Fort McMurray : Features
Playing Tourist in Fort McMurray
By Chris Koentges
May 1, 2006

Clawing its way to the summit of the global economic vanguard, Fort McMurray and the oilsands to the north could very well be the most essential post-modern tourist destination on the planet, writes Chris Koentges. Now if only the tour buses could find a way to stay clear of them big ol’ trucks

 

When you live in Calgary, you eventually get sick of taking people to Banff. “You could go to the mountains,” we told our friend Pia at the airport, after she arrived from Germany. “But they’re just mounds of rock and wood.”

I made an exaggerated yawning sign. Then laid the trap. “There’s this other thing. It’s kind of like Mad Max meets Mars.” I told her to imagine a Mötley Crüe stage. Optimus Prime and Ozymandias. Dinosaurs. Dolly Parton lyrics. Falco lyrics. Angkor Watt. A hangover. Cold, gritty coffee.

“Imagine the world’s biggest trailer park and it costs more to rent a room there than a flat in Düsseldorf. That’s where we’re going.”

Pia was so eager to see the place she didn’t even let us finish. (Note: you do not actually have to sell Fort McMurray to German girls, they get this kind of trip intuitively.)

“But there’s more.” I explained a theory I was tinkering with, based on the surrealist Andre Breton’s famous castle question. Breton was concerned that the human psyche had developed such a fixation on the Gothic castle—and everything that went with it—that it would become imperative to establish an equivalent for our time. “I believe that equivalent’s being established, four hours north of Edmonton, where this road runs out.”

As we prepared for the journey, I began receiving angry calls. “What are you doing?” one friend asked me. “It’s a dump,” said another, an engineer who had just returned after five months there. To keep Pia’s will strong, I showed her photos on the Internet by Edward Burtynsky, who grew up in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, and is suddenly being hailed as one of the most poignant photographers in the world. He travels to remote mines, quarries, tire piles, factories—the hidden fountainheads of the global economy. He went to the oilsands before it became a household aphorism. And although his photos are not the same on an 11-inch PowerBook as when they’re six feet tall, like at the Guggenheim or Bibliotèque Nationale, Pia got the gist.

The true wonder of his photos is that they are inherently neutral. He only says: “We all partake of what comes from this place, but we have no idea what it looks like.”

It was this chance that excited us. Our trip would not be like the Grand Canyon nor some ruins in the ancient world. It would be an actual 21^st-century experience.

*** 

 

Your ears pop as you plunge into the valley that cradles Fort McMurray (pop. 62,000 and likely having grown by another thousand in the time that this article moved from writer to seatback), and if it’s your first trip, your stomach swells with butterflies. You feel as if you are journeying to the end of the world, and in many respects you are. Dick Cheney was scheduled to visit just after our own trip, and consortiums from China, India—all the emerging global powers—pass through steadily. It’s not like the boomtowns you see in movies. It is, in fact, something of a letdown to finally arrive. It was not, to Pia’s disappointment, “such a dump.”

We circled Franklin Avenue, which is the main drag through town, as indicated by banners of former mayors. There’s a Wal-Mart. A grocery store that stocks food by nation. The Boomtown Casino. Help wanted signs. A sign on the front lawn of Fellowship Baptist Church that reads: “MY LAST NAME IS NOT ‘DAMN.’ SIGNED, GOD.” African men are walking around in sandals, Arabic women in hijabs. There are Chinese kids, old Aboriginals, Latino families. A dozen blocks in all.

By our third lap, I noticed two curious things. One: most of the shiny pick-up trucks had what looked like a very long tail, not unlike the flag on the banana seat of a girl’s bicycle, stretched tightly from the tailgate down to the back of their cab. And two: each of these trucks appeared to be doing laps like we were.

As the sun set and a dull haze glowed over town, we got out to watch; the revving strained our eardrums as drivers would speed up then suddenly break like the renegades in Mad Max. “This is really, really great!” Pia yelled, clapping her hands. A red Dodge truck darted out of the loop, over the sidewalk, then across a patch of grass into a parking spot in front of a taco franchise with precision you don’t even see in truck commercials. An ’80s Mustang zipped in beside him. Two goofy 17-year-olds got out. The goofier-looking Mustang driver yelled over at me, “Can you believe this guy? Fifty grand for this thing.” No money down, no credit history, only proof of six months on the job. “It’s a beaut,” I replied. It looked as powerful as a triceratops. Over the next three days, we would learn that in the grand scheme of the industrial savannah, which stretches north of Franklin Avenue, it was a minor truck in much abundance. 

***

Once you’ve been in Fort McMurray for a couple of hours, you begin to hear about the Oil Can. The inside is dark wood with brass rails and stained-glass lampshades. And despite everything I’d been told for several years about Franklin Avenue, it was packed equally with males and females. There’s a freelance men’s room attendant, who turns on the tap for you and is at the ready with a couple globs of aftershave should you need it. On three different trips, spanning about eight minutes, I saw him collect at least $30.

Although the city’s average age is 31, and median income over $100,000, everybody in Fort McMurray has bags under their eyes. They’re constantly asked to pick up extra overtime shifts, and have a general wariness about the job itself. Wherever you go, there is an unspoken ceaseless acknowledgement of that thing to the north.

We ask everybody we meet at the bar about these pits being dug outside the city. “What are you doing here?” they respond. “Holiday,” Pia would say, smiling. After more people accused us of being insane, I grew irritated, and asked, “What the hell do people do at the Grand Canyon?”

The same engineer that accused us of slumming and rubbernecking doesn’t bat an eye at touring catacombs or concentration camps or Alcatraz. Adventure travellers rush to recently stabilized war zones. The world has collectively shelled out almost a billion dollars to see Phantom Menace—it wasn’t for the gripping story. It was to see gnarly set pieces. We are fascinated by set pieces. Disneyland bases rides on what’s seething just 40 minutes up the road from this bar.

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In the warm months, on alternate days, Syncrude and Suncor run a daily bus tour to the gnarly set pieces, which have names like all-inclusive gambling resorts: Aurora and Albian Sand. You have to book the Syncrude bus weeks in advance. Today it’s full of retired American geologists on a pilgrimage. They say stuff like “There’s nowhere else like this on earth.” Syncrude runs 90 other buses to its facilities each day, picking up employees within three minutes of their home.

As you draw closer, the boreal forest thins and the vessels on the road grow in size. The tails that were pulled down over the backs of the half-tonne trucks are now up, disproportionately long. “Buggy whips” was what one of the roughnecks at the Oil Can called them.

In 1975 the dump trucks hauling earth from open pits weighed 60 tonnes. By 1986 they were up to 200. They’re currently 400 tonnes and cost $5 million a pop. It takes 12 hours to wash one of these trucks and they weigh 14 tonnes less when clean. A half-tonne is budgeted to last a year in this pit. This is the hierarchy of trucks in this strange land—that a half-tonne truck’s got to fly a buggy whip so it doesn’t get squished by something that can’t see the ground beneath it. This is a whole new ecosystem.

The Syncrude guide says, “Our utilities plants produce enough electricity per day to supply a city of 300,000 people.” For almost a century, they tried all manner of experiments, attempting to solve the geological wonder’s central mystery: how do you get the oil out of the oilsands? They heated it to ungodly temperatures. At one point they tried adding laundry detergent. Year after year, sinking billions of dollars. By some estimates, there could be 2.5 trillion barrels to dig out. The thinking goes that if God didn’t want us to burn up oil, he wouldn’t have put it 91 metres beneath the earth to suck out with 400-tonne trucks and $8 billion in refining equipment. Could the Almighty have made it any easier?

***

Aurora is an organism unto itself. It moves slowly, and continuously changes shape. When we saw it, it was oozing to the northwest. To make way for the pit, muskeg is drained, forest pulped a year in advance. As you watch from the edge, you feel like you’re looking down on The Lost World, on creatures from some other age whose every act of being is also directly causing its own ultimate extinction. The open pit’s relentless activity can be summed up: scoop, haul, dump. A million tonnes of earth are moved in a 24-hour period. Two 12-hour shifts, 365 days a year. Lunch and coffee breaks are taken inside the cabs, which have GPS positioning systems. ("Night Shift 4" does a weekly karaoke night over the radio system.) Temperatures can plummet below -50 C. Operations can't be allowed to stop.

As these creatures thunder past us on the haul road, entering and exiting the pit, their force of motion moves so much dirt into the air that it causes a dust storm. The map of the haul road constantly changes, and the driver of our bus looks nervously towards the tour guide. “We don’t want to confront one of those trucks,” she reminds him. For several minutes, as we swerve through the dust, lost on the new haul road, with no buggy whip, everybody on the bus feels the urgency of this place. And more literally, I think the thought I have caught myself thinking a hundred times since we arrived: My God, we have come a long way much too quickly.

***
 

Burtynsky is always asked if his portraits are intended to condemn or to glorify these places, but he never gives a response. It is for you to decide.

Just before you reach what Syncrude calls “the facility,” there is a turnout on the road. It is a wonderful place to come at night, when all the machinery’s aglow, a place to ponder your existence. Better than any mountaintop. Cranes hang off 600-foot stacks, which shoot steam and gas and fire into the heavens. Part of it is shaped like an accordion. Other parts like brass and woodwind sections. Another’s like a rocket that will be released for outer space. Trucks streak silently towards the facility and then seem to be swallowed.

It’s so calm. Air cannons thump sporadically in the darkness without disrupting the symphony of crickets. In its wake, Syncrude has very conspicuously reclaimed more than 3,400 hectares of land, planting 3 million trees and shrubs. They’ve parachuted in 200 buffalo.

Beyond inventing a new industrial environment, these consortiums have reinvented the natural one too. Each year, Alberta’s oil and gas industry clears the same amount of forest that Alberta’s entire forest industry clears, and not everyone is such a steward as Syncrude. Whenever a scientist from some well-meaning institute asks, “Why don’t they just give us more for this privilege?” the energy minister will say that it’s too late to “change the rules.” We are forever worried they will take their business somewhere else. But the thing you learn when you go to Fort McMurray is that this set piece is too big to move. And it doesn’t exist anywhere else on earth. It’s created new rules, very quickly.