4.

The Oilman

FORT MCMURRAY, ALBERTA

September 22, 2012

The official name for the road that leads to the tar sands is Highway 63, but the locals have other names for it: the Highway to Hell, Hell’s Highway, Suicide 63, the McMurray 500, the Highway of Death.

Highway 63 is a 150-mile, north-south, mostly two-lane road that stretches from north of Edmonton to the northern reaches of Alberta. Our destination was Fort McMurray, a flourishing boomtown of 76,000 residents, with another 39,000 living in nearby work camps.

We were driving through the boreal forest, the northern woods that stretch from Alaska all the way to Canada’s east coast. From the car, it was impossible to see the ecological devastation that was supposedly going on all around us. From my seat, it just looked like a dark, dense spruce forest.

My driver, Alan, a middle-aged software engineer, was driving from Athabasca for another fourteen-day work stint. Alan was one of thousands who use the Highway to Hell every single day. It’s especially bad on Tuesdays and Sundays, Alan said, because a lot of the workers (“who all drive like idiots”) were finishing their work week (or work month for some) and were in a rush to get home to be with their wives or girlfriends down in Edmonton or Calgary. It’s one of the deadliest roads in Canada. In 2004, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police gave out eighteen thousand tickets on just one stretch of highway, the average ticketed speed being one hundred miles per hour. Between 2002 and 2010, there were sixty-six deaths, and between 2001 and 2005, there were more than one thousand collisions and two hundred and fifty injuries.

Alan was a careful driver who never showed any emotion when a hotheaded twentysomething charged past us in his brand-new beefed-up Silverado. Curiously, Alan had installed a camera on the windshield so that when he’d eventually get into an accident his wife would be able to watch the video and know whom to sue.

“This is the underbelly of society,” he said blankly, looking straight ahead as the Silverado teetered back into the northbound lane in front of us. On account of the reckless driving and the highway’s deadly reputation, I was more than a bit on edge, protectively covering my privates at the slightest provocation from passing drivers.

The road was so deadly because it badly needed another two lanes of highway to make space for the incredible width of some of the semis hauling equipment up to Fort McMurray and also because there was simply too much traffic.

The promise of high-wage jobs in an otherwise slumbering economy attracted Canadians to Fort McMurray from all provinces. Alan told me he was getting paid like “a doctor” for simple engineering work. There are always opportunities in boomtowns, he told me, but there are also more than a few drawbacks. Alan had been working in oil and mining camps all his adult life, and he told me about the alcoholism, the drug addictions, the gambling, the prostitution: the products of having too much money and no real life. He was a recovering alcoholic. He’d seen it everywhere but nowhere as bad as Fort McMurray. The prostitutes were charging, according to Alan, three hundred dollars for twenty minutes of service. “They’re there,” he said. “You got choices.”

Fort McMurray has increased its population tenfold since the early 1970s because of what’s in the ground. Amid the muskeg and spruce roots is a substance as thick as peanut butter called bitumen (bә-tyü-mәn), a mixture of clay, sand, water, and oil. Though there are several ways to get the bitumen, it is often mined in enormous man-made pits. The pits are dug and the bitumen is carried out with gigantic backhoes, bulldozers, and dump trucks. The only thing the oil companies are interested in with the bitumen is the oil. But separating the oil from the bitumen is a costly process, requiring tons of fresh water and natural gas.

The bitumen is essentially boiled at nearby refineries, a process that separates the oil from the clay and sand. Because of the high consumption of gas, the pollution of water, and the razing of the forest, not to mention the sheer scope of the operation (in which two million barrels of oil are produced every day), the tar sands are highly controversial, and the creation of the Keystone XL, which would pump this oil more quickly to Texas, would mean that the developed area of the tar sands would continue to spread.

After a few hours in the car with Alan, I began to feel comfortable enough with him to let him in on my plan while trying not to come across as the “I hate everything you do” radical environmentalist I sort of was.

“The workers don’t give a rat’s ass about the environment,” Alan said. “The place is full of rednecks. Anyone with half a brain knows the country has a significant environmental problem. We just don’t know what to do. If you start talking to people out here about the environment, they’ll punch you. They’ll get violent. They’re here to make money. The people here are the worst sort.”

Alan dropped me off at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre on the edge of town. It was late, and after hearing about the crime in town, I was scared of getting mugged in the middle of the night, so I chose to sleep where I figured no one would come wandering through: a thin stand of spruce and aspen poplars in between the Highway to Hell and a fenced-in industrial facility. There wasn’t much of a chance of rain, so I didn’t bother to set up my tent, sleeping instead on a few folds of cardboard that I’d used as hitchhiking signs. There was nothing between me and the stars except a few humble tree branches.

Throughout the night, my sleeping bag became saturated with dewdrops, which, by the morning, had turned into a frozen sheen of frost crystals. The whole night I listened to jacked-up trucks and semis hauling freight in and out of Fort McMurray.

Booming, indeed.

•   •   •

In the morning, I hobbled up the road and borrowed a Wi-Fi signal from a McDonalds’s playroom, where I found an electrical socket. I checked my e-mail and looked at the map of Fort McMurray. I made my way to the post office to pick up a box of nine days’ worth of food I’d mailed to myself from Denver.

Fort McMurray, despite bursting at the seams with people and cars and construction, did have a sort of northern charm. It was built atop a gently ascending hill alongside the Athabasca River, and it probably could have been a nice place if it wasn’t for all the bustle, traffic, and crime. Alan had told me I’d never really get a good view of the tar sands from ground level, so I called one of the local aviation companies and scheduled a two-hundred-dollar flight tour. I hitchhiked the twenty miles to the airstrip, and the pilot, a few years younger than I was, took me up in his four-seater Cessna 172.

I didn’t realize it, but because the tar sands are so inconceivably large, I’d get to see only 10 percent of the pit-mining sites and none of the other operations that use different methods to extract the oil, such as steam-assisted gravity drainage, which account for about 50 percent of the operations. In northern Canada, there are as many as 1.63 trillion barrels of bitumen across 54,000 square miles of land, larger than the country of England.

We began the flight over the forest, a green hide of bristled spruce dappled with clusters of golden-yellow birch leaves and sprawling pools of dark-blue bog. The forest covered the earth with a thick layer of biota. Despite small sections that had been logged, the forest still felt wild, mysterious, inviting. The forest’s autumnal hue had not yet bronzed into the crispy prewinter foliage that would portend winter’s grim plans. They were the sort of woods you’d like to have rubbing up against your village, the sweet cool air and sleek orange leaves smelling of Halloween, hayrides, and backyard football. We flew over the Athabasca River, a deep, clear canoeist’s dream, as thick and curvaceous as a dragon’s tail.

But the autumnal wonderland came to an abrupt end as we approached and then passed over an enormous tailings pond—a lifeless gray sea of sludge, the liquid residue of the bitumen-to-oil refining process. The ponds, which are more accurately described as lakes, bore no sign of bird, wind ripple, or fish. They were still, silent, dead. And they were everywhere. After the refining process, the oil industry creates these giant man-made lakes to store all the toxic fluids. As of 2010, the tailings ponds covered about seventy square miles of northern Alberta, with some ponds as big as 7,500 acres, or half the size of Manhattan. Migrating ducks are known to rest on the ponds, and because the ponds have killed thousands of them, the oil industry has placed scarecrows (dubbed “bit-u-men”) wearing orange hazmat suits in the middle of them.

Beyond the pond was one of the pits, a breathtaking mud crater that was of such breadth it almost stretched to the edge of the viewable earth.

At worst, the scene was a war zone, the ground zero of some horrific city-destroying bomb. At best, it was a futuristic moon colony where imported laborers operated giant machinery, worked slave hours, and remorselessly plundered a place to which they have no emotional connection. How could this be here—in Canada? This seemed like the work of some deranged Third World tyrant bent on industrializing his nation at any cost, not the willful desecration of a whole ecozone carried out by an enlightened world power.

It was a mishmash of utter chaos and sublime sophistication. The pits appeared to have been dug, and redug, hundreds of feet into the ground. You could see the strata of previous digs, which looked like giant downward steps. The mined area was mostly a whitish gray or a drab desert brown. In the deepest parts of the mine, where trucks were scooping out fresh loads of dirt, was the bitumen, a gleaming gray black, so rich and wet and vibrant in color it brought to mind, despite all of the environmental hazards linked to it, an astounding fertility, a delicious loam, a shovel-deep scoop of life-dense Iowa soil.

Here it was. The whole reason everyone was here. The oil.

Peering down at the shimmering blackness, I thought I could begin to feel its unusual draw. Each scoop was money, security, prosperity. It was the world’s fuel, its boggy-black lifeblood, the lubricant keeping our grand fossil-fuel experiment and consumer-capitalist machine humming.

Although the oil is very much a lifeless substance, you get a sense that it was, in fact, once a heap of screaming tropical life that had, over the ages, been composted down to the molecule, a rich blackness of potency, each bead a galaxy of condensed energy, sundrops that have lain in shadow ready to burst into life again at the heat of a flame. I almost sympathized with the oilmen: Why not reawaken this pool of sleeping wildness to let it live out one last moment of lightning-struck, horse-powered combustion before dissipating into airy nothingness? Our gooey remains don’t deserve any worse.

There were thousands of workers down there bulldozing, maintaining roads, working in the refineries, working on restoration. From above, the men driving vehicles looked like ants, each acting independently yet functioning as a mind-bogglingly coordinated unit. We flew over a vast refinery, the shadow of our plane just a speck on the sprawling facility, the facility just a speck of the tar sands. There were lime-colored holding tanks in the shape of giant tuna cans, billowing towers, gray tubular chimneys coughing out clouds of smoke, a claptrap of pipes—pipes everywhere! It looked as if some buildings were made of them.

We flew over more curiosities: vast flat fields of blackness—about fifteen of them, all next to one another, each the size of a soccer field. (These were fields of “coke,” a pure carbon that’s left over from the refining process.) There were yellow sulfur pyramids being built into the sky, and splashes of water everywhere—ponds, puddles, small lakes. These weren’t the dark-blue pools of the forest, but a vile sewer green. From the plane, the area vaguely smelled like tar. From the factories, a vapor spouted out into the atmosphere—not in a confident vertical but a peg-legged horizontal that fell clumsily onto the ground and swept across the terrain like a Great Plains miniduster.

Beyond the tailings ponds, the pits, the industrial facilities, the eerie sulfur pyramids, the fields of coke, the steely work camps, the Orwellian “reclaimed” zones—where they’d placed a herd of confused wood bison—was the forest. But the forest didn’t seem like a forest anymore. It was just another zone soon to be plundered, just a thin stretch of healthfulness that had already resigned itself to its industrialized fate.

We flew back into Fort McMurray. I got off the plane feeling shell-shocked, dazed, rattled. I had no psychological precedent to draw from to help me process and make sense of what I’d just seen. It struck me that I didn’t feel much at all. Where is my anger? My hatred? My sadness? More disturbing than the tar sands was my thought: Do I even care?

The human mind struggles to sympathize with a devastated landscape, especially one that was never our home. A whole ecosystem removed from the earth is an unbelievable sight. It’s an abstract concept, and appreciating it requires more than just our eyes and ears. On first sight, we feel shock and awe and amazement, but I’d wager that only a few of us are overcome with the moral indignation that we’d originally expected to feel. It’s not until afterward, when we’ve had time to think it over, to reflect on industry’s shortsightedness, to imagine the exodus of animals, and to consider the implications for our climate—all nebulous, abstract things—that we begin to feel what we’d expected to feel and appreciate the enormity of what is being lost.

I retrieved my pack from the aviation company’s office and drew up a new cardboard sign, this time reading SOUTH.

•   •   •

Originally, I’d planned to start my walk in Fort McMurray, the very source of the oil, but after realizing that the existing underground Enbridge pipeline that links Fort McMurray to Hardisty would lead me through chin-high muskeg, a forbidden military zone, and forests teeming with black bears, I decided to change plans and use Hardisty, a small town on the Canadian prairie in central Alberta, as the beginning point of my hike. It would be, after all, the northern terminus of the Keystone XL. This way, the journey, I justified to myself, would be even more symbolically taut, as I was now focused entirely on the proposed route of the Keystone XL, which the soon-to-be-elected president was supposed to approve or reject after being sworn into office in a couple of months. Plus, this would now be a certifiable Great Plains Adventure, a walk from the northern extent of the continent’s grasslands in central Alberta to its southern end down in Texas: a route that, as far as I knew, no one had ever walked.

I got a lift out of Fort McMurray with Eddie, a half-Native-American, half-Scandinavian oilman, who introduced himself to me as an alcoholic and a crack addict almost immediately after shaking hands. He said he’d been off crack for three months, a declaration that brought me about as much relief as the open can of Budweiser in his cup holder.

He was a giant of a man, a round-skulled grizzly bear whose meaty paws made his Dodge Ram’s steering wheel look like a brittle halo. In dangerous situations, I, like most any guy—despite having no tested fighting skills whatsoever—imagine that I’m capable of unleashing a series of devastating martial-arts moves (that I’d unknowingly picked up and stored from movies) on a trio of adversaries. But Eddie was one of those guys who I knew could handily kick my ass—the sort who’d manhandle me into a headlock while letting out a breezy chuckle.

As usual with drivers, I was as polite and uncontroversial as I could be, sparing him the details of my visit and telling him that I was merely a writer (sort of true) who was gathering stories on the XL (sort of true, too).

He said he’d just quit his job in Fort McMurray despite the “disgusting” money he was making (four thousand dollars a week) so that he could see his kids, whom he’d seen for only eight weeks in the past year.

He said that after twelve hours of work the workers would come home to their camp dormitory, which was “more like a jail cell,” to cope with the miseries of their way of life. “These guys, they’re in a rut,” Eddie said. “They can’t get out of it. Some people smoke crack, and others, the crack smokes them. Fort McMurray takes your life, man. Fucking vicious cycle.”

He dropped me off near the town of Lac La Biche. I walked the highway, jumped a barbed-wire fence, and set up my tent in a forest. I cleared away a few fallen logs on a relatively flat patch of ground before cooking up a meal of rice and beans sprinkled with Parmesan cheese. With a full belly, I squirmed into my tent, which was held in place by my two upright trekking poles.

When a leaf from the birch trees feathered down onto my tent, scraping against the fabric on its way to the forest floor, I’d wake up terrified, thinking someone was unzipping my door and trying to get in. When I realized it was just a leaf, my nerves were momentarily calmed, but that worry was merely replaced with another: Winter is on my heels.

I got off to an early start in the morning, mixing in my pot some water with dehydrated whole milk, throwing in a couple of palmfuls of granola cereal. I got on the highway, which was shrouded in heavy fog. The sun rose up in the east directly behind me. It was a scene of celestial perfection, the pale orange orb burning through the fog and hovering just feet above the double yellow line, illuminating the highway to its most westward extent.

My second ride was with a pair of guys coming down from Fort McMurray headed to Edmonton, where they’d resume work with their landscaping business. The driver was adamantly pro-oil, telling me about all the jobs pipelines create and how men can support their families with the money. “There will be jobs,” he said. “It’s going to happen.”

He said that anyone who uses oil shouldn’t complain about oil.

“Hypocrites,” he said, though he said I was an exception since I’d be walking the pipe.

Was I anti-oil? The tar sands and the Keystone XL struck me as pretty terrible ideas, but how could I be anti-oil when all of my gear, clothes, and food were made with, made of, or transported by oil? I was wearing nylon pants and a polyester shirt, which were materials made from oil. Oil was in my pack, my shoes, my trekking poles. I’d originally wanted to travel the XL without using any oil. But where would I, for instance, get shoes that weren’t shipped with oil? How could I get food without any trace of oil? I could bring a rifle and hunt rabbits and deer, but what oil-run machine had cut the wood for the stock? What fuel ran the furnace that shaped the barrel? Where did the lead come from? Oil was everywhere; it was in everything. And going without oil or coal or natural gas was, on this hike and in life in general, pretty much impossible.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought his assertion that “no one who uses oil can complain about it” was just a handy little line to silence heresy. Indeed, let’s acknowledge that oil is a big part of our lives, but let’s not forget that oil and oil’s fossil-fuel cousins are creating some rather massive problems. Seen in this light, some nuanced criticism of the fuel seems warranted.

But he was kind enough to give me a ride, so I swallowed my objections and listened politely.

Later, I’d get rides with a potato farmer, a teacher, a carpenter, and a truck driver. I’d broach the subject of the XL, always in respectful, nonpartisan, I’d-best-not-get-my-ass-kicked ways, and their opinions seemed to land somewhere in between indifference and wholehearted support of the pipeline.

During all of my rides, the conversation revolved around work. Work on oil rigs for fourteen hours straight. Hammering nails in forty-below in steel-toed boots. Snowplowing. Construction. Mining. Potato picking. Work, work, work. That’s what everyone talked about. There was a sort of placid resignation that work consumed almost the entirety of their lives, and there was something admirably wholesome about their unthinking diligence. But there was something sad about it, too. Where was the enlightened heresy, the impassioned religion, the wildness that makes you think, Wow, now there’s a person? It was just work. A lot of work. Hard work. A pipeline, to them, wasn’t something to debate. It was just someone else’s work.