Now THAT'S a valley floor
It’s not every day I take a job to go international, much less in Canada (too polite to tolerate me, obviously). But then again, it’s not every day I’m invited to experience the wonder of riding up a famous and deadly (in its day, and that day was 1903) rock slide.
That’s how I came to be in the town of Frank, Alberta, Canada.
The amazing thing about Frank today is the silence. Especially juxtaposed with the certain thundering loudness of a rockslide. But then I realized that this juxtaposition wasn’t taking into account that Canada is mostly empty, and thus silent, and that Frank had a hundred people die in the slide, which wouldn’t do anything to help Canada’s relative emptiness or quiet airs. Dead people are the most silent kind, after all.
Frank Slide covered something like two square miles of valley floor when it was done. Think about that. And according to reports, the slab of rock that broke free was approximately 650 m high, 900 m wide, and 150 m thick—whatever those measurements mean in American—anyway it sounds pretty huge.
I was hired to ride as far up Frank Slide as I physically could manage, then to pin a flag in the ground with the initials FPR on it. That stands for Franklin Patrick Russell—apparently a former major league baseball player whose unique slide into second base—a wobbly sideways crawl intended to make second-basemen and shortstops miss tagging him—was dubbed the Frank Slide by his teammates and fans. I guess when Frank found out about the other Frank Slide, he felt he had to connect the two with his mark.
Frank is now a successful owner of a car dealership in Detroit (believe it or not, they exist), and thus has lots of money but not a lot of time to perform flag placements in Canada. Thus, hiring me.
All went off without a hitch. Those rockslides are pretty difficult to ride on because of the shaky, crumbly earth, even after a hundred-some-odd years, but I forged my way quite a distance up the slide and pinned that flag in like it was what I was born to do.
Like a more permanent flag, but really the same idea
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