Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and Sniff!
With a name of such economy and force, it commands you to action, granting
you a direct experience—modestly tactile, safely olfactory—of the oil sands themselves.
A young boy worked the scraper. “This thing is cool!” he cried, sticking his nose into
the dome. “Dad, come smell the oil sand! The Discover Center's
fun
.” We were living in-
side a commercial for the OSDC. I took my turn at the stand, ready to get down to business.
I dug. I sniffed.
Frankly, it didn't smell like much. Maybe it needed a fresh batch of sand. But had I not
already learned something? That oil sand may sometimes lose its aroma?
You could be forgiven for assuming—it would be weird if you didn't—that the OSDC
was created by the oil sands companies themselves, as a temple to their own name. But
among its many triumphs in industrial propaganda, surely the greatest is that it is actually
a government facility, operated and administered by the province of Alberta itself. You can
draw your own conclusions about what this seamless collaboration says about the relation-
ship between oil and government around these parts.
Underneath all the excitement, though, there was a sour note—a defensive, self-con-
scious tone that sometimes crept into the wall copy. I could feel the exhibit designers
grudgingly trying to account for that one spoilsport in each group, the one who would be
asking over and over about the trees, and the rivers, and the ducks.
Toward the end of the galleries, past a backwater of displays about environmental re-
sponsibility and the future of clean energy and other boring crap, I found the Play Lab, a
colorful area partially screened off from the rest of the hall by a metal space-frame. Child-
size tables and chairs sat in the center of the room, attended by a wardrobe of hard hats and
jumpsuits available on loan to the tiny oil sands engineers of tomorrow.
Ignoring the cues that I fell somewhat outside the Play Lab's target demographic, I
charged in, blazing my way through the
PUMP IT
exhibit—a wall of clear plastic pipes
with valves to twist and a crank to turn—before settling in for a spell at
DIG IT,
which fea-
tured a pair of toy backhoe shovels and a trough filled with fake oil sand.
Neeeat!
The last section of the Play Lab was
GUESS IT,
a large grid of spinning panels printed
with questions on one side and answers on the other. Somewhere an exhibit designer, wor-
ried about how much fun the rest of the Play Lab was, had caved in to the didactic urge. I
read the first panel.
Bitumen is a very simple molecule. True or false?
Duh! We're talking about hydrocarbons, here. False. Next question.
Oil sand is like the filling in a sandwich. True or false?
