Peregrinations

I Hitched into Fort McMurray from Edmonton late last night with Dru and Macdonald. It was dark and wet all the way here and having never been so far North before, the trees to me seemed sickly and pallid, pointless as far as trees go. I felt like the straight, black road could cease at any moment and we’d simply fall off the end of the earth.

The entire day was slow-going and lazy. We had wandered around the town commenting surreptitiously on ‘Fort McMurray-isms’—that is, various opinions we’ve come to form in the last couple of days. For example, just before skipping town, we’d parked ourselves outside of Zellers, under a sign that read ‘No loitering, No Littering, No Spitting,’ and cooked ourselves some noodles on Macdonald’s camp stove. Most of the stores in that particular strip mall complex were closed, and Dru wondered aloud at how many cars there still were in the parking lot, which was close to full.

Almost two weeks ago we went to Fort McMurray’s aviation centre to do a fly-over of the main tar sands plants: Syncrude, Suncor, Albian Sands, and CNRL. Our pilot, Karen, was younger (not to mention more female) than I’d expected. She’d been flying for two years, and told us that some pilots don’t like doing tours, but she does, because “you get to meet all kinds.”

We went to Fort Mackay about a week and a half ago and stayed with Edward and Celina, people that Macdonald met at a water conference a few weeks ago. They are the most hospitable, most authentic people that I’ve met in a long time. Members of the community of elders here in town, and married forty years, they both grew up in the bush and were raised strictly observing the traditional ways of their communities, from trapping, to cooking, to sewing. They are sad to see respect and discipline dissipating with the younger native generation.

We lay in bed dozing off, talking about quality of life. About how apples and tomatoes, rumour has it, aren’t as robust, tasty or nutritious as they were in our parents’ generation, and that the quality of theirs didn’t measure up to those of previous generations either. Oranges and celery. Mangoes and Carrots. Fresh produce. The vitamins of life. I read an article about it that recited percentages, that recapped parentages.