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
There are magical moments.

The man was a failure, harboring a self-described “aversion to strenuous forms of toil.” He left Scotland in 1896 to wander the Americas, engaging an assortment of menial jobs. He had sunk into society’s dregs, considered little more than a bum to be scorned. With hindsight colored by enormous ensuing success, poet Robert Service dismissed this period as, “the romance of destiny.”

In 1906, having accepted a bank job and transferred to Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, Service attended a social gathering where a “big mining man from Dawson, smoking a big cigar with a gilt band” told the story of a miner who had cremated his partner. Next morning, Service wrote ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ and tossed the manuscript into a desk drawer atop a growing pile of poems. Deciding to publish a volume of verse as Christmas gifts, Service sent his work to his father in Toronto, who carried it to Methodist Church Publishing, and thus a wilderness path led to literary legend. Though dismissed by the literati, Service’s popularity exploded over ensuing decades, Mark Twain’s self-deprecating assessment of his own work perhaps best explaining the poet’s appeal, “My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wind. Everybody drinks water.”

I stumbled across that path. Fascinated with adventure, wilderness, and treasure, when discovered fused in a gold rush, I quickly succumbed to ‘The Spell of the Yukon’. I drank deeply from a stream of Northern literature, encountering a dog named Buck and learning how not ‘To Build a Fire’. And I made acquaintance with Robert Service characters such as Dangerous Dan McGrew, Blasphemous Bill, and the unfortunate Mr. McGee.

In 1986 I traveled Yukon roads and afterward stumbled across the path of a ragtag team of gold miners who had once challenged for hockey’s Holy Grail. As a struggling writer I heard my own ‘Call of the Wild’ and wrote a novel about Dawson City’s forgotten Stanley Cup challenge to the Ottawa Silver Seven.

In 1997 I joined a cast of characters, a proverbial coterie of ‘The Men Who Don’t Fit In’, recreating the historic 4,000-mile journey the 1905 hockey team had undertaken. Determined to replicate the journey as accurately as possible, 20 snowmobiles and 4 dog teams retraced their mid-winter wilderness path, enduring brutal conditions from Dawson to Whitehorse. Twice hosted by First Nation communities, other nights were camped in tents, one on the banks of Stewart River seeing the temperature fall to forty degrees below zero.

We wrestled our way through hilly wilderness, following the recently marked Yukon Quest Dogsled Race trail. Accidents occurred; one sliced sideways into trees, stripping off his windshield. Others ran head-on into trees. Most could no longer use their right hands, paralyzed from hours suppressing accelerators in bitter cold. Some became frost bitten; another gave up. All looked forward to ending this arduous first leg of our re-enactment journey.

The last day before the lake was exciting, understanding only one night remained before an easy run across Lake Lebarge and up the Yukon River to Whitehorse warmth. Through vast bush fields and small hills we churned, the whine of the machines maddening after seven long days. Finally, I ran one long, gentle slope and topped a ridge, the expanse of lake materializing through trees below. I heard dogs hacking and men swearing, settling into our last camp on the shore of Lake Lebarge.

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Next morning, with sled packed and tied down, I paused at a morning campfire. I pulled my copy of ‘The Best of Robert Service’, turned to its renowned entry and read it, thoroughly appreciating, after a week in sub-zero temperatures, Sam McGee’s iconic line as he met his fiery fate, “since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”

I looked up, savoring the moment. I warmed a pen and wrote at the end of the poem, “Read campfire-side on a point jutting into Lake Lebarge, Saturday, March 8, 1997. Two dog teams just slid by, others wailing down the shore, ready to go. The lake mist covered, beautiful.”

Long enmeshed in Northern literature, long familiar with Service’s poetry, I had long yearned to travel distant trails and had finally been fortunate, in one Dawsonite’s words, to “see the Yukon the way most Yukon residents will never see it.” I was a kid who dreamed of putting words on paper in such fashion that others would want to read them, and a kid who by some fateful blessing had this day experienced a confluence of imagination and impossible dreams.

I was sitting with Sam McGee by a campfire, on the marge of Lake Lebarge.

There are magical moments.