It's not fraud, it's creative!

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. I mean, there still aren’t. But don’t tell the folks at Marketing that. Of course, if they have two brain cells to rub together, they have to have realized it. But then again, my sister is over there and well ... that may not have been the case.

But, ultimately, the truth didn't matter. The tickets did. And the slogan "there weren't always dragons in the Valley" sold a lot better than "Wild and Wonderful" ever did. And the Department needed the money. Every year, the costs of taking care of the parks of West Virginia grew in costs, yet state and federal law capped the amount we could charge for tickets. We used to offset the revenue from the licensing of lands for various gas exploration projects and mining, but the mines were tapped out and demand for gas was declining - at least here. They say it's different out West, but on the East Coast, there were other, cheaper sources of fuel. Heck, a lot of the workers didn't want to come out to West Virginia to work, so they found ways to stay where they are.

But you didn't come here to listen to an old man grumble, you came to listen to solutions! And what a doozy of a solution we thought up. Of course, we were drunk, but then the best days of my life have usually involved alcohol. A forest fire had just swept through a section of Canaan Valley in the northeast section of the state. Melvin and I had just done a tour of the affected region and were sitting at a bar in a nearby town and talking about it.

"A forest fire! Here, in West Virginia of all places!" Melvin shook his head. "That's the sort of thing you hear about out West. How the devil did it get to be so dry here?!"

Now, I had always been a bit of a nerd, but I'm still blaming the ale I had in my hands. I just chuckled at Melvin's comment. "It looked like a dragon had swept through the area." He looked at me, perplexed and I waved my hand. "You know, how there were all these straight lines, like a dragon had flown over, strafing the ground with the flames. Like in the movies!"

Melvin just looked at me, not saying a word for moment. Then he laughed and shook his head. "Yeah, sure bud. You have some imagination. But yeah, I bet people would have loved to see that! They spend enough money going to those movies. Imagine seeing one in real life!"

"Or maybe just having the opportunity to track one..."

And there it was, a drunken conversation that was the genesis of an idea. I wasn't sure where I was going with it, and the conversation petered out at that point. I forget what else we talked about that evening, but the idea of a real-life dragon had captured my attention and it was what I was thinking about as I went home that evening. I turned on the TV to watch the news, as I always needed something to settle me down after being out. But that night, I couldn't help but notice: this was the local news but not once did they mention the forest fire in the park! Gossip news out of Hollywood, gossip news out of DC ... OK the updates on the war were probably pretty important. And a third convenience store robbery at the same convenience store. But it was the next story that got my mind in a huff: it was talking about some hunt for a yeti or something in some state park out west! A yeti, of all the idiotic things, literal fakery when there was a real story just down the road! Yet they were selling tickets for yeti hunting parties!

But wait... my drunken mind said ... if they can make a story of a yeti from a fallen tree, how much could we make a dragon out of a fire? We could sell the tickets for dragon hunting expeditions. We could raise money off of a dragon. We would need the money, the fire had damaged a few roads and cabins in the park.

Well, if a drunken old ranger can think of an idea like that, just imagine what the more creative types could do once let loose on the idea! After a week with them, they had a whole campaign ready to go.

"There weren't always dragons in the Valley," intoned a serious voice over the video playing in the conference room. Then a roar played as the image shifted to a very realistic cut of a dragon soaring over a verdant valley (my nephew was a computer science major at one of the state universities - he called it a deepfake, whatever that means), breathing flame and leaving burning forests behind it. Spliced into the middle of this film were real clips from cellphones taken during the forest fire itself. "We don't know where they came from now, but here in Canaan Valley, we know they're real." Then came footage from the aftermath of the fire: burnt out cabins & trail markers, a section of road that had bubbled up from the heat. One of the outhouses had collapsed, and the ground around it had sunk a bit. With some artful arranging of debris, we had made it look a giant reptilian footprint.

Then came my star turn. At a faux news conference, I held up a large scale. It was lab-made to our specifications by a chemist friend. "The whereabouts of the beast which set the fire in Canaan Valley is still unknown. No other known sightings have been made..." The star turn ended as images of the flames returned before zooming out to show they were the reflection in a giant dragon's eye.

Honestly, it had just begun as a bit of a lark, but the marketing campaign was actually fairly successful. There was a lot more money for 'dragon attack recovery' than there was for 'forest fire recovery'. That probably says something about human society, but I wasn't really worried about that. We could actually repair all that needed to be repaired. We had a few fun holiday parties that took us up on the 'dragon hunting expeditions' idea. One of them was a gun group who I think were getting quite the kick of pretending to be badass scouting the woods with their long rifles and whatnot. But hey, their expedition helped to rebuild the outhouse network, which was probably the most important part of the park! We scattered a few of those fake scales around, made a few fake footprints, that sort of thing. When they found them, people were happy.

Then there was a second fire, in a different part of the Valley, just before the end of the season, and a third at the beginning of the next season. And we used the same dragon playbook. At first, it was just a grand old time, but then it got really dark. One of the party-goers died, and his friends swore it was the dragon who had dragged him off of the cliff. The numbskulls on the police force couldn't prove anything different either, and the legend grew. They even said that there were gouges in the cliff face like those of a giant claw!

Then the fires spread to a different part of the state, and the governor decided to broaden the slogan. "There weren't always dragons in West Virginia" became almost a second state motto for the park system, as often as we were using it. There was even talk of a History Channel show called "The Dragons of West Virginia."

Melvin retired during this time. His replacement on my team was a greenhorn named Samantha. Sam was actually originally from out California way and was really curious about the whole dragon thing and how it had gotten started. There had been a new, thankfully small, fire back at the site of the original conflagration in Canaan Valley, so I decided to take her out there and show her where it all began. We went up there to check it out. The forest had started to recover. It would take years for the trees to fully come back, but ferns and bushes and the like were faster to grow back. Truthfully, nature's ability to recover from nearly anything was a true miracle.

The most recent fire had been fairly localized to a hollow deep in the park. As we drove towards it, I pointed out the various markers we'd set up for dragon sightings, the casts of the dragon's feet that we'd made from the footprints (and that we used to fake other footprints around the state so that they stayed uniform). Sam & I had to ditch the jeep about a mile away from the believed ground zero of the latest fire. It wasn't like what I had seen at the other sites and I whistled tunelessly at the devastated landscape. This fire had burned very hot, reducing things to ash which normally survived. There was almost a perfectly straight line of completely devastated land.

My first thought was arson, that's how straight it was. On the bright side, something that straight was easy to follow in the woods. I was suddenly forced to confront something I had no training or expectation for. At the base of the line of destruction was a perfectly circular portal of glimmering red-orange energy. As Sam & I watched, a lick of flame curled around the edge and darted over the ground, but there was nothing left there for it to burn. Sitting maybe five feet from the portal was an almost greater shock: an egg. About three to four feet tall and probably similarly wide at its base, no animal I knew of laid an egg like that. Nor did any egg I knew of have a small aura of flames that seemed to be coming out from the bottom and creating a constant wisp of fire and smoke that wreathed it.