was where the international museum buyers showed up with entourages, looking for spectacular specimens. “Especially in what I call the good old days, the early 1990s, there would be people from the museum in Tokyo walking around the show with eight helpers,” Andreas Kerner, another dealer, once said. “The first guy would point things out. The next guy would walk up and say, ‘Hold this for us.’ The next guy would be the one to write the checks. The next guy would pack it up.” Private and overseas museums and collectors were buying big. One American Diplodocus sold to the United Arab Emirates to be displayed at a Dubai mall. To scientists’ outrage, a complete Stegosaurus, found on private property in Wyoming, was sold to the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences in Okayama, Japan, by a commercial company in Utah. (The company supposedly made the sale contingent on scientific access, but the caveat did little to assuage those paleontologists who were sickened by the fact that U.S. law allowed the sale and export of vertebrate fossils at all.) A major buyer was Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed al-Thani, a Qatar royal known for burning through well over $1 billion in fine-art and other purchases for the emirate’s burgeoning museums. China alone was “building natural history museums like wildfire.”
As Eric worked on Florida Fossils, Amanda started Everything Earth, an interior design company. Her girlfriends had been urging her to go into business because the spaces she decorated were such an inviting mash-up of safari, beach house, bohemia, and proper Williamsburg. Tucson, vast and eclectic, gave her endless ideas. Why hang a ho-hum print on your wall when you could display a framed sea fan? “That’s art,” she liked to say. At Tucson she bought skins, furniture, and imported corals, along with beads for making jewelry. It never occurred to her to ask how materials were sourced; if it was pretty and interesting, she simply bought it, envisioning Everything Earth as “National Geographic for your house.” She acquired inventory with the intention of sending it right back out the door. She was the purger, Eric the keeper: he’d had to salvage Amanda’s college diploma from the garbage and talk her out of selling her wedding dress. “Eric lives in organized chaos,” Amanda once said. “I live in organized organization.”
After a successful Everything Earth trunk show, Amanda opened a booth at the Bizarre Bazaar, a popular crafts market that takes place in Richmond in the spring and at Christmas. One of the first sights shoppers saw when they walked into the cavernous showroom at the Richmond Raceway Complex was Everything Earth: woven baskets, cow skins, mercury-glass jars, handmade jewelry, and miscellaneous antlers, seashells, fossils, and starfish. In 2004, her first year as a vendor, Amanda won Best of Show.
That year, Guernsey’s, a New York auction company, held a natural history show at the Park Avenue Armory. The catalog featured a primer on paleontology. Amid the Lebanese shrimp imprints, Italian soft-shell crab, and the whale skeleton—one that P. T. Barnum bought during the Civil War—were dinosaur parts from Montana, Utah, and Oklahoma, but also from Argentina, China, and Mongolia, countries that banned the trade in fossils. In the acknowledgments, Guernsey’s thanked seven commercial hunters by name. Eric made a note of it.
David Herskowitz was the kind of guy who, a hundred and fifty years ago, would have succeeded in a place like Deadwoo
d, a hard, enterprising town built in the forested folds of the Black Hills of South Dakota. At Tucson and Denver, he tended to wear jeans, a frumpy T-shirt, and a faded baseball cap, his belly leading, his eyeglasses slipping to the end of his nose, his New Yawk accent audible across the room. One could just as easily imagine him on a street corner of the Old West in a slightly shabby top hat, conducting business as the passing horsecarts misted dust onto his three-piece suit.
Herskowitz, who was in his early fifties, lived with his phone to an ear the way auto dealers watch the showroom door. The caller might be either a buyer in want of a Torvosaurus or a hunter eager to sell. Herskowitz was terrible with names to a comical degree, but he had established such an exclusive clientele that people often thought of him first when it came time to do business.
The natural history broker came from the city: Flushing, Queens. Herskowitz’s grandfather manufactured uniforms and blue jeans, his father owned a liquor store, and his mother’s family had a pharmaceutical company in Manhattan. Herskowitz earned a college degree in hotel and restaurant management but ended up in the advertising and newspaper subscriptions business, where he did so well in the early 1980s that he started investing in real estate. One of his tenants was a Korean woman who didn’t seem to have much money but always paid her rent on time. One day Herskowitz asked a friend where the woman got her income and learned the tenant sold diamonds in Korea.
Herskowitz knew nothing about diamonds, but his Colombian girlfriend’s sister’s office assistant was a Korean woman who had worked in the diamond district of Manhattan. The assistant introduced Herskowitz to a Forty-Seventh Street appraiser who schooled him a little in the trade. Herskowitz started buying diamonds and having his new friend appraise them, then took the diamonds to Korea and sold them. When he found out the Koreans also wanted emeralds, off he went to Colombia.
The Dinosaur Artist Page 9