A fierce new face can be seen floating in Miller Lake. This past Saturday, residents of Fall River gave a warm welcome to Dillon, the newest addition to Miller Lake’s dragon family. Dillon joins Emily, the already iconic dragon who has been residing in the lake for decades.
The Coast got to witness the fateful day the pair was released into their natural habitat, just along Highway 102 near the tip of the abandoned Scout camp.
Emily was released back into the water first (she’s removed at the end of each season, before the lake freezes over). Her crew anchored her smoothly and efficiently—this was not their first rodeo—and Dillon was lowered into the water next by his creators, John Robidoux, his wife Judy and their friend and fellow woodworker, Junior Gosse.
Each are members of the Nova Scotia Wildlife Carvers and Artists Association. The trio had Dillon on display at the association’s annual showcase earlier this month so the public could get up close and personal with him before his maiden voyage.
Robidoux and Gosse spent over 60 hours carving Dillon out of a large chunk of cedar. Dillon’s flashy colours and eye-catching paint job is courtesy of Judy.
“We just drove by it and it looks great in the water,” Robidoux told The Coast over the phone a couple of days after the release. “It looks really good and I couldn’t be happier.”
The history of Miller Lake’s dragons
Like all dragons, there is a fair bit of lore behind the creatures of Miller Lake.
Let’s go back to the beginning—the 1950s—when the Miller Lake dragon made its big debut as a humble log. The very first dragon was a fork-shaped stump protruding out of the water that someone later painted, highlighting its natural reptilian features.
In the 1970s, local resident Patti Snow began the tradition of adding different iterations of the dragon head to the water each spring. The first was Mortimer, who was sculpted from papier-mache. He vanished from the lake before the Snow family created the dragon we now know as Emily in the early 2000s.
In 2008, Emily was snatched from the lake and suspiciously recovered a few days later in a field in New Glasgow. I grew up in New Glasgow, and the word around town was that the dragon burglars were a group of teen boys from a high school rugby team. That was 15 years ago. Those culprits have grown up, some of them may be fathers now. I wonder if they have regrets.
You won’t want to try that shit with Dillon. According to Robidoux, there are two GPS trackers embedded beneath his woody flesh.
“So if somebody takes it, just know we’ll be there the next morning to get it back. And we’ll tell everybody in the land who took it,” he says.
Imagining Emily and Dillon’s future
Emily stans aren’t sure if she will accept Dillon as a mate. Right now, the pair is situated quite far from one another in the lake. Some of the folks at the release said that the two are still in their “courting phase,” so the distance between them has the potential to close with time.
Robidoux sees romance in the dragon’s future.
“Imagine that, next year, we put the two dragons just a little closer to each other,” he says. “And maybe in a couple of years, there might be new little dragons in there.”
Oh! Emily and Dillon babies. Imagine how cute they’d be!
But it would be terrifying if those babies appeared on their own. How scary do you think that would be for Robidoux and the Snow family if, on one humid and foggy August morning, there were suddenly half-a-dozen of Emily and Dillon’s tiny offspring ominously floating in the lake? And they weren’t there the night before?
Maybe they would have Emily’s eyes and Dillon’s teeth; and one by one, more of these little hybrid dragons would inexplicably appear in Miller Lake. Then, they’d start popping up in the adjacent Thomas Lake, then Lake Banook and then, oh my god, they’ve adapted to salt water and found their way into Halifax Harbour. The city would become overrun with the offspring of Dillon and Emily. And they’re hungry. It would be absolute mayhem. Their big, cartoonish eyes would be the last thing you’d see before they tear you to shreds with their beautifully hand-carved cedar teeth.
If my speculations are correct, our city’s waterways would be overtaken by hundreds, if not thousands, of charming, handmade dragon figurines by 2028.
May God help us all.
This article appears in May 1-31, 2023.
