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Dinosaur Park "Laughing stock: cattle with a sense
of humor." Near the village of Rosemary, on a tabletop-flat road, we passed a road warning sign: Steep Downhill. "Get a load of that!" I chuckled at the absurdity. "Cripes, there's not even a hill in the vicinity, let alone a steep one!" "I think they mean that dip," Sharon said, motioning to a barely perceptible undulation in the road surface. "It's darn flat around this part of the prairies," she contended, gazing out at the horizon in all four directions. "Refreshing when the road ripples now and then." "Even a corner is cause for celebration," Sue laughed.
The sun bristled in a hot blue sky. We stopped in Rosemary outside Harry's General Store. I bought a root beer Popsicle, and asked Craig, the owner of Harry's General Store: "What's with the 'steep hill' sign back there?" "Ah," Craig responded, "some highway worker spilled his coffee one morning when he hit the dip. 'Jeez,' he said, 'we better put a sign up.'" "Ah, ha, that explains it," I said, and shuffled outside. Sitting curbside, opposite Harry's General Store, we felt as if we were in a sauna as the temperature approached broil. Lucky for us, Harry's had a sale on Popsicles. I did my best to consume the entire lot myself. With Sharon and Sue's help, we polished off Craig's complete inventory. Time to move on to Fudgesicles! We trooped back inside the general store. "When's your next delivery of ice cream products?" Sue asked, noticing with alarm that we were nearing the bottom of the bin. "Oh, probably in a day or two," Craig figured, glancing outside at the glaring sun. "Don't worry about it though ... eat as many as you like." While I paid for the last remaining Fudgesicle, a cowpuncher waltzed in on the heels of his scuffed cowboy boots. He picked out a pair of new leather work gloves, waved them at Craig, and strode toward the door. "Add them to my tab," he spat in a crisp tone as he passed the till without paying. Amazing! A place in the world that still ran tabs? "How do I get a tab?" I asked. "I'm planning on eating your entire stock of Revels next." "All you have to do is ask," Craig said. "It's been a tradition at Harry's General Store for over 50 years now ... from when my dad, Harry, owned the store." He paused with a wide smile. "It's rather hard to break the habit. People seem to like it - a lot." Impressive. A bastion still existed where folks trusted each other? What would we discover next? "Is there somewhere I can fill my water bottle?" Sharon asked in a rather sticky voice. Craig whipped the bottle from her hand and flitted to a sink at the rear of the store ... leaving his cash register wide open, money visible. Being a hardened urbanite, his naïveté shocked me. I mentioned it to Craig on his return. "I wasn't too worried," he responded with a wink. "Just how far ahead of me on a bike do you think you could have made it, anyway?" Okay, he had a point. It still boggled my mind though. Sharon, Sue, and I moved outdoors to a bench to enjoy the heat - and another round of Revels. Craig swished out the door. "I'm off to the post office," he sang out. "Answer the phone if it rings, will ya?" "Sure!" we chorused.
"Where do you hide your washrooms?" I asked Craig when he returned from the post office. "At the bakery," he replied. "Two doors down." "What!" we gasped. "There's a bakery in town?" We had been upwind the entire time. "Uh, excuse us," Sharon said, abdicating our phone answering duties. "I think it's time we moved on to our second course." "Is it okay if we leave our bikes here?" I asked. "No problem," Craig replied. "If anyone wants to buy them I'll just deduct the amount from your tab." Still chuckling at Craig's sense of humour we entered Rosemary's scrumptious-smelling bakery. Lynn, the afternoon counter person, laughed when I requested "one of everything." As she filled my order, I asked her how the town got its name. "Rosemary is named after the Queen's cousin," she said. "Really? The Queen has a cousin named Rosemary?" "Oh, yes," Lynn replied. "Other towns in the area are named for Royalty too ... Patricia, Duchess, Countess...." Hmmm. Maybe that accounted for the royal treatment we were receiving in Rosemary? After taste-testing at least one of each baked goodie, we ambled back to Harry's General Store and resumed our positions on the bench. We were beginning to feel like regulars with our tab and all. A gritty elderly farmer pulled up to the store's gas pump. He sprang from the battered Subaru as if he had hit the eject button, grabbed a gas pump nozzle and shoved it deep into the vehicle's filler hole. When he squeezed the pump's trigger ... fuel sloshed onto the ground! I could tell right off there was some sort of problem. The old feller, confounded, knelt and peered under his auto. "I'll be...," he mumbled, flabbergasted, and rubbed his grizzled chin. "There's no tank!" He stood upright and removed the gas pump nozzle from the filler neck. From where I sat I could see daylight through the opening. The old geezer stooped and put his eye to the filler hole, peering into it like a lad intently watching a World Series ball game through a knothole or a youngster engrossed in peeking through a keyhole as an older sister undressed. "Yep," he nodded after a long while, "that confirms it. No tank." Craig came out to check on the situation. "I just bought it yesterday," the old farmer told him. "I guess you got a good deal on it then," Craig deadpanned. "What does it run on? Air?" The old farmer circled the Subaru twice, wondering if he'd been bamboozled. On his second go-around he discovered another gas flap. "Let's see what's behind door Number Two," he chuckled, and flipped open the cover. "Well, the good news is," he reported, "I can't see clear through this time." The old codger pumped fuel into the second orifice, keeping a wary eye on the fuel-soaked ground as if this one too, might at any second, begin gushing like an out-of-control oil well. Craig uncoiled a rubber garden hose and sprayed away the spilled gasoline. "Just in case old Farley comes by," he said. "Wouldn't want the old feller to quit smoking that way."
Craig didn't have any takers on our loaded touring bikes. "Guess we'll settle our tab and head out of Dodge," I said. We planned to spend the next couple of days in the Badlands Dinosaur Provincial Park - one of only a handful of Canadian sites to make the World Heritage list. (Another in Alberta is Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, located near Fort Macleod - it's one of the world's oldest and best-preserved buffalo jumps known to exist. Indians used the Jump for more than 5,500 years to hunt bison by stampeding them over a cliff. I thought I'd like to work at the interpretive centre for a summer ... just so I could answer the phone, "Hello. Head-Smashed-In, may I help you?") Recalling our 'Hussar Hunger,' we went for the gusto, stocking up on groceries. Satisfied we weren't going to starve anytime soon, we saddled up and spurred down the road to Duchess. The prairies continued, flatter than a pancake. "Makes me hungry just looking at it," Sharon said. I'd probably want some syrup to go with it, I thought. But then I'd get all sticky and want to take a bath.... A sea of blue flax, divided by a strip of black asphalt, waved in fields as far as the eye could see. White and yellow wild clover peppered the roadsides. Cattails poked brown tips from occasional man-made marshes. Sprinklers irrigated crops, pumping water from a canal system controlled by mini-locks. In Duchess, Sharon spotted a sign for a meat shop. "Check if they have sliced turkey," she prompted. It didn't look like a deli to me, but I dutifully entered the shop. A half-dozen brawny men sat around a table wrapping ground beef. Raw meat clung to their muscular forearms. Another fellow with a big knife trimmed an upside down hanging side of cow into giant steaks - nary a feather in sight. "Um," I said with some hesitation, "you don't have turkey here, do you?" They looked insulted. "No poultry here, son," one replied. "You're in Alberta beef country, boy," another bull-necked worker stated flatly. A weak smile pursed my lips. Behooved, I thanked them, exited in some haste, and nearly smacked into the tailgate of a pickup parked in front. It sported a bumper sticker: Support the beef industry. Run over a chicken. "No turkey?" Sharon asked on my empty-handed return. "Nope! Not a one," I beefed. "And they don't play kd lang in there either."
Frying in the sun, slugging it out with a pugnacious headwind, we arrived at Dinosaur Corner feeling as dry as a hunk of old cowhide. Ranchers' brands emblazoned picnic tables. Make no mistake about it: we were in cattle country. Toward Dinosaur Provincial Park, the prairie continued flat and brown. Where are they hiding these so-called 'Badlands'? I wondered. As we pedalled closer to Dinosaur Provincial Park, shallow ravines, arroyos, and coulees hinted of something different. Sandstone spires and pinnacles replaced the endless expanses of farmland we had cycled through for the past week. The asphalt ended without warning. We reined to a stop at the precipice, and gaped into a vast cauldron of murky witches' brew, stunned into silence by the enormity of the spectacle spreading below us. An outrageous sunken bowl filled with daring wind and water carved stone formations - a wild west scene more dramatic than any John Wayne movie backdrop. Mystified, breathless, and wide-eyed, we stared across the lip of the bowl. Small settlements and clumps of trees perched on the prairie's edge - all seeming about to fall face-first into the great abyss. Gazing down at the vast sunken treasure trove gouged deep within the magnitude of windswept prairie, my thoughts surprised me: It was the man-made structures amongst the incredible natural wonders that seemed foreign. Beneath an indigo sky, I stood in awe, contemplating the tranquility, imagining a time when dinosaurs roamed there only 75 million years ago. Stark hoodoos, streaked with intermixed layers of chocolate browns, mustard yellows, burnt oranges, oxide reds, and coffee-with-cream tans, marched before us, holding tight their secrets of earth's past. It was as if time had stood still. I snapped a photo, locking a phase of geology into nevermore erosion. Inspired, we lurched down a steep gravel road, bumping over a surface that would have made a washboard proud. We gripped our brake levers in hopes we didn't build up too much bone-shaking speed and become prematurely extinct ourselves. Besides, we wouldn't want to pass the mushroom shaped hoodoos, thousands of years in the making, too quickly! Sand Piper Creek, our campground location, peeped into view. Not a sandpiper in sight. Sandflies and mosquitoes, however, buzzed without relent, attacking ears, eyes, and necks. Any exposed skin was fair game. Some of the more adventurous pilots even flew up our noses. "Maybe they should have named it Sand Fly Creek," I cried, slathering on copious amounts of insect repellent. Still, I swatted away clouds of biting pests. I was beginning to formulate my own theory as to the real reason why dinosaurs became extinct. "This bug spray is like candy to them!" Sharon hollered. "I'm a deet man," I sang, slapping on more bug dope. Sue, entertaining her own personal gnat groupies with a flashy little two-step, frowned. "Are we having fun yet?" |
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