Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope this dispatch finds you well; here’s something to keep you out of a tryptophan coma.

This story originally ran in a slightly different form in publication called County Highway. I think you’ll like it better this way, with these pictures.

Please enjoy!

Matt

Dinosaur World

Is a fallen Kong still King? Can a Kong who cannot stand still be a King? Is any royal ape, disarmed, rendered recumbent, really still a royal deserving of the title of King?

I wonder this as I shimmy up Kong’s flanks, scaling along the fallen Eighth Wonder of the World. The forty foot statue of the Great Ape ― once the largest in the world ― toppled a few years ago, losing the limb that once held an effigy of the Ayatollah dangling from a noose. This Kong can’t stretch necks anymore.

His right arm broke off in the fall, the left arm is grasped close to his body as if cradling a chest injury. The red eyes once lit by “Psycho Lights” from RadioShack are vacant now gazing skyward. Supine Kong, in this ruined Ozymandias state, looks scared, not scary.

I suppose Kong knows. Some part of him knows—that for him the end is near, just as the end once came for all but the concrete dinosaurs that now surround him. I’ve long been haunted by ghost reptiles and now visions of Roadside Thunder lizards in their glory days appear before my eyes. Here, Kong has fallen, but he once stood King, at the former home of Farwell’s Dinosaur Park, opened in 1967 by Ola Farwell. My name is Matt Farwell. Turns out—we’re kin.

I can see the whole park from up here. The Cavemen that once guarded the place are likewise crumbling; the suspension bridge connecting the park’s footpaths are un-passable, but some of the Dinosaurs are well preserved, as if in amber. There’s a two story creamy parasaurolophus with it’s face painted like Ziggy Stardust behind a tree.

This was once the largest roadside dinosaur park in the world, a place advertised by a small card size flyer featuring Ola—a big man with a shock of white hair dressed like Johnny Cash hand-feeding feeding his pets—a cat, dog, deer, and what appears to be a monkey with—“The Dinosaur Park”as superscript