Gaps in child care, my day off, I borrow a car and the daughter decides she wants to go to Drumheller to look for dinosaur bones. This is fine, I try somewhat to talk her out of it, suggest maybe quartz crystals or trilobites up at Lake Louise, but she's decided.
It's going to be a hot day. First stop Drumheller, we check out the Salvation Army (I have this persistent vision of great treasures lying unrecognized in rural thrift shops), nothing, then a quick sandwich and we're off.
Horseshoe Canyon, we've a route we take through the badlands, the flat tops and hoodoos, and when we get far enough back we begin looking.
No great finds, a few pieces of bone, some sticking out and weathered into a thousand pieces, if we were professionals we might dig and look further, but it's not legal in Alberta. We find a number of small amber beads, brilliant gemmy yellow with the weathered white crust, a (relatively) large piece at almost a full centimeter in length, the amber here, like the bone, is poorly fossilized, crumbles easily, it's pretty and curious but you couldn't make jewelry from it.
Then home, we vary the route to bypass construction, through small towns where kids play in the bleak, hot afternoon prairie sun, it reminds me of my childhood, the dead hours between noon and 6 or 7 PM when nothing could be done for the heat, the trees cast no shadows, the children would pace bored upon the street, looking for something, anything to do, in the evening, that's a different story, it's cool, there might be thundershowers or great buildups of dark cumulus clouds, an aerial landscape to compensate for the boredom of the prairie landscape, there would be gangs of neighborhood kids gathered for great games of "Kick the Can" or "hide and Seek", but the afternoon, the tortuous long afternoons of summer, they were death.