This is the fifth leg of this tour. To read the fourth leg, click here.
South on US 19 a giant dinosaur waits. I first found it as a kid, when my dad had a construction job at nearby Timber Pines. He worked for Scarborough Construction, the company that installed most of the water and sewer lines in central west Florida. The parent company, Weyerhauser, sent me through college on a scholarship, and I try not to focus too much on the fact that the company that had an active part in resurfacing much of Florida's landscape paid for the bulk of the studies that led me to fall in love with the parts of the state they were actively destroying.
Nevertheless, I was going into sixth grade and Scarborough paid for the guys on the construction crew to stay the week in Weeki Wachee, so my mom and I spent a few days hanging out on the the-then deserted stretch of US 19. We visited the brand-new Kmart, went to the pool, and visited the mermaids. She also took me into a taxidermists' – I guess you'd call it a shop, right? – and I stood, transfixed by all the animals rooted forever in death.
My favorite thing (after the mermaids, of course) was the great brown and green, plaster dinosaur. The hulking giant used to signal a Sinclair gas station but those, too, died out. Today an auto service station, Harold's, changes water pumps and rotates tires beneath the belly of the beast. It's not a traditional tourist attraction, but that doesn't mean people don't stop and take pictures. I have a painting of Dino in my study, and if the brute ever topples, to storm or sprawl, US 19's metamorphosis from sleepy two-lane road to clotted arterial highway will be sadly complete.
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