Sam the Phoenix ("The Cremation of Sam McGee")

mThere 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.

These are the first line of "The Cremation of Sam McGee", a very clever and funny poem by Robert W. Service. Good few lines, right? Foreshadowing, rhymes, personification, and everything. If you read the poem, you'll find that The Cremation of Sam McGee is very similar to "Pancho and Lefty" in many ways. Sure, it's about miners in the far north instead of bandits in Mexico, but miners and bandits are both bearded and unclean men spending all day trying to pocket some gold, after all. Similarly to "Pancho and Lefty", one of the two protagonists dies while the other survives, but Sam McGee is much more humourous, as you're soon to find out.

The poem itself tracks an unnamed narrator and his whiny, annoying friend Sam McGee. They work all day in the cold, cold, frozen north, mining for gold and mushing around the snow on dogsleds. Sam McGee is from nice, warm Tennessee and can't stand the cold up north. As the narrator said:
"If our eyes we'd close, the lashes froze, till sometimes we couldn't see
   it wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee."

You would think that he would just leave if he hated the cold so much, he would just move back to Tennessee, but apparently the gold mining prospects aren't as good down there, and his greed was enough to keep him from leaving. It didn't stop him from complaining though, or even from dying just to get a friend to warm him up for free. That's right, he died on the road with the narrator, and insisted he be cremated. He didn't die suddenly, either - he had plenty of time to guilt his narrator buddy before kicking the bucket. Not the best friend in the world, is he?

"Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:

"It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone."

 Yet 'tain't being dead—it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;

 So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

Now, the narrator could easily just empty Sam's pockets and dump him in an ice floe, but the narrator is apparently a man of honor. Or, as he put it, "a pal's last need is a thing to heed", even if the pal in question is a whiner who brought his death upon himself. So he took Sam's corpse onto his sled and started a-mushing through the snow. Luckily, the frozen north had no patrolling law officers back then, or the corpse would have drawn some attention. I mean, last time I had to go to a secluded place to burn a body, the law was on me in a heartbeat. Anyways, the poor narrator pulled that corpse for days on end, freezing to the bone as the huskies howled and the food ran low. He showed himself to be just about the most dependable person imaginable by just keeping going despite the hunger, cold, and fear. And finally it paid off, when he reached Lake Lebarge (which is actually called Lake Laberge), several kilometers north of Whitehorse. Here's what he saw:

 "Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;

   It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May."

   And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;

   Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

By 'derelict', he means an abandoned ship. There's where I would have said, "Nice find! Looting time! Maybe I can pay off this pointless trip!", but the narrator decided instead to burn it up to cremate his dead whiny buddy. So he pulled some planks up from the floor, gathered up some valuable coal that was lying around, and set them afire in the boiler. And once he had it going nice and well, he stuck Sam's body in it to burn. And it's after this that things start to get weird.

Because after standing outside in the cold to let Sam burn for a while, the narrator came back in to make sure the body-burning was complete. And instead of some burnt scraps of cloth and some charred bones (which is what one would expect), he finds something else entirely.

  "And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
   And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.
   It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm—
   Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

That's right people, Sam sent his most reliable friend through the freezing snows for days on end just to get warmed up from the cold. Nice of him, isn't it? That would be like me pretending to be dying just to get my friends to buy me an ice cream. And now he's risen phoenix-style from the grave to enjoy blissful warmth while his friend is left out in the cold to feel like a chump. I mean, the poem itself ends around there, but if you think it through, the narrator would still have to get all the way BACK. And he said earlier that "the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low".  And on top of everything else, he's now days behind on his gold-mining schedule and has just burned all the valuable wood and coal that he could sell to compensate for the trip. So the poem is supposed to make us feel joyful that Sam has risen as an augmented burning skeleton undead, but I think we should look at the narrator and his suffering instead of looking at all the nice stuff Sam got out the deal. I love the poem but dislike Sam, so to speak. I mean, if Sam were to pull that sort of scam on you, how would you feel?

-Paddywagon Man