AN EXCAVATION IN THE BADLANDS

Other States of Mind, No. 20

One July day in 2012 I found myself at Dinosaur Provincial Park, northeast of Brooks, in the Albertan Badlands. I was looking at a quarry site excavated in 1913 by palaeontologist Charles Sternberg. I knew first of his work as a boy, over 50 years earlier, from my obsessive visits to the dinosaur galleries of the Victoria Museum in Ottawa. In those days, the skeletons of these huge creatures were set up towering above one, the actual flesh an imagination, the actual locomotion an object of speculative terror. I would stay for hours. I lived around the corner, on Argyle Street, and haunted the place; becoming so attached to it that, when my family bought a brand new home at the then outskirts of town, I bicycled along Rideau and Elgin Streets (in those long ago days when traffic was light and not murderous in intent) to feed my compulsion.

The corner of Argyle and Elgin, Ottawa, Ontario. We lived in the upper flat with the corner window. The Victoria Museum, now the Canadian Museum of Nature, across the street. (Photo: Hendrik Slegtenhorst, 23 January 2014)