Julius Bonello
Peoria, Illinois, United States

We had just finished an endoscopic procedure and the patient had left the room. We were scurrying around in the dark getting ready for the next patient. As ‘50s and ‘60s music  played in the background, we challenged each other to random trivia questions. Thinking that I was “better than the average bear,” I offered something that I knew no one would know:

 “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.”

I was stunned when, expecting no one to recognize the quote, a voice from across the darkened room responded with:

“The northern lights have seen queer sites but the queerest they ever did see, was that night on the Marge on Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee.”

“Where did you learn that?” I queried. She answered, “I had to memorize it in high school.” “Wow,” I said. “You’ve just given me hope in our education system.”

The Scottish poet Robert Service (1874–1958) was born in Preston, England. His family moved back to Scotland, and he spent his childhood in Glasgow. After college, following in his father’s footsteps, he became a bank clerk. A prodigious reader, he fell in love with the outdoors after reading Thoreau, Kipling, and B. Harte. “I wanted to be a cowboy,” he wrote in his autobiography.

At twenty-one, Service immigrated to Canada. He got a job as a bank clerk in British Columbia and lived with a family who had also emigrated from Scotland. Soon he tired of being inside again. He left British Columbia and while working odd jobs, he traveled south to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and as far south as Tijuana. Wishing to settle down, he returned to British Columbia and worked in the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Victoria. In 1904, they transferred him to Kamloops, British Columbia, and then to a branch in Whitehorse, Yukon. Whitehorse was a heavily prospected town along the Yukon River.

By the time Service arrived, the gold rush frenzy was over. However, Whitehorse, having a population of less than a thousand, brimmed with prospectors, miners, and the usual potpourri of people surrounding the nouveau riche: gamblers, whores, and schemers.

One night while walking home, he heard revelry coming from a saloon and thought of the phrase “boys whooping it up.” He went home and wrote the entire “Shooting of Dan McGrew” poem in twelve hours. One month later, he heard of a man who had to cremate his friend out in the wilderness. That night, walking in the woods, he wrote “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” Service then put these poems away. He continued to write over the next couple of months and then sent the collection to his father in Toronto to have the poems published. The book, The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses, was an immediate success.

In 1908, the bank transferred Service to Dawson, Yukon, where again he was in the company of old prospectors. Soon he had his second volume, Ballads of a Cheechako, which was published in 1908. It, too, was an overwhelming success. The next year the bank wanted to transfer Service back to Whitehorse, but he resigned. Now wealthy, he began to travel throughout Europe and America. He returned to Dawson in 1912 and wrote another collection of poems, Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.

He left the Yukon for good later that year. Over the next fifty years, until his death in 1958, Robert Service continued to write. His subjects ranged from his time in the Yukon, his vagabonding years in Europe, and to his job in the Red Cross during World War I. In all, Robert Service wrote almost 4,000 poems, two autobiographies, and six novels. To me and many others, he will be forever known as the “Bard of the North” and for his most famous early poems, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

I first became acquainted with Dan and Sam in 1967. My father told me that I had to get a summer job. As an adventurous soul and an avid camper/canoeist from Northern Minnesota, I wished to go further north. I wanted to go to Alaska. My father said he would help pay my way there, but my return would be on my own dime. That evening, I went to my friend’s home and stated that I was going to Alaska. From the next room a voice declared, “You’ll have to buy a copy of Robert Service poetry.” I replied, “Who is Robert Service?” At that, my friend’s father appeared in the doorway and in a rather loud, stentorian voice said, “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malemute Saloon …”   After he finished the first stanza of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” I asked him where he had learned that poem. He said, “I had to memorize it in high school.”

I flew to Alaska and worked all summer in Valdez. While I was there, I met the rough and tough characters that lived with wildlife in their backyards, mountains on the left, and ocean to the right. My time there, although brief, was indelible. On the weekends, my coworkers and I would take a car and discover the awesome beauty that Robert Service spoke of many times in his poems. By summer’s end, I did not have the funds to fly back, so I had to find alternate means. One of my coworkers had worked in a motel in town and somehow wrangled two seats on a Gray Line Tour company bus. The tour was going to Haines, Alaska, to catch a ferry with one stop before in Whitehorse, Yukon. Once again, I had a chance to meet people from a forgotten time where the wilderness had not yet been tamed by expansion and commerce. In Whitehorse, tourists were given tickets to a performance given by the Whitehorse Playhouse. The play The Cremation of Sam McGee was performed. I was thrilled. It was karma.

Three years later, I enrolled in medical school and opted for the three-and-a-half-year program. This gave me one vacation of six weeks. Of course, I went back to Alaska. This time I drove, 3,000 miles, which included 1,300 miles of a packed gravel road. My roommate and I went to Mt. McKinley Park and stayed for three days, even seeing seven grizzlies on the last day. Upon leaving the park, we asked the ranger for any outstanding site to see before we left. He stated we should go to the Malemute Saloon outside Fairbanks. “The original?” I asked. “No, the original burned down, but the original bar is still there.” Then he added, “Be sure to be there at midnight.”

We got to the Saloon about 10 pm and were able to stand at the original bar. Looking around, the crowd was rather rough, loud, and boisterous, and I could see that we were the only males there without a beard or tobacco in our hand, lip, or cheek. We enjoyed a couple of beers and were regaled with the surrounding conversations. Suddenly, the room was quiet. You actually could hear a pin drop. All eyes turned toward the back of the bar where a man with a long gray beard and a lighted candle emerged and sat down at a table. He opened a book and in a deep, clear, gravelly voice spoke: “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malemute Saloon.” He finished the entire poem in complete and eerie silence. He closed the book, blew out the candle, and exited the bar. The place went crazy. The loudest and longest hooting and hollering I have ever heard went on for at least five minutes. This episode showed me these folks had not changed much in the fifty years between Service’s visit and mine. His words had transported us to a place that was simple and natural without the pretense or the trappings of civilized life. It was awesome and a fitting end to my personal Robert Service story.

There is also a third Service poem, “The Quitter,” that has influenced me throughout my career, and it too has a history of its own. Sir Douglas Mawson (1882–1958), an Australian geologist, became the lead investigator in 1911 of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911–1914). Their goal was to make and record meteorological measurements and collect biologic and geologic samples along the northern coast of Antarctica. His party’s exploration was marred by the death of his two sledding partners. Turning back with no dogs and very little food, Sir Mawson continued his arduous trek back to his base camp. During his return, Mawson fell into a crevasse. Dangling above a dark, unknown depth, he held on to a fourteen-foot rope attached to his sled. He attempted once to climb out but fell back. He then thought of ending it all, by cutting himself free of his harness. In his autobiography, he states that the only thing that stopped him was his belief in providence and the last lines of a Robert Service verse, “The Quitter”:

“And though you come out of each grueling bout, all broken and beaten and scarred,
Just have one more try—it’s dead easy to die,
It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.”

Sir Mawson got out on his second try and returned to his base. A year later, he returned to Australia a hero.

This poem has been my go-to verse on many a night during my professional life. We have all had our metaphorical crevasses and, as a general and trauma surgeon, I have encountered my share of them. I’ve had many ups and downs in my career but never, thank God, as deep as Mawson‘s. These lines of Robert Service should be etched into our souls—they could save more lives. They have already saved one.