by Fred Stenson
“I didn’t know that. The part about the bile duct.”
“Since there are health concerns downstream of the mines and plants, why is there only one water-monitoring site on the Athabasca River between the strip mines and the delta?”
“Is that so?”
“A scientist at the University of Alberta has been talking about it for years. He says there should be better sampling, but you guys and the province say your system is already adequate—pardon me, ‘world class.’ One sampling site.”
Bill nodded, stared at the remaining half of his muffin. He had no appetite.
“I’m making you uncomfortable,” she said.
“I don’t like being an information guy. It’s Dion’s job, his department.”
“And you make sulphur. So you told me. But you came. Why?”
“Dion said you asked for me.”
She refilled his cup.
“I understand that water doesn’t run uphill,” she said, “so Fort Chip’s problems won’t necessarily happen here. But we are on water, and all the water around your plant is connected to us through wetlands, creeks, and lakes. If you guys are putting the same kind of cancer shit in this water, it will come to us. What about that?”
“Our strip mine and plant design is supposed to contain its effluents.”
“You mean your tailings pond.”
“That’s part of the containment system. All the runoff is supposed to be caught so it doesn’t get in the groundwater.”
“If your tailings pond leaks, then it all comes here. Right here into this lake. Are you going to tell me tailings ponds never leak?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
“Because they do leak? I’ve heard plenty about them leaking.”
“I’m not aware that ours leaks. I won’t say it’s impossible.”
She sat back again and looked at him quizzically, as if he had played a sleight-of-hand trick she was trying to understand.
“That’s pretty good,” she said. Then she geared up again—straightening, becoming taller in her chair. “Something else I’ve researched is tumours in fish. One of my uncles makes his living fishing from Lake Athabasca. I’ve touched the lumps on those fish with my own hands. A different fisherman, also Native, took a bag of them down to the government office in Fort Mac. They wouldn’t even look at them. Let them rot on the steps. Somebody in your business said we’re mistaking spawned-out fish for ones with cancers. Do you have any idea how many fish my uncle has handled in his life? Do you think he’d make that mistake?”
“No.”
“Then why are they saying that?”
“I don’t know.”
Marie sat for a time with her arms tightly folded. Then a laugh rolled out of her.
“What?”
“You’re not much of a defender of your industry.”
“No.”
“Then why do you work for them?”
“I take a sour gas stream. I remove sulphur from it. I’ve done something like that all my working life.”
“But if your industry kills lakes and rivers, and people, that doesn’t affect you?”
“I think the plants up here are good plants, the ones I know anyway. But the government allowed too many projects, and the companies are building them too fast. Whether they’re good plants starts not to matter. Put too many together, on one river, it adds up to pollution. Even if the government made the rules tougher, and we met those rules, there would still be pollution.”
“Do you think it will slow down?”
“No.”
“Will the government make it slow down?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Politics. Greed. Pressure.”
“You’re no spring chicken. You could retire.”
“Someone else makes the sulphur. What would that change?”
She smiled at him. “It’s nice you came and listened. I appreciate your saying what you’ve said.”
They were done. Though Bill enjoyed looking at Marie Calfoux, he was yearning to go. He picked his cap off the table.
“Thanks for the tea. The muffin was good.” At the door, he pulled his boots back on. “Why did you ask to see me? Me in particular?”
She brushed table crumbs into her palm and carried them to the garbage can. “It’s not quite right that I asked to see you. Dion phoned and said he wanted to come to my house. I don’t like to be rude but I didn’t want him here. I said if someone has to come, send Bill, the sulphur man.”
“Why me?”
“Dion always brings tobacco, in a cloth bag or sometimes in a brand-new leather pouch. If it’s a bag he puts a pretty-coloured ribbon on it. Like it was 1875 and I had never seen a store. It gets on my nerves.”
Bill imagined Dion handing over the ribboned tobacco bag. Bowing deeply.
“Bring the Indian tobacco,” Marie continued. “It’s not giving tobacco that means anything, you know, it’s accepting it. If I take your tobacco, it’s like I’m accepting you and your stinking plant. Anyway, I thought you wouldn’t bring tobacco and you didn’t.”
Bill opened the door and the cold leapt in. Behind him, Marie said, “Don’t worry. I’m not trying to snag you. My snagging days are over.”
“They wouldn’t have to be.”
“You don’t know a thing about it, Mr. Ryder. All the men around here either have money and suddenly think they’re special, or else they’re like you—sad. Either way, it’s not attractive. But there is something I would like to do with you.”
“What?”
“Can you snowshoe?”
“Yes.”
“I have a few pairs. I’d like you to come and we’ll snowshoe around.”
“To look for leaks?”
“I want to show you some nice places.”
As soon as he had driven his truck the length of main street and was back among the trees, Bill thumped the steering wheel with both hands. He had agreed to go back and snowshoe! To do yet more community work. What was wrong with him?
Bill’s plan was to spend every night of his current shift week in the Chateau Borealis. All over the oil sands, faux hotels were popping up, accommodation for the tradesman class that might be the difference between hanging on to a welder and losing him to a project with better exercise machines. When Bill arrived at Waddens, he found out Chateau Borealis had rooms reserved for management and that these were generally unbooked. Local managers regarded the Chateau as a penance, preferring to go home to their overpriced houses in McMurray. Often Bill wanted nowhere near his McMurray home, especially after days off. Borealis was more to his liking.
What he did on his nights at the Chateau was read. He read novels, and he read widely, defined as wide of the mark of himself. He liked novels about nineteenth-century frontier wars. He liked sharp and witty novels written by women in which men unlike him were humorously scourged. He even liked books that broke his heart, except if they broke it by reminding him of the long loser portions of his own biography.
But on the evenings of this week, none of his books could hold him. None had the power to keep him from thinking about Marie Calfoux.
He had several arguments with himself over whether she liked him or just wanted to convey her annoyance. The third obvious possibility was that she wanted to find out inside dope about the upgrader. Rather than ponder and imagine her during these evenings, he could have visited her; she was all of five minutes away. But the notion paralyzed him. He would not see her again until the snowshoe visit. He would not mess with the schedule.
Something he could do in the meantime was investigate her concerns. He had his computer; the Chateau had internet. First, he made a list of what to search for. He wouldn’t bother with the medical situation at Chip because he already knew Marie was right on that one. The whistleblower had been fed his whistle as usual.
What she had said about Native fishermen on Lake Athabasca also tallied with what he knew. When the government and the c
ompanies got together and sent a team of experts to educate the Indians on fish health and fish disease, he had cringed
What he could research was leakage from tailings ponds. Dion and his boys claimed it didn’t happen, but when he typed “Do tailings ponds leak?” in the search bar, a flood of hits said the opposite. One of them was a study commissioned by an oil sands company several years earlier that found that its tailings pond not only leaked but leaked right into the Athabasca River. Of this, the province’s environment minister said it was only a small leak relative to the river’s volume. In the course of the evening, Bill found a site that claimed a leaking tailings pond had “self-healed.” Another company had a moat around its pond to catch leaks. In other words, the answer was yes: tailings ponds leak. So too, probably, would the one at New Aladdin Waddens Lake.
Bill’s next query was Athabasca River water sampling. Was it really possible that there was only one sampling site downriver of the strip mines? Like Marie, Bill had heard Dion say that the air and water monitoring effort throughout the oil sands was world-class and a splendid example of industry-government-community co-operation. Bill was suspicious of things declared world-class, since the oil sands industry, as viewed from within, was a world-class scientific and technical effort to free a world-class resource from nature’s stubborn clutches. The industry was bringing a world-class energy product to the world-class appetite of the world-class world.
Skeptical though he was, Bill was occasionally worn down by the propaganda. Hearing the monitoring system praised for so long, he had told himself that surely they could get that much right.
Online, he found an annual report from the industry’s own environmental watchdog. It said there were no detectable changes across time in the water resource. He looked up the university scientist Marie had mentioned and found him quoted as saying that the one-downriver-sampling-site system was a joke (a world-class joke, no doubt), designed to find nothing.
Bill shut his computer down and tried to sleep, but he was kept awake by his old nausea. The two sides of these questions were like giant linemen slamming into each other again and again in a game with no end—or until the farmers and environmentalists ran out of bodies or money to pay them.
Bill Ryder wanted to be on no side, even as he made his living off one. This had been his dream for as long as he could remember, and Marie Calfoux would not be the first to tell him it was impossible.
The next time Bill saw Johnny Bertram and his nephew, on their ladders with their insulation and tin, he tried to walk by. But Johnny shouted for him to hold on. He zipped down and beckoned Bill to the truck.
“It’s me who wants to go for a drive this time.”
Behind the wheel, Johnny said, “I’ve never seen the strip mine in action. With a big boss like you, the security boys won’t stop me.”
Without guidance, Johnny drove to the dignitaries’ viewpoint, a slight rise on the strip mine’s edge where the power shovels and mega-trucks could be seen. Visiting dignitaries were brought here because the active part of the mine bordered a played-out section heaped with clean sand from the hot-water separation plant. Left: exploitation. Right: reclamation.
A loaded ore truck roared toward them and swung sharply, flinging black in their direction and yanking a sound from Johnny’s throat. You saw these trucks on television whenever the oil sands made the news, but it was different watching something the size of an apartment block bear down on you at speed.
Johnny slapped the steering wheel, laughed. “This could be on IMAX. They could race.”
A burly Native banged on the windshield, and Bill showed his ID.
“What about this one?” asked the guard, pointing at Johnny.
“Visiting dignitary,” said Bill.
“From where? Anzac?”
“Good one.” Johnny gave him a thumbs-up.
When the guard was gone, Johnny said, “Is it true they used to have conveyor belts moving the ore and they broke down all the time? I heard there was a woman VP who told them it would be cheaper to use shovels and trucks?”
“All true.”
“And that’s when they started making money?”
“That’s true also.”
“You’d think they’d have statues of her lining Highway 63.”
Bill did not answer.
As they re-entered the upgrader, Johnny asked Bill if he was married.
“Twice. Not anymore.”
“Kids?”
“Girl and a boy in their twenties. What about you?”
“Celeste and I been married thirty-three years. Four kids. Seven grandkids.” After a pause, Johnny asked, “What are you doing about it?”
“About what?”
“Being single.”
“Not much. Actually, there is a woman. Sort of.”
“Tell me.”
“Nothing much to tell. She’s interesting, funny, good looking, smart.”
“Excellent!”
“But she says I’m sad.”
“Meaning what? Sad sack or a sad case? Or just going around looking sad?”
“We didn’t get into it. I was only there for tea.”
“You mean she’s local?”
“She lives in Waddens Village.”
“Oh my. I can’t wait to tell Shirley.”
“Tell Shirley what?”
“That forty years after you were in love with her, you’re still chasing Indian women. It’ll make her day.” Johnny pulled his truck off the service road beside his ladder. “So, are you sad?”
“No sadder than most men our age.”
“Maybe you don’t hide it well enough.”
“I should grin more. Tell people to have a nice day.”
“Okay, tell me this. Does she want to see you again?”
“She says she wants to go snowshoeing.”
“For Pete’s sake, Billy! Then there’s no problem.”
“I think she only wants to show me places the upgrader’s going to wreck.”
“I’m sure that’s right. But still.”
As they climbed out of the truck, Johnny favoured Bill with a little song. “Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side, keep on the sunny side of life.”
At work, Bill tinkered with his corrosion maintenance plan. The idea had been inspired by his long-time boss, Lance Evert—who he must phone! About once a day, he thought of the aborted call on his message machine, told himself to phone, and did not do it. An old man now and retired, Lance spent his days combing the Net. Though the two men had not talked in ages, Lance sent him emails whenever he found something exciting. Fourteen months ago, there had been a flurry of emails about refinery accidents in the States, a lot of them involving the hydrotreater.
Lance believed the wave of accidents was caused by hydrogen stress cracking, the old sour gas bugbear he’d fought in the early part of his career. At first, Bill ignored the idea. Processing and refining had moved on, and Lance’s idea sounded antique. But it grew on him. Many of the accidents Bill heard about did happen in the hydrogen-producing part of the plant, and what Bill was trying to come up with was a way to check potential corrosion sites on hydrogen lines in advance, and without having to shut down the plant. The latter was the unique part, the selling point.
Like a lot of men in charge, Bill’s boss lived by best practices handed to him from head office. The idea that his own plant could evolve a new best practice would make Theo Houle laugh. This was the hinterland, the oil sands, thousands of kilometres from the great laboratories of Houston or The Netherlands. It would be like finding a new microparticle with a Christmas chemistry set.
When Bill felt frustrated, he got up and walked around his desk. Either that or go outside. Circling the desk now, Bill saw that the inbox on his desk was stuffed and was unsure how it got that way. He pulled out the bale and started sorting. Most things went into the trash unopened, but a handful remained. He selected one envelope and shoved back the rest.
The envelope was f
rom a professional association he belonged to. He knifed open the envelope, and, as he thought it might be, it was notice of an upcoming technical meeting in Calgary. He drifted his eyes down the menu: technical papers, panels. There was one called “U.S. Refinery Fires: Should Canadian Processors and Refiners Be Alarmed?”
This might be the answer to Bill’s problem. If he went to this meeting and some higher authority suggested the sort of action Bill had in mind, then he could come back here and offer up the corrosion inspection plan to Theo as if it were the idea of another. An expert is a guy from out of town, as the sage said.
He looked at the schedule again, and the meeting date sank in. Thursday. This Thursday. Two days from right now.
Bill pitched the letter into the wastebasket, circled his desk, and retrieved it. He would have to leave no later than tomorrow afternoon; would have to drive non-stop to get to Calgary by midnight. His next days-off started Friday anyway, so he could combine the Calgary meeting with a visit to the farm. He pictured himself handing his oldest sister Tom’s binder.
Thinking ahead to the meeting, he imagined Lance Evert sitting at a round table, listening avidly. They could sit together at lunch.
He went ahead and registered, and booked a room in the downtown hotel where the meeting would be held. Then his phone rang.
“Bill!” It was Theo. “There’s a high-priority tour coming through!”
“Today?”
“Of course today! Two p.m.!”
“Did I miss a memo?”
“We got no notice.”
“Who?”
“I can’t say. Security on this thing’s tight as a button.”
“Drum.”
“What?”
“Cute as a button, tight as a drum.”
“Piss off. I want you at the control room at two. Have your crew ready between two and four in case they want to tour your unit.” Bill set the phone down. The visitor had to be a politician, because only politicians did this: landed in your lap without notice, knowing you could not tell them to fuck off.