Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

Forget that Crane Lake is called Crane Lake, though. It should be called Duck Lake—or maybe something punchier, like Suncor Ducktasia Lake. It is nothing less than Suncor’s duck showcase. No nature area has ever been so completely tricked out with signs calling attention to what a lovely little nature area it is. There are duck blinds, and a duck-identification chart from an organization called Ducks Unlimited, and a good number of actual ducks present on the lake, possibly including several I had recently failed to murder.

So ducktastic was it that I began to wonder whether Suncor was trying to stick it to poor old Syncrude, with all its duck problems, just up the road. Surely some Suncor PR rep had hoped for a newspaper headline proclaiming, “Suncor, Neighbor to Duck-Destroyer Syncrude, Offers Clean Water, Reeds, at Waterfowl Haven.”

I set out on my hike, keeping the lake on my right, ambling through a spray of purple wildflowers. There were dragonflies, again, and mosquitoes, too—snarling, clannish mosquitoes of the Albertan variety, with thick forearms and tribal tattoos. But I was ready. Don had lent me a bug jacket—a nylon shirt with a small tent for your head and face—and I had armed myself with enough spray-on DEET to poison a whole village. That is to say, I was happy, and ready to bypass all this man-made nature and find my scenic mine-overlook.

Making my way over a small wooden footbridge that spanned a swampy inlet, I was steered southward along the east shore of the lake by a thick forest of young trees on the left. A wooden bench, with grass growing up between the boards of its seat, faced the water. Silence reigned, except for the gentle rustle of the breeze and the constant sound of cannons. I had the place to myself.

But the farther I went down the path, the more the Crane Lake experience started to chafe. All this had been put here on purpose— sculpted, as Don had said. It was too neat. Too self-contained. 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.