Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
said, picking up a tiny brown dog bouncing at her feet. “I think that whole 'dirty oil' thing
comes from a lobbying group in Saudi.”
“The ducks,” Adam said, completing the conspiracy theory.
Colleen snorted. “Yeah, fuck! There's so many more important things. Like consumer
waste!”
Through Fort McMurray Tourism, anyone who signs up a day ahead and forks over forty
bucks can take an oil sands bus tour.
Oil sands bus tour
—are there any four words more
beautiful in the English language? Someone was finally seeing the light on this pollution
tourism thing. I signed up.
The bus tour didn't leave until the following morning, so I had a lonely afternoon to kill.
I called my girlfriend. The Doctor. She always knows what to do in these situations. She
has a peculiar kind of common sense that includes the possibility that spending your days
roaming oil sands mines and nuclear disaster sites might be a good idea.
“Remember,” she said over the phone, “you're supposed to be on vacation.”
Right! I was a tourist. And although the world's industrial eyesores and ecological
calamities generally languish unattended by gift shops and welcome centers, Fort McMur-
ray is a forward-thinking town in this regard. I made for the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, a
family-friendly museum for those interested in the local industry.
The OSDC represents some of the best industrial propaganda in the world. (Which I
mean as a compliment.
You
try writing the brochure for Mordor.) Its gift shop is a gift shop
among gift shops, an emporium thick with toy giant dump trucks, kid-size hard hats, water-
color prints of gigantic machines, and truck-themed socks. I grabbed an armful of goodies.
At the register, I made the find of the day in a bin of impulse buys: a tiny, plush oil drop
with yellow feet and googly eyes. Who knew petroleum could be so adorable?
Into the exhibits, where I spent the next several hours in a state of fizzing excitement
over scale models of dragline shovels and bucket-wheel extractors, over containers holding
liquid bitumen in different states—room temperature, heated, diluted—with rods to stir the
stuff and feel the different viscosities. Not to mention the 150-ton oil sands truck parked
inside the exhibit hall. I climbed two stories up, into its cab, and sat in the driver's seat,
wrenching the steering wheel back and forth.
And now let us praise the Dig and Sniff, in which a small mound of raw oil sand is dis-
played under a plastic dome. The Dig and Sniff invites you simply to
dig,
using the rod built
into the display—and then, having dug, to
sniff,
through the small opening in the dome.
Dig
