The I-4 corridor is the most haunted place in Florida. Don’t let the strip malls, flashy billboards, and animated mascots fool you. These haunt in their own way; but further west, in the push of cow plots, strawberry farms, and weather-beaten “for sale” signs, the haunting becomes thicker.
It radiates from the waterlogged singlewides, plastic lawn furniture, and abandoned sinkholes. From the Bates RV (not to be confused with the Bates Motel), which is most easily recognized by the five Airstreams haphazardly buried nose-first in its yard, like an aluminum Stonehenge. From the dead armadillos on the side of the road, with their shoulders hunched and their hands folded in prayer. Dead silent prayer. From the scattered trash bags heaped like tortoises. Trashed trash. Trash squared. The haunting is squared here too.
I used to make this trek regularly as a child, outrunning the sun in the early days of Tampa’s Lowry Park and Busch Gardens. Back then, theme parks were about cheap costumes and simple rides, imagination and faintly hinted-at possibility. Now, all fun has to be spoon-fed. With an electric spoon. Maybe that is what has drawn me to the dinosaurs. Dinosaur World, to be precise. It isn’t an amusement park or a prehistoric zoo. In fact, I suspect nothing within it even moves. It’s simply a patch of land off I-4, stocked with life-size plastic dinosaurs, and it seems to require a lot of imagination with little-to-no possibility. A few of the park’s biggest mascots lean out over the interstate, attempting a smile. True, they can’t compete with dapper mice or revolving killer whales. But they’re trying.
Though I have passed Dinosaur World often, I never had the pity to stop. Even with my fertile imagination, left over from childhood, these model dinosaurs seemed hardly believable. My dinosaur world was dizzying with the heavy thuds of running herds and the crisp whipping of wings in flight. It was not this, a slideshow told in stills from a single angle.
I finally arrive under the dinosaurs’ sad smiles.
It is hard to imagine a time when Dinosaur World was new. Given its subject matter, I suppose that wasn’t its goal. The park’s exterior sign and the token T-Rex in front of it had both faded into an orange sandstone, an evolutionary camouflage that couldn’t be good for business. Age warped and sagged every letter, such that the whole scene seemed to slightly frown. Or as if it had exhaled long ago but never bothered to breathe in again.
I stop in the potholed parking lot and walk to the entrance, where the teenage ticket-taker is the only sign of life. He chews gum obnoxiously and takes my money without removing the ear buds to his iPhone. In his little plastic booth, fenced in and cut off, he could have been his own exhibit. “American Adolescent Male. Information Age.”
“It’s just you and them today,” he shouts too loudly as he shoves a ticket under the plexiglass. He never makes eye contact.
“Thanks,” I mouth. Why waste my breath. The dinosaurs were my destination.
And, by the look of the park, they were clearly forsaken.
A faux stone plaster archway leads down a long, thin boardwalk to the skeletal retention pond in the heart of the park. The faded, plastic map shows a single loop around the water, shaped like a needle whose eye had threaded herds of dinosaurs, but this turns out to be a mere veneer of logic. In truth, the archway and boardwalk open up into a haphazard labyrinth of cement pathways that criss-cross the dinosaurs and the pond. Here, the ferns blanket the ground while the oaks’ gnarled knuckles wrestle with the roots of the cypresses, propped up like hand on its fingertips. The pines stand at attention while some hungry kudzu licks the door of a rusty maintenance shed, swinging slightly ajar. I close it, to keep the dinosaurs out.
An apatosaurus is the first to greet me, with his foot slightly raised, as if he were mid-step. Most visitors would call this creature a brontosaurus, a fictional dinosaur coined in the petty Bone Wars of the late 19th century, which pitted scientist against scientist in a race to colonize the past. I notice that despite his cheaply artificial body, his eyes are deep and authentic. They almost look real.
Next comes a spinosaurus, the largest known dinosaur, even larger than the park’s hallmark T-Rex; but he appears tame, worn out from standing still for so long. The paint on his feet is flaking off like old nail polish, and the tiny spines on the crown of his head stick up like thorns.
There’s a raptor exhibit, too, with a pterodactyl, dripping some cheap Fire Engine Red paint from its side, suspended taut by cables across the pond. Two punctures, one on each wing, hold him in place, while his feet drag behind, gently folded. His head hangs slightly down and his eyes, too, look sad. Even when the wind blows over him, he doesn’t flutter. In the corner of the raptors, I spot a plastic trashcan, molded into the shape of a velociraptor. Its mouth is stuck slightly open, with its black plastic bag spilling out. You were to shove the garbage down its throat. Of all the disguises trash can take, this one seems most appropriate, swallowed down by the past.
At the farthest end of the park, I discern the tyrannosaurus rex family, gathered around some finger of the drainage creek that once fed into the pond. One’s snarling jaw hangs slightly over the walkway, but despite this, the T-Rex seems the docile seesaw of dinosaurs, tipping his head and tail on the fulcrum of his thick thighs. His tottering makes him seem more helpless than threatening, subject to the whims of schoolboys’ riding him. Seen from the ground, his tiny cupped hands could also be the armadillo’s, even though they’re too short to fold properly in prayer. This one is only half-crucified, with a bolt missing from its left claw.
As a child in what was then rural Orlando, I used to imagine that I found a dinosaur skeleton in my backyard. And because I discovered it, a new species native to Florida, I could name it after me: Aaronosaurus. I could even picture him, all the qualities he’d need to survive the Florida swamps: a long and dexterous tail for swimming, a lean body to float, and narrow, webbed feet for the wetlands. But, of course, no dinosaur has ever been found in Florida.
Except for these. And these dinosaurs wouldn’t last five minutes in the Florida interior. Their thick stumps of legs would get sucked below the marsh, pinned down to their thighs, and their armadillo hands would be useless for treading water. Their bulky tails wouldn’t fit between the roots of the cypresses, and they’d do terror to the spidery roots of the dogwood. Here, they were out of place, and out of time.
I wind toward what I think is the end of the park, where the pine needles littering the path seem like a thousand compass needles, all quivering toward different norths. I keep the retention pond, cradling all the dinosaurs, on my left as a bearing. It takes great skill to have such a pathetic retention pond in Florida. Usually no place is safe from runoff. It must all be in the aquifer beneath, carving out of the limestone one more underground cavern to haunt Florida’s underbelly.
To return to the beginning, I shuffle my feet up the small berm flanking the pond, next to a rogue triceratops who has escaped his herd. The archway and boardwalk that led me into this world should be able to funnel me out, but I can’t find them.
Then, as if to at once announce and heighten my predicament, the deep, heavy, haunting trumpet of thunder blows through the humid air. It sounds the clockwork deluge that marks nearly every day of a Florida summer. I should have known.
In seconds, sheets of water pound the cadaverous eye of the needle, and soon nothing is dry. The ferns, cypresses, and oaks. The dinosaurs and their doppleganger trashcans. The pond itself. They all shiver and sag under the rain’s assault. It seems far thicker than usual, almost preternatural, and shows no sign of letting up. Shelter would be pointless now, and I couldn’t find it even if it weren’t. The water climbs the side of the pond and begins to pool where I and the triceratops are standing. Within a minute we sink one, two inches deep.
When the pond is swollen with the flood, I begin to feel the dirt beneath me gravitate towards its center. The weight of the beasts presses hard on its crust until the earth below crumbles away and all collapses into a hellish sinkhole. Suddenly, its sedimentary circles, etched out by time, gape before me. I’m able to slosh further up the berm, but the rest are doomed. The triceratops sinks until his patch-quilt stomach grazes the waterline. The torrents push against the T-Rexes’ squat stance, while one apatosaurus’s foot is already swallowed. Soon only the spinosaurus’s fan is visible, cutting the surface like a shark’s fin. Water pours into the velociraptor’s bin, while the pteradactyl’s wings churn a wake in the flood, and his cables vibrate with the tension. The whole scene filters through the warped prism of the water.
But the dinosaurs’ demise is not so quick. For, as soon as they are unhitched from their stations — unbolted and free — a spell seems to lift, and I see them move.
The triceratops rears up, treading the air ferociously. He lasts only a moment before he topples over into the surge, his broad crown crashing fantastically onto the surface. His two horns quicky spiral into the chasm.
Nearby, the apatosaurus’s elephantine legs try to paddle against the current while his neck writhes like a snake hung from a tree. In desperation, he turns his small head upward to keep his nose above the spray. But he cannot. He goes down with a gasp.
The T-Rex’s lone bolt is uncoupled and he is swept from his bent knees, plunges backwards, and rolls into the flood. He tries to doggie paddle toward me, his glassy eyes alive with terror, but his heavy head overtakes him and he too sinks helplessly into the earth.
Overhead, the pteradactyl’s cables snap, and for a moment he frantically takes flight. But his rusty wings, stiff from disuse, can’t beat fast enough, and he tumbles wing over wing into a swirl.
Eventually, the waves fold all the dinosaurs in.
Then, only the marshy sludge of the berm remains. Only the berm and my own disbelief. The rain moves on, and the scene stills. The retention pond peacefully laps its grassy side, and the archway and boardwalk barely peak over the waterline. In amazement, I trudge back to the Information Age.
As I approach, soaked to the bone and trembling, the American Adolescent Male turns around. “Dude, where are all the dinosaurs?!” he cries, showing more emotion than I thought him capable of.
I pause to think where, exactly, they have gone. “Home” is all I reply.
Cameron Hunt McNabb is an assistant professor of English at Southeastern University, and has also taught at the University of South Florida and the University of Tampa. She has published articles on medieval and early modern literature in both academic journals and popular venues, and has published short stories set in her home state of Florida in the Tampa Review Online and Deep South.
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2015.