Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

glassy wastewater.

I rolled down the window to let in the breeze, tarry and warm. The cracking thuds of cannon fire punctuated the air. It was the bird-deterrent system, the one that Syncrude had been a little slow to deploy in the spring of the previous year.

Let us hope that ducks find these noises either helpful or terrifying. Personally, I found it hard to tell where they were coming from. Had I been a duck, I would have wanted to land, to get my bearings and figure out just what the hell was going on. This also would have afforded me a closer look at the other bird-deterrent: a sparse posse of small, flag-like scarecrows that decorated the shore. Several more of the ragged little figures floated on lonely buoys in the middle of the lake.

The mines themselves were nowhere visible, but at the north end of the lake rose the Syncrude upgrading plant, the flame-belching doppelganger of Disney’s Enchanted Kingdom, built of steel towers and twisting pipes, crested with gas flares and plumes of steam. A hot, wavering stain of transparent yellow rose from one smokestack, drawing a narrow stripe across the sky.

Oil sands contain a heavy form of petroleum called bitumen, which must go through several stages of upgrading at a plant like this before it can enter a refinery. But before it can even be upgraded, it must be separated from the vast quantities of sand that are its host. This first step takes place mine-side, where the sand is mixed with water and then heated, separating out the layer of bitumen that clings to each grain of sand. You have here two issues: the use of massive amounts of water—in this case drawn from the Athabasca River—and the incredible volumes of natural gas required to heat it.

The separated bitumen is then piped to the upgrading plant, where—using yet another unimaginable amount of energy—it is put through a series of distillations and cracking processes to break it down into smaller, more manageable hydrocarbons. Only then can the result—called synthetic crude oil—be sent off to a refinery for the production of gasoline, jet fuel, and ziplock bags.

I hung a left, following the loop that would take me past the front gate, around the tailings pond, and back toward town. Just west of the plant was the sulfur storage area, though to call it a “sulfur storage area” is like calling the pyramids a “stone storage area.”

One byproduct of Syncrude’s industrial process is a monumental quantity of sulfur, for which it has neither a use nor a market. So it stores the stuff, pouring it into solid yellow slabs, one hulking yellow level on top of the last, building what is now a trio of vast, flat-topped ziggurats fifty or sixty feet tall and up to a quarter mile wide. Like everything else around here, they may be some of the largest man-made objects in history—but I had never heard of them before. A pyramid of sulfur just isn’t news, I guess. They are less scandalous than a city-size hole in the ground, and only a very determined duck could get itself killed by one.

One day, though, Syncrude or its successors will see these vast—huge, monumental, gargantuan, monolithic—objects for the opportunity they are. Tourists of the future will summit their grand steps, and stay in sulfur hotels carved out of their depths, and sip yellow cocktails, and attend championship tennis matches at the Syncrude Open, for which the players will use blue tennis balls, for visibility on the sulfur courts. Thousands of years later, explorers bushwhacking through the jungles of northern Cameximeriga will stumble onto them and be dazzled by the simplicity of our temple architecture, at once brutal and grand, and will speculate about what drove us to worship sulfur above all other elements, and will see that the pharaohs were nitwits.

Although the mines sit at a breezy remove, their presence is felt everywhere in Fort McMurray. The economy and community thrum in tune with the ceaseless project of ground-eating. As you meander the streets, you begin to feel that you are an iron filing oriented along the field lines emanating from an immense subterranean magnet, and that everything and everyone in town is pointed toward it: the new bridge over the Athabasca, built to withstand the load of heavy equipment being transported to the work site; traffic lights that can be swung sideways out of the roadway to let oversize loads pass unhindered; the local high school (mascot: the Miners; motto: “Miner Pride”); the old excavating machine sitting on the lawn of Heritage Park.

You feel it standing on a wooded bluff overlooking the river, where the air stinks of bitumen oozing naturally out of the hillside, and where nearly a century ago the first hopeful entrepreneur tried to boil money out of oil sands. And you feel it downtown at the Tim Hortons, where white pickup trucks line up around the corner to get their coffee and doughnuts. Each white pickup truck carries someone on his way to work at the mines, and each white pickup truck has a tall, whiplike antenna sprouting from its bed, and they are not antennas but safety flags. Without one, even a large pickup truck may go unnoticed by the behemoth sand haulers in the mine, and be crushed.

Even at leisure, people in Fort McMurray live out an echo of their industry, taking their minds off the noisy machines of the mines by churning through the countryside on other noisy machines, like all-terrain-vehicles and snowmobiles (known as sleds).

“Ninety percent of people who live here have at least one ATV or sled,” said Colleen, the young woman behind the counter at the off-roading store. She and her colleague Adam were Fort McMurray natives, rarities in a city overrun by outsiders coming for work, and they had a blase defensiveness about their hometown. Colleen seemed almost to rue the economic boom that had transformed it. “The recession sucks and all, but in ways it’s amazing,” she said. “Now you can go to a restaurant and not wait three hours. You can get a doctor’s appointment. Before, if your car broke down, it would take nine weeks to get it fixed. The quality of life was getting really low before the recession happened. Everything was a struggle.”

But that didn’t mean they thought the oil sands themselves were a bad thing. “Fort McMurray is what’s powering all of Canada, and we don’t get the recognition,” Colleen said, picking up a tiny brown dog bouncing at her feet. “I think that whole ‘dirty oil’ thing comes from a lobbying group in Saudi.”

“The ducks,” Adam said, completing the conspiracy theory.

Colleen snorted. “Yeah, fuck! There’s so many more important things. Like consumer waste!”

Through Fort McMurray Tourism, anyone who signs up a day ahead and forks over forty bucks can take an oil sands bus tour. Oil sands bus tour—are there any four words more beautiful in the English language? Someone was finally seeing the light on this pollution tourism thing. I signed up.

The bus tour didn’t leave until the following morning, so I had a lonely afternoon to kill. I called my girlfriend. The Doctor. She always knows what to do in these situations. She has a peculiar kind of common sense that includes the possibility that spending your days roaming oil sands mines and nuclear disaster sites might be a good idea.

“Remember,” she said over the phone, “you’re supposed to be on vacation.”

Right! I was a tourist. And although the world’s industrial eyesores and ecological calamities generally languish unattended by gift shops and welcome centers, Fort McMurray is a forward-thinking town in this regard. I made for the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, a family-friendly museum for those interested in the local industry.

The OSDC represents some of the best industrial propaganda in the world. (Which I mean as a compliment. You try writing the brochure for Mordor.) Its gift shop is a gift shop among gift shops, an emporium thick with toy giant dump trucks, kid-size hard hats, watercolor prints of gigantic machines, and truck- themed socks. I grabbed an armful of goodies. At the register, I made the find of the day in a bin of impulse buys: a tiny, plush oil drop with yellow feet and googly eyes. Who knew petroleum could be so adorable?

Into the exhibits, where I spent the next several hours in a state of fizzing excitement over scale models of dragline shovels and bucket-wheel extractors, over containers holding liquid bitumen in different states—room temperature, heated, diluted—with rods to stir the stuff and feel the different viscosities. Not to mention the 150- ton oil sands truck parked inside the exhibit hall. I climbed two stories up, into its cab, and sat in the driver’s seat, wrenching the steering wheel back and forth.

And now let us praise the Dig and Sniff, in which a small mound of raw oil sand is displayed under a plastic dome. The Dig and Sniff invites you simply to dig, using the rod built into the display—and then, having dug, to sniff, through the small opening in the dome. Dig and Sniff! With a name of such economy and force, it commands you to action, granting you a direct experience—modestly tactile, safely olfactory—of the oil sands themselves.

A young boy worked the scraper. “This thing is cool!” he cried, sticking his nose into the dome. “Dad, come smell the oil sand! The Discover Center’s fun.” We were living inside a commercial for the OSDC. I took my turn at the stand, ready to get down to business.

I dug. I sniffed.