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Meanwhile, ever since the boat had been completed in its oversized, ridiculous form, everybody who was intimate with the North Saskatchewan had been warning that the poor beast was just not suited to a shallow, fast-moving river. When the water is low the Queen can’t make her route, and sometimes she runs aground or has to put in early after encountering a new sandbar. When the water is too high, well, she can’t go out then, either, because Lord knows what logs and other disgorged flotsam might come tearing around the riverbend without warning.

Photo by Jason franson/Postmedia News

She can’t get underway when the river is iced over, and some years she doesn’t leave port at all: she has had more “farewell voyages” than a rock group. When she does go out on the river, the people gobbling beef Stroganoff on her deck get treated, at rare intervals, to the stimulating sight of a waterlogged corpse being hauled out of the river.

Every few years someone writes a letter to the paper pointing out that the Queen would have an easier time if the city built a weir downstream — i.e., if it threw still more money at a poorly executed aquatic concept. These appeals never get much traction. At this point in history, the sequential owners of the Queen understand that they are on their own. The city is not going to dredge the river or let them turn the boat into the kernel of a river-valley business-and-entertainment empire.

Photo by Ed Kaiser/Postmedia News

Yet it goes without saying that Edmontonians, though content with this laissez-faire policy, are fond of the Queen. Where others would see a boat, we see a generation of history, with its invisible scars. She is the incarnation of the constant struggle to maintain the balance in the river valley between human uses and wild character. She is us, trying to make a go of it in an inhospitable place.