Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
it, nursing a euphoric terror, imagining how it once churned through the earth, lifting ton
after ton of oily sand as it went. There was something wonderful about the fearsome im-
probability of the reclaimer's existence. It was the bastard offspring of the Eiffel Tower and
the Queensboro Bridge, abandoned by its parents, raised by feral tanks.
As my tourmates took pictures of one another standing in front of the behemoth, I
walked back to the bus, where the driver was standing with his hands in his pockets. His
name was Mohammed. The Suncor bus tour was only a minor part of his job. He spent most
of his days ferrying workers to and from the mines. When I asked why he didn't choose to
drive one of the big trucks instead of a bus, he told me he wasn't interested.
“But you could make a lot of money,” I said. The salary for driving a heavy hauler star-
ted at about a hundred thousand dollars—more if you worked a shovel.
He smiled. “The pollution. Especially at the live sites, Suncor and Syncrude.” He
thought the air coming off the upgrading plants was bad for your health.
“But you breathe that air anyway,” I pointed out. “You drive onto those sites all the
time!”
He laughed. “Yeah!”
The supposed centerpiece of the Suncor bus tour is of course Suncor itself. We entered
from the highway, the air sweet with tar, and drove toward the Athabasca River into an area
invisible from the road. My oil sands fever was reaching its crisis. The upgrading plant slid
into view, a forest of pipes and towers similar to the Syncrude plant, but nestled next to the
river in a shallow, wooded valley.
It was getting hard to pay proper attention to the scenery. Mindy had been keeping up
an unrelenting stream of patter, a barrage of factoids that, despite its volume, managed to
be completely uninformative. I found it difficult to follow her, even with my inborn enthu-
siasm for pipes and conveyor belts and giant cauldrons of boiling oil.
The green building houses the fart matrix. It uses 1.21 gigawatts of electricity every
femtosecond.
The what matrix? Wait, which tower was—
…three identical towers of different sizes on the far side of the plant—can everybody
see?
No, wait, which?
Good. Those are where the natural solids ascend and descend twenty-one times per
cycle, each cycle producing ten metric tons of nougat, which is sold to China, because it
can't be stored so close to the river. The interiors of the towers have to be cleaned every
two weeks using high-pressure ejaculators. Wow!
