Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
But I also think of them as a breed of adventure travelers, and I thought Hudema might
be able to share some tips for future visitors to Fort McMurray. Should hikers pack their
bolt cutters?
“Well, unfortunately that's the part I can't talk about at all,” he said. “It's sort of a gen-
eral rule at Greenpeace that we never talk about how we get onto premises, because the
question of why we go is much more important.”
What a disappointment. I had expected pointers, even war stories. Weren't we col-
leagues of a sort? Didn't we share a profound fascination with the destroyed landscape of
the oil sands mines—even though his fascination was politically engaged and mine was
mainly witless?
Think,
I thought.
Think of some question that will really capture his experience inside
the mine.
“What did you eat?”
“We brought all our own food in with us,” he said, “and so we ate a variety of different
things.”
A variety of different things?
It seemed like an evasion. I closed in for the kill.
“Does that mean sandwiches?” I asked.
“I don't really want to comment in terms of exactly what we ate,” he said.
Although he refused to talk about access, or sandwiches, Hudema was willing to give
me his impressions of the mine itself. “A barren moonscape,” he said. “There is nothing but
death. There's nothing living. All of the trees, all of the brush, everything above the earth's
surface has simply been pushed away. All of the rivers have been diverted, all the wetlands
completely drained. You just have these machines, larger than any on the planet, that just
carve into the earth, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, twenty-four hours a day. And
so from a visceral point of view, it's a horrific experience.”
“Was there a sense in which you found it perversely beautiful?” I asked.
“Um, no,” he said. “I would never use that word to describe it. It's just a place that is
devoid of all life. A barren, barren moonscape. And you're constantly reminded of what
used to be there. Or what should still be there.”
What should still be there.
That was the crux of it, I thought. The beauty or ugliness of
a place didn't have that much to do with what it looked like. Even a moonscape could be
beautiful—if it were on the moon. And who would deny the beauty of a desert, no mat-
ter how barren or harsh? Beauty depends on what we think is
right.
How else could we
have come to think that unnatural objects like cities or farms or open roads were beautiful?
