Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ended and the non-tailings landscape began. Beside it was a graphite-colored tailings pond,
a mile and a half long, with a single boat floating motionless on its surface.
“People have really different reactions to seeing the mines,” Terris said. “One group I
had said it was the most horrible thing they had ever seen. And then you'll get engineers
up here, and they just say it looks like a mine.”
As we considered circling back for another look, the radio crackled to life.
Private aircraft, maintain minimum distance and altitude from Syncrude plant opera-
tion.
It was Syncrude security. The company had its own aircraft control. Terris grimaced. “I
was hoping nobody would be home.” But it didn't matter. Already we could see Suncor.
It loomed in the distance. Rather, it did the thing that is like looming but is actually its
opposite. It did the thing the Grand Canyon does when you first catch sight of it from the
window of a passenger jet. It's not like a mountain, or a mountain range. Even the Rockies
only modulate the landscape—they don't interrupt it.
Now we saw that interruption, where the flat of the world fell away from the horizon.
Where a crater had been punched through the face of the earth.
Terris swung us toward it. He circled, he rolled to one side, and we looked straight down
onto the mine, onto its dozens of tiny yellow dump trucks. They drove along a curving net-
work of dirt roads, through a mosaic of craters. Here they sped back to the hoppers, fully
loaded and surprisingly fast, kicking up trails of dirt and dust. There, in the intimate cata-
clysm of a smaller pit, they waited in a group of two or three for their turn to approach a
shovel, workers to their queen. And then away again, urgently, to deliver the next load.
The window pressed against my forehead. To the east and the south, I saw forest. But to
the north, there was only the mine.
I wasn't horrified. But I had a funny feeling. Some kind of problem with scale. The
trucks and the shovels looked so tiny—such toys and yet so huge. I had spent all week
thinking about bigness, about weight, running through the synonyms for
huge,
and running
through them again. The biggest machines in the world, they towered over a person with
such magnitude and force. Now they were earnest beetles in a sandbox, themselves dwarfed
by the vast footprint they were hollowing out.
“They look like ants!” Terris was shouting over the headset.
But they did not look like ants. They were too big to be ants. And somehow their very
failure to be mere specks made them grow ever larger, and part of this growing was how
much they seemed to shrink.
