Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
That's what I wanted to see. The rind of beauty that must exist in every uncared-for corner
of the world.
Elevation. That's what you need. I hired a plane.
We took off straight into the sun, riding a little four-seat Cessna, and arced north, bring-
ing downtown Fort McMurray under our right wing, and then its suburbs, newly carved out
of the forest—Don and Amy's neighborhood. A clean boundary defined the edge of devel-
opment, beyond which evergreen trees and muskeg swamp stretched out to the sky.
Terris was my pilot. Boyish and friendly, with broad, angular features and a strong Ca-
nadian accent, he had been in Fort McMurray for only a few months and earned his living
by giving flying lessons and the occasional tour. During the boom of the previous decade,
he had flown charters out of Edmonton. It had all been oil business, he told me, carrying
executives and engineers up to private airstrips that the oil companies maintained on their
lands. “The runways at Firebag and Albian are nicer than the Fort McMurray airport,” he
said. Engineers would come from as far away as Toronto and stay for a two-week shift be-
fore flying home to take a week or two off duty. It is a common cycle in Fort McMurray,
except that most workers do it by car, driving back and forth to Edmonton along Highway
63.
Oil prices had fallen with the recession, though, and the oil sands business had entered
another of its cyclical downturns. Terris's corporate work had dried up.
“So now I'm back in the bush,” he said.
Fort McMurray dwindled behind us. The sun was low, behind a curtain of haze, the earth
dusky. Sliding toward us were the sulfur pyramids of Syncrude, their full dimensions even
more impressive from the air, a footprint five city blocks to a side.
“I have one flying student who's a Suncor engineer,” came Terris's voice over the head-
set. “He was complaining about how people give the oil sand companies a hard time about
polluting the Clearwater River. He said, 'The Clearwater River is one of the most
naturally
polluted
rivers around.'” Terris was smiling. “The guy said, 'It's been leeching bitumen in-
to the water for three million years. We're just doing the same thing!'”
We all have our ways of feeling like part of the natural order, I guess.
I could now see a low mountain of dry tailings that Don had told me to look out for, a
huge heap of sandy mine waste that, like everything else around here, was one of the largest
man-made objects in the world. It was so large that it was hard to tell where the tailings
