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 environmental 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 approached 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 followed by more traffic behind. There was no leeway, no room for them to swerve. With horror, I imagined the bus careening into the ditch, rolling onto its side.
And then, somehow—it didn’t happen.
The bus leaned forward, lumbering to its knee as it slowed. The pickup truck made a languid weave halfway out of its lane. And the rest of the oncoming column seized up and stopped. As the scene dwindled in my mirror, I saw the mechanized army of the Syncrude evening shift pause, like Godzilla offering Bambi a bouquet of daisies. And there they waited, patiently, as the ducks reformed their little rank and waddled off the highway back into the woods.
Crane Lake is a nice spot, enclosed by a belt of young forest, with reeds clustering along its swampy shores and a nature trail running a mile circuit around the lake, through tall grass and wildflowers. The only footnote to the idyll is that the entire place stinks of oil sand, the same heady aroma that you would smell at a restaurant if the waiter set a bowl of bubbling tar on your table. The trick to experiencing Crane Lake, then, is to appreciate this smell as part of the environment, to remember that it’s coming off of oil sand that God himself put in the ground—even if it’s humankind that decided to rip it open and expose it to the air. As for the constant, popping reports of nearby bird-deterrent cannons, if they weren’t enough to bother the birds that had come to take the waters at Crane Lake, then why should they bother me?
Forget that Crane Lake is called Crane Lake, though. It should be called Duck Lake—or maybe something punchier, like Suncor Ducktasia Lake. It is nothing less than Suncor’s duck showcase. No nature area has ever been so completely tricked out with signs calling attention to what a lovely little nature area it is. There are duck blinds, and a duck-identification chart from an organization called Ducks Unlimited, and a good number of actual ducks present on the lake, possibly including several I had recently failed to murder.
So ducktastic was it that I began to wonder whether Suncor was trying to stick it to poor old Syncrude, with all its duck problems, just up the road. Surely some Suncor PR rep had hoped for a newspaper headline proclaiming, “Suncor, Neighbor to Duck-Destroyer Syncrude, Offers Clean Water, Reeds, at Waterfowl Haven.”
I set out on my hike, keeping the lake on my right, ambling through a spray of purple wildflowers. There were dragonflies, again, and mosquitoes, too—snarling, clannish mosquitoes of the Albertan variety, with thick forearms and tribal tattoos. But I was ready. Don had lent me a bug jacket—a nylon shirt with a small tent for your head and face—and I had armed myself with enough spray-on DEET to poison a whole village. That is to say, I was happy, and ready to bypass all this man-made nature and find my scenic mine-overlook.
Making my way over a small wooden footbridge that spanned a swampy inlet, I was steered southward along the east shore of the lake by a thick forest of young trees on the left. A wooden bench, with grass growing up between the boards of its seat, faced the water. Silence reigned, except for the gentle rustle of the breeze and the constant sound of cannons. I had the place to myself.
But the farther I went down the path, the more the Crane Lake experience started to chafe. All this had been put here on purpose—sculpted, as Don had said. It was too neat. Too self-contained. Halfway down the east side of the lake, I turned to face the dense thicket of young trees that hemmed in the path. From a conspiracy-theory point of view, I reasoned, the very impenetrability of the forest here made it all the more likely that there was something interesting on the other side, perhaps something spectacular, or even hellish.
Ten seconds in, I had lost sight of the lake and the path, crashing through the trees, pushing branches out of the way, plowing through thick spiderwebs that collected on my face-tent. After a few more minutes of bushwhacking, I began to doubt that this was such a good idea. Everywhere I looked, the world looked the same: crowded stands of tall young trees closing in. I wasn’t even sure which direction I had come from. I concentrated on the fantasy of breaking through the trees at the top of a magnificent cliff, looking out over the mine, trucks rumbling to and fro.
I saw light in the distance, through the trees, and went toward it, crossing a small clearing, then plunging back into thick overgrowth and more trees. I jumped a small ditch or stream, heading toward what seemed like a large, open area. It was close. I climbed a small rise of high ground, and it gave way like mud, my foot sinking down into it. I hopped forward, pulling my foot out, and saw sky ahead. Readying a mental fanfare, I broke through the tree line.
There was no vista. No overlook. No oil sands. Instead, I found myself standing on the edge of a cozy little wetland, swampy water winking in the sun.
Crap!
The way was utterly blocked by this revolting picture of nature in repose. I turned back in disgust. It was the sinister hand of Suncor at work, several moves ahead of me, drawing me in with the siren song of bird-deterrent cannons—and the drone of distant machinery, if I wasn’t imagining it—only to throw wetlands in my path.
And now I was lost. Half-blind and overheating inside the face-tent, I walked in what I hoped was the direction of the lake, branches tearing at me. The mosquitoes circled, cracking their knuckles and waiting for that moment when the human, undone by panic and claustrophobia, tears off his bug jacket.
Finally, I saw the muddy rise I had sunk my foot into on the way over—a single landmark in a leafy wasteland—and staggered back toward it. About to cross over it again, I stopped short.
I could see my footprint from before, right in the center of the mound. It was swarming and alive. The small ridge was actually a great anthill. I bent over and looked into my footprint. Ants poured through it in chaos, frenetic in their attention to the fat, wriggling grubs, tumbling over them, picking them up, extricating them from the crater, the giant breach in their city wall. Sorry, guys.
Crane Lake was pleasant in its way, but it was the merest green speck on a huge landscape of unreclaimed and active mine sites. Nor was it even a true test case. I later talked to Mike Hudema, of Greenpeace Canada, and he scoffed at the very notion of reclamation.
“When we destroy an area, we can’t put it back,” he told me over the phone. “We don’t know how to do it. We can create something…but it’s not what was there. It’s not the same, and the way that life in the area reacts to it is also not the same.”
That a guy from Greenpeace would be skeptical of mine reclamation was no surprise. More interesting was his contention that Crane Lake was never a mine site in the first place.
“It’s basically reclaiming the area where they piled the dirt,” Hudema said. “So it’s not actually reclaiming a mine site. It’s not reclaiming a tailings lake.”
Hudema was that rare person who had been camping in the o
il sands mines. One sunny autumn day, not long after my visit, Hudema and several of his colleagues had gone for a walk through Albian Sands, an oil sands mine owned by Shell.
Of course, no group of Greenpeace activists can go strolling through a mine without chaining themselves to something. In this case, they attached themselves to an excavator and a pair of sand haulers and rolled out a large banner reading TAR SANDS—CLIMATE CRIME. The entire mine was shut down for the better part of a shift, and Hudema and company spent thirty-some hours camping out on the machinery before agreeing to leave. (Later Greenpeace oil sands protesters met with arrests and prosecution.) The protesters’ purpose—what other could there be—was to make the news, to raise awareness, to convince the world that there was something at stake worth getting arrested for. In them, Canada’s love-hate relationship with the oil sands had most fully flowered into hatred.
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 general 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 colleagues 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 matter 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? 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, bringing 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 development, 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 Canadian 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 before 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 headset. “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 into 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 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 operation.
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 network 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 cataclysm 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, themselve
s 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.
Vertigo rushed into the eye that tried to see it. And with the horizon circling around us, I knew that the mine itself, the panorama-swallowing mine, was barely a pinprick on the spinning body of the globe, and the globe itself a mote in the void, and the void itself a mote in another void, and I sat with my head pressed against the window—and felt, just a little, like puking.
THREE
REFINERYVILLE
Tell folks that you’re making a grand tour of polluted places, and they tend to get excited. A surprising number of people say they want to come along, and, although this turns out to be mostly talk, it’s gratifying to know the market is there.
Most of all, people want to know about the list. How am I choosing my destinations? Based on what? And they have suggestions. Everyone has a favorite: a city that struck them as horrifically smoggy, a developing-world landfill they read about. Some make an easy leap from Chernobyl to Bhopal, taking up the theme of industrial disaster. But that doesn’t seem quite right. And what if I want to check out a place that is the perfect embodiment of an environmental problem but that isn’t particularly gross? Should I abandon it, just because I’m worried it won’t count as “most polluted”? The criteria flood in: kinds of pollution, areas of the world, recreational possibilities…
“I’m trying to get a nice spread,” I tell them.
From Alberta, a powerful suction pulls south. And so they would like to build a pipeline. Another pipeline, that is—longer and better than what’s already there. Leaving Canada, it would pass underneath the Alberta-Montana border and run clear through the heart of the United States to the Gulf Coast, ending at a clutch of refineries in Port Arthur, Texas.
Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places Page 8