Beyond the Dragons

Badlands, Alberta

Medieval cartographers sometimes illustrated uncharted territory on maps, with dragons.

The phrase Hic Sunt Dracones (Here Be Dragons)was often written on the edge of charts, to warn sailors of the dangers of venturing into the unknown.

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This is an aerial view of our destination today. For the second time this week, Bear and I forged a trail into Alberta’s badlands.

The Red Deer River valley is just two hours drive from our place, but it still has wild, raw properties, evocative of the Age of Discovery.

I am happy you can join us on our journey, beyond the dragons.

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Our trek started at the Last Chance Saloon – so called because it is the last place to get a drink before you head into the badlands. Highway 10X from Drumheller follows the serpentine Rosebud River to the old mining town of Wayne. Eleven narrow bridges must be crossed to reach the landmark hotel/saloon in the shadow of Badlands hills.

We were late arriving, so Bear and I booked a room at the 110-year-old hotel and grabbed a table at the saloon before they closed for the night.

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The beer they served with my burger was a different matter. I have trouble deciding which craft beer to order when they are the only beers on the menu. With the waitress’s help, I chose a local lager.

The beer came in a lively coloured can with a little jam jar glass. When I poured it from the can into the jar, I mentioned to Bear that it reminded me of a pee sample at the doctor’s office, and I didn’t change my mind after I had a sip.

I only drank half a glass, the plant pot at our outdoor table drank the rest.

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We knew that staying at a century-old hotel might come with a few rough edges, but it wasn’t just the edges that were rough.

The room was tiny, the floors squeaked, the air was conditioned by a fan, and the communal toilet/shower was at the far end of the hall on the second floor.

Life, love, laughter, and law enforcement can be observed from a bar stool in either saloon.

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Every room in the hotel has a theme. Ours was the Harley Davidson room.

Which reminds me of a joke:

Q: How do you tell the difference between a Harley Davidson and a vacuum cleaner?

A: The position of the dirt bag. 😊

Being a Harley driver, I can get away with a joke like that.

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Drumheller Antique Museum

Is “Antique Museum” a pleonasm like “frozen ice”, a tautology like “unmarried bachelor”, or a simple redundancy like “unintentional mistake”?

Our neighbours back on the farm in Saskatchewan had a calf born with two heads but I never got to see it. I have regretted that shortcoming in my life experience for sixty years. But today, I got a close look at a Polycephalic (many headed) animal.

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There are strange things done in the midnight sun
      By the men who moil for gold;
  The Arctic trails have their secret tales
      That would make your blood run cold;
  The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
      But the queerest they ever did see
  Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
      I cremated Sam McGee…..

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.….

Excerpt from The Cremation of Sam McGee – Robert W. Service

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Sam McGee wasn’t from Tennessee, and he wasn’t cremated in the Yukon. William Samual McGee was an American prospector living in Whitehorse, Yukon in 1906. Robert W. Service lived there at the same time, working at a bank by day and writing poetry at night. Service was drafting a poem about a cremation that had taken place in a ship’s boiler. In the poem, the dead man was from Tennessee and Service needed a name that rhymed. He chose Sam McGee’s name from bank records at work.

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The Cremation of Sam McGee became an instant hit when it was published in 1907, earning Robert Service fame and fortune.

The real Sam McGee didn’t fare as well. He drifted from an unsuccessful prospecting career in the Yukon, to construction jobs across western Canada. He tried his hand at farming near Edmonton for a while, but that venture also failed. In the 1930s, with his health declining, McGee moved in with his daughter and her family near Beiseker, AB.

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The real Sam McGee returned to the Yukon as a tourist a few years before he died. He was shocked to discover that shops in Whitehorse were selling bags of his ashes as souvenirs.

Sam McGee is probably the only person on earth to buy a bag of his own cremation dust.

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C0₂

Unfortunately, we had to cut our Beyond the Dragons tour short. It wasn’t dinosaurs, or dragons, or two-headed beasts that drove us out of the badlands; it was carbon, in the form of forest fire smoke.

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Fires, which have been blotting out the sun the past few summers, are the direct or indirect result of careless human behaviour, over an extended period. The frequency and severity of these climate events are increasing, to the point that they have become a clear and present danger.

This August 13, 2024, The Guardian article quantifies the elevating effects of Canadian forest fires:  

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Dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago because of a catastrophic asteroid impact off the west coast of what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. Life on planet Earth carried on, but three quarters of earth’s creatures were wiped out by the effects of the 90-million-megaton explosion, tsunamis, and secondary climate consequences.

This August 14, 2024, CBC article offers updated insight into the asteroid event:

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Scientists have found no consequential asteroids or comets that could impact earth as far into space/time as they are able to predict. If we look after planet Earth, life will carry on until some far distant, unforeseeable cosmic event occurs.

But, if we don’t start making changes to the way we use carbon-based fuels, we will align our fate with T-rex.

We have a choice, and we must make it soon. We have the collective knowledge and resources to turn this thing around, but we must get started right away.

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The first step is for a majority of us to admit that we have a problem. Like an alcoholic, we cannot fix our substance dependence until we acknowledge that we have an addiction.

We will never get everyone to agree that we are poisoning ourselves, but once a majority is on side and we set our collective will to the task, the outer margins of our map to the future will extend …

… Beyond the Dragons

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