The Art of the Brick

79

80

He would take us on field trips—not to the

zoo orthe other typical sites, but all the way

to a cave in the mountains, for days. He’d

mention offhand, “Oh,and by the way there

are bats, so you’ve got to bring a tarp with you

so you don’t get bat guano all over you while

you’re sleeping.”

That’s stuff that changes your life as an eighth

grader.

One of Mr. James’s more grotesque assignments

prepared me for Dinosaur. He asked all of his

students to find a dead animal, then strip its

flesh and reconstruct its skeleton. I’d found a

dead beaver by the side of the road, so that

became my project. Do you know how to strip

the skin and flesh off a beaver? You’ve got to

boil it on your mother’s stove top. So I did that.

Luckily, I had very supportive parents.

81

82

I went along with Mr. James, in the summer

of ’88, to the Oregon Institute of Marine

Biology on a summer course. Most of my job

was reconstructing a skeleton from a dead

California sea lion for a museum. The Institute

had a walk-in freezer, like a butcher’s freezer,

and inside there was a whale carcass, a great

white shark, and a few sea lions. Now, sea lions

are pretty big, and they’re covered in blubber,

which you’ve got to cut off with a chainsaw.

(You could euphemistically call this step a dirty

job.) Then you’ve got to boil the body in giant

cauldrons so all the flesh falls off, and finally

you’ve got to piece all the bones together

again to make the skeleton.

That summer, I completed the reconstruction

of the sea lion’s skeleton, and I also did a

brown pelican. I hope they’re still in natural-

history museums somewhere. So when it came

to Dinosaur, I knew what it took to create a

skeleton. It took me about three months to do

Dinosaur—about the same time it took me to

do the sea lion!

83