I spent most of the following Monday feeling wounded, the
source of that being from having a dental appointment that morning. I didn’t
have the sense to book a time outside of my vacation days. As per usual, the dental
hygienist performing the cleaning service managed to poke at each and every
special acupressure combination of nerve endings along my gingiva, which made
me feel like I was being repeatedly struck in the face with a pick axe
throughout the ordeal. A migraine ensued after and stayed with me for rest of
the afternoon. More time wasted; not a good vacation day. I suppose it wasn’t
enough to already feel like a luckless loser for the day. I went to the casino
later in the evening to have it confirmed. I lost most of the small stakes that
I thought acceptable to part with, and that time passed quickly. I realized
then that I had to do something else with myself than handling kitchen knives,
reading/screen-watching, or waving bye-bye to my hard-earned money at the slots
and roulette table. I saw that another staycation was going to shove me into a
pit of misery. Lunch with my friend on Tuesday gave me a little time to
decompress as I examined my situation. I was made to see afterward that I have
always been shirking travel off in the guise of being responsible. Another
reason is that there isn’t much fun doing it alone anymore; or I’ve been hating
my own company enough to the point where I am starting to bore myself: a
symptom of something very wrong, I think. Whatever the case, I found myself
really having to leave this town, badly.
I packed a few essentials; Ella happily joined me in the car.
As I didn’t have any real plan, I chose to visit my folks first. If I got
nothing else done, I would have at least spent some time with them. Wherever
else I decided to go to, the Battlefords is not too far out of the way as a
jump off point: a better one if going north was feasible, and an acceptable
loss in highway time if I had to retrace any route back through and past home.
I used Wednesday afternoon, watching the news and weather channels, formulating
things. The process for narrowing down my destination decision was as such:
1.
The Weather Corridor – Forecasts for rain were for
the north and east, and I was getting chased by funnel cloud warnings from the
southeast. That left me with west or southwest if I wanted to find someplace
without inclemency.
2.
Geographical Variation – the idea of a vacation
is going to someplace that doesn’t look like home. Some people are content enough
with walking into another room for a change of scenery. Other people, like me,
need the entire landscape to change to feel like they’ve gotten away and
escaped to someplace. That’s a tough deal when one has been an inhabitant in an
area smack dab in the middle of the Canadian parkland/prairie . . . a region
that’s so expansive. There is the Boreal forest, but as I said, weather wasn’t
making going north an ideal choice, neither was my lack of camping gear. The
next closest options for going southwest were: Cyprus Hills (with an elevation
as high as that in Banff), or the Badlands. Next factor . . .
3.
My Six Hour Driving Radius – six hours in a
crammed in a vehicle in a day seems to be my absolute limit. After that, I start
having some adverse psychological effect from it, especially when I’m the one driving.
If I have bad company with me as a follow passenger, then it’s triply worse. They
risk being punched out and then abandoned in some ditch in the middle of
nowhere if they exhibit too many marked signs of stupidity or impudent
assholery for each and every minute approaching hour six, crammed in a vehicle
with me. Life is short. I travel to see new places and experience new things; so
sitting in a metal box (with toxic people), like a goddamned trapped rat, longer
than necessary, is wasted time. The trip between Saskatoon and Calgary is an
example of the longest one I can endure by car. If longer than that, then I
fly; using only three hours or so to take me to places in this country much
further away with less overall cost, hassle, and energy needed to attend to
driving. I’ll happily spend more money to buy more time to stay off a road. The
whole issue of me now being more prone to idiopathic thrombosis and
blood-clotting makes the matter of prolonged periods sitting/immobility a more
genuinely serious reason to avoid extra long of car rides. Cyprus and the
Badlands fall within that six-hour radius from the Battlefords.
4.
An Act of Rebellion Against Ignorance – as I sat
with my Dad, switching to the channel with Wheel
of Fortune for him to watch (and Jeopardy
for me after), I caught the last few minutes of the CBS nightly news which
showed a story that disgusted me as a person who appreciates progress and
education in science. I watched this story about some guy in Kentucky, who
built a supposedly full scale replica of Noah’s Ark for an amusement site. It
cost millions to get this thing made. The guy who founded this project is a
self-proclaimed Creationist, who truly believes that the Earth is only 6000
years old or so, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed together. He actually
has models of dinosaurs penned up along with other contemporary species in this
excessively ridiculous display. He, as an employer, actively discriminates by
making the workers there sign some sort of “statement of faith” to prove that
they are “Christian” enough to work there. He goes so far as to say that
evolution is a “junk science”, and this crazy tacky spectacle is the length he
is willing to go to refute and take a stand against it. You may just say “pshaw
. . . whatever, it’s just a goofy spectacle”. I would agree too if it weren’t
for another crazy issue about this damn stupid boat. The most disturbing issue
of it for me was that some of the millions that he used to build this wretched
monstrosity actually came directly from the state government of Kentucky itself,
i.e. the Kentucky taxpayers were pitching in a fortune to have this idiotic
thing built. It’s bad enough seeing that Kentucky is regarded as being one of
those have-not states in the USA and suffering for it, with fewer resources for
better healthcare, and an adequate education system*. To see this kind of insane
amount of money (in the high tens of millions) being squandered away by their
state government to sponsor the creation of something that takes away from
science education and promotes more ignorance to suit the whim of a lobby of biblical-literalist
right wing nut jobs** goes far beyond obscene in my mind. How did this guy
manage to con some government official to permit him access to this kind of money
for such a moronic endeavour? I admit to having some moments of a fantasy after
I saw that story - it was that of Neil Degrasse Tyson himself, going over there
to pop a cap in the ass of this ignorant bastard perpetuating this nonsense.
Thinking about Richard Dawkins storming over to this ark thing, and then beating
seven shades of shit out of this fundamentalist huckster with one of the limbs
torn off of the animatronic Noah mannequin was an entertaining visualization
too. It helped, in a way, to settle the question as to where I was going to go
then for my holiday for my narrowed down options. I chose to take a stand! I’d
then make a pilgrimage to the Badlands to use my tourist dollars to support
science. So, Drumheller ended up becoming my chosen destination.
I heeded my Mom’s advice. She told
that I really needed to take some time for myself. It meant surrendering the
dog to her care as I went on this trip: so I had one less thing to tend to, and
fewer problems, like finding lodgings that take pets. My car stereo quit working,
meaning that I had no tunes, or CBC radio to occupy my mind as I drove for so
long. I was a sort of on a true pilgrimage: just me, without my dog, driving
for a long time, no distractions, being alone with my own thoughts. Stray
thoughts slipped into my mind about those of whom I’d love to have riding
shotgun with me on such a venture. I thought about where I would go to in the
US if I ever took a spontaneous turn to head to the border (that is, if I
hadn’t procrastinated and gotten a valid passport). Given the current political
mayhem going on down there, the current currency exchange rate, the obscene
amount of (recent) gun violence, and the reflection about the types of mindsets
I’d be dealing with, like those who would allow and support something like the bizarro
Noah’s ark down in Kentucky, any curiosity about finding anything interesting
to do in the states extinguished pretty quickly. Those same reasons I just gave
for not heading over the border maybe are the same ones as to why I saw so many
vehicles with American license plates around where I was touring.I went to Drumheller a couple times before in my life: once as a kid who was awestruck with dinosaurs, and again as a twenty-something with university classes in zoology still fresh in my head to make me appreciate the experience even more. Now, with a little more life wisdom and knowledge at this stage of life, and some more conscientiousness of how to put big concepts in a whole new perspective, I thought it would do me well to see the place again before I become a fossil myself. Given the things I said before, what else can a nerd who is travelling alone with limited time really do?
I eventually made it there, and after touring the Royal Tyrrell Museum, and scrambling around the Hoo Doos for a while, I went to the first hotel I could find – more accurately, I went to the first hotel I spotted that didn’t look like it was slapped together with pieces of flotsam from a shipwreck. I passed by three other places that fit such a description. This place was a short walking distance from a place that sold cold off-sale beer - a nice bonus. I managed to claim the last of the vacant rooms there. I was given a whole room with two double queen beds. I guess, to the clerk, I looked like the sort that rolls around a lot. I discover that the day after was an event called the Passion Play of the Badlands, happening the next day: apparently, it is an affair that attracts more fundamentalist types from all over the continent, and such goers to this sort of thing snapped up most of the rooms. Aw Shit! Religious nuts to contend with?! I couldn’t help but to be bewildered by the irony of it all: a place with the richest bed of fossil evidence of dinosaurs in Canada, confirming their existence and extinction 65 million years ago, scientifically proving the workings of evolution; being swarmed by a clique of religious people, many of whom still believing in this myth of creationism, like that knob in Kentucky. They probably show this religious theatrical production here, just because out of all the places in Canada, this one perhaps has what looks most like the natural scenery of Golgotha of ancient Judea.
I couldn’t stay to be bothered by all this to witness how cheesy and tacky it would all be. I thought about proceeding to Calgary, but then realized that the Stampede starts the day after. I wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of finding a hotel room. Just as well, because my time wasn’t going to be used mingling around in a place celebrating country music and cowboy/rodeo culture***. I spent what little time I had left wandering the hills in the early morning, contemplating and meditating: about the massive explosions of both life and death that occurred here, captured in the layers of sandstone throughout this valley that act as chapters of a book capturing the history of all life on Earth in this region for many aeons. I thought about how I wouldn’t even have been here to witness all this if it weren’t for an asteroid wiping out these monstrous creatures 65 million years ago. If that rock was even a small percentage larger, the likelihood of any life existing on this planet today would be zero. The intricacies of cause and effect being quite overwhelming, as I sat on those rocks, thinking about courses of natural selection and what comes about for each beings’ evolution. All this was pondered, plus a great myriad of other things involving the natural catastrophes involving extinction . . . that are a hell of a lot more interesting and rational than some story of a flood and an old dude on a big boat full of animals.
I returned back to the Battlefords after another long drive. I was happily greeted by my own little dinosaur who was missing me: attacked with eager kisses from the Ellabooboosaurus. I stayed long enough for a reprieve from driving, and helped to do some DIY electrical work installing new fixtures in my folks’ home. I returned to my own place later that evening, happy to use my own bed.
More holiday time is due to me in August, and I’m debating whether or not it will be worth booking a flight somewhere east (if there are any cheap enough); it would be a thing I genuinely would like company for though. The places I have in mind are walking and bike tour intensive.
*- I found an infographic recently on Mental Floss, which compared the education level of each state in the USA which similarly corresponded to the level of education with a world nation on the United Nations Development Index. Kentucky's education level was most similar to that of Honduras.
**- I’m not bashing all religious
acts. Pray if you like to: if that, or meditation, really gives you a centred
mindset for empowering yourself to do better for yourself and others, I’ll even
encourage you to do such things. It all costs nothing to do, and it’s harmless
while you are sitting there still and silent doing it. However, when huge sums
of government money are being used for propagating mythology as fact, instead
of fostering true science education, and being diverted away from more socially
valuable “Christian” ways of helping people, like for instance, supporting and
equipping care homes for the elderly, sick, and disabled, it obviously becomes
an evident problem for everyone. I guess there is no such thing as separation
of Church and state down in Kentucky.
***- Some people want to relive
the bloody Wild West. I believe in living in a progressive, civilized, and
educated one, if you haven’t figured that out already.
