Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
With the bus tour such a bust, I turned to finding a scenic overlook. I headed for Crane
Lake, a Suncor reclamation site that seemed like a good starting point for some creative
sneaking.
The word
reclamation
gets tossed around a lot in these parts, and not only in Don's liv-
ing room. It is an important concept for anyone who doesn't want to feel too bad about
strip-mining. Reclamation requirements use the vague guideline of “equivalent land cap-
ability,” which means, according to the Alberta government, that reclaimed land has to be
“able to support a range of activities similar to its previous use.”
And that's the key here—
its previous use.
What, previously, was the use of an undis-
turbed boreal forest? What if its main use was to remain undisturbed?
I drove. I was in my little rental car, underneath a thick sunshine that was pushing back
the afternoon's storm clouds. The highway was slick with rain and heavy with traffic. It
was the beginning of the evening shift change. Work in the mines is divided into two shifts
per day, and every twelve hours fresh battalions of truck drivers, shovel operators, plant
workers, and engineers come hurtling up Highway 63. The road is long and straight, and
the waves of pickup trucks and red and white buses had worked up to an insistent, hum-
ming speed. It was at that moment—as I approached the turnoff for Crane Lake, followed
by a speeding phalanx of cars and buses—that I saw the ducks.
They came waddling onto the highway from the right shoulder, from the direction of
Crane Lake. A mother and six ducklings.
A black sports car had just zipped past me and slotted back into the right lane. I was
certain it was going to tear right through them, leaving them in twisted pieces; and that
I, unable to stop, would mow through the survivors; and that if by a miracle there were
still survivors after that, they would surely be obliterated by the wall of chartered coaches
breathing down my neck. After so much talk of ducks and duck deterrents, of duck death
and duck lawsuits, I was now about to help write the next chapter of Syncrude's environ-
mental record, and that chapter was going to be written in blood, the blood of ducks, here
on Highway 63, during the shift change.
It was over in seconds. The driver of the sports car braked and veered left, clearing the
ducks by a few feet. Spooked, they turned and waddled back the other way, directly into
my path. I found my moral sense neatly congruent, if only for a moment, with the needs
of Syncrude PR. I swerved onto the shoulder, also missing the ducks, but spooking them
again as I blew by and sending them back into the middle of the highway in disarray.
In the rearview mirror, I saw ducklings turning in every direction as their doom ap-
proached at seventy-five miles an hour in the form of a looming passenger bus—possibly
driven by a man named Mohammed—riding abreast with a big white pickup truck and fol-
