Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
onto them and be dazzled by the simplicity of our temple architecture, at once brutal and
grand, and will speculate about what drove us to worship sulfur above all other elements,
and will see that the pharaohs were nitwits.
Although the mines sit at a breezy remove, their presence is felt everywhere in Fort
McMurray. The economy and community thrum in tune with the ceaseless project of
ground-eating. As you meander the streets, you begin to feel that you are an iron filing
oriented along the field lines emanating from an immense subterranean magnet, and that
everything and everyone in town is pointed toward it: the new bridge over the Athabasca,
built to withstand the load of heavy equipment being transported to the work site; traffic
lights that can be swung sideways out of the roadway to let oversize loads pass unhindered;
the local high school (mascot: the Miners; motto: “Miner Pride”); the old excavating ma-
chine sitting on the lawn of Heritage Park.
You feel it standing on a wooded bluff overlooking the river, where the air stinks of bitu-
men oozing naturally out of the hillside, and where nearly a century ago the first hopeful
entrepreneur tried to boil money out of oil sands. And you feel it downtown at the Tim Hor-
tons, where white pickup trucks line up around the corner to get their coffee and doughnuts.
Each white pickup truck carries someone on his way to work at the mines, and each white
pickup truck has a tall, whiplike antenna sprouting from its bed, and they are not antennas
but safety flags. Without one, even a large pickup truck may go unnoticed by the behemoth
sand haulers in the mine, and be crushed.
Even at leisure, people in Fort McMurray live out an echo of their industry, taking their
minds off the noisy machines of the mines by churning through the countryside on other
noisy machines, like all-terrain-vehicles and snowmobiles (known as
sleds).
“Ninety percent of people who live here have at least one ATV or sled,” said Colleen,
the young woman behind the counter at the off-roading store. She and her colleague Adam
were Fort McMurray natives, rarities in a city overrun by outsiders coming for work, and
they had a blasé defensiveness about their hometown. Colleen seemed almost to rue the
economic boom that had transformed it. “The recession sucks and all, but in ways it's
amazing,” she said. “Now you can go to a restaurant and not wait three hours. You can get
a doctor's appointment. Before, if your car broke down, it would take nine weeks to get it
fixed. The quality of life was getting really low before the recession happened. Everything
was a struggle.”
But that didn't mean they thought the oil sands themselves were a bad thing. “Fort
McMurray is what's powering all of Canada, and we don't get the recognition,” Colleen
