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

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 oil 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.