CremeationofSamMcGeeThe Cremation of Sam McGee, by Robert W. Service, Illustrated by Ted Harrison • Greenwillow Books, 1987.

Somewhere in the depths of my memory, the phrase “the men who moil for gold” was locked away like a bit of ore, or maybe like a ghost ship, sighted on occasion and wondered over by those who noted its presence, only to forget it as it disappeared again, its meaning and origins shrouded in mystery.

So, thank you, Ted Harrison, for creating a book so bright and alluring that I pulled it off the shelf, reviving the memory not only of Robert W. Service’s phrase, but of the poem itself, which tells the tale of a poor Tennessee boy who freezes to death in the Yukon, and conveys it with a morbid humor.

Reading Service’s poem, I was struck by the way it captured a certain flavor of child-logic, where the dangers of the world (freezing to death in the Yukon, being bound by a promise to carry a man’s body on your sled), are inescapable and yet oddly comforting, making sense of the chaos of life and death and cold. Harrison’s illustration of Sam McGee, dead but finally warm as he basks in the flames inside the furnace of the Alice May, is both humerous and haunting, as liable to induce giggles as it is nightmares.

I was a very easily-frightened child. But I remember is the odd sort of comfort that could be encapsulated inside the fears that kept me awake at night, starting at every shadow. In the story Sam McGee, a very literal and sublunar afterlife awaits a cold and lonely Tennessee boy, providing him with comforts that his poor cold body can know and enjoy.

The Cremation of Sam McGee is the sort of book that will appeal to a very specific need in a child’s life, one that thrives songs and poems that make a joke of the dark without shying from its horrors. Children as young as eight and as old as twelve should enjoy this story, simply and straightforwardly told in Service’s evocative verse and illustrated by paintings that make a rainbow of the darkness. Younger children will enjoy the book as a read aloud, though the presence of the word ‘moil’ in their subconscious might cause mild confusion later in life.