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

“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.

Fort McMurray dwindled behind us. The sun was low, behind a curtain of haze, the earth dusky. Sliding toward us were the sulfur pyramids of Syncrude, their full dimensions even more impressive from the air, a footprint five city blocks to a side.

“I have one flying student who’s a Suncor engineer,” came Terris’s voice over the headset. “He was complaining about how people give the oil sand companies a hard time about polluting the Clearwater River. He said, ‘The Clearwater River is one of the most naturally polluted rivers around.’” Terris was smiling. “The guy said, ‘It’s been leeching bitumen into the water for three million years. We’re just doing the same thing!’”

We all have our ways of feeling like part of the natural order, I guess.

I could now see a low mountain of dry tailings that Don had told me to look out for, a huge heap of sandy mine waste that, like everything else around here, was one of the largest man-made objects in the world. It was so large that it was hard to tell where the tailings ended and the non-tailings landscape began. Beside it was a graphite-colored tailings pond, a mile and a half long, with a single boat floating motionless on its surface.

“People have really different reactions to seeing the mines,” Terris said. “One group I had said it was the most horrible thing they had ever seen. And then you’ll get engineers up here, and they just say it looks like a mine.”

As we considered circling back for another look, the radio crackled to life.

Private aircraft, maintain minimum distance and altitude from Syncrude plant operation.

It was Syncrude security. The company had its own aircraft control. Terris grimaced. “I was hoping nobody would be home.” But it didn’t matter. Already we could see Suncor.

It loomed in the distance. Rather, it did the thing that is like looming but is actually its opposite. It did the thing the Grand Canyon does when you first catch sight of it from the window of a passenger jet. It’s not like a mountain, or a mountain range. Even the Rockies only modulate the landscape—they don’t interrupt it.

Now we saw that interruption, where the flat of the world fell away from the horizon. Where a crater had been punched through the face of the earth.

Terris swung us toward it. He circled, he rolled to one side, and we looked straight down onto the mine, onto its dozens of tiny yellow dump trucks. They drove along a curving network of dirt roads, through a mosaic of craters. Here they sped back to the hoppers, fully loaded and surprisingly fast, kicking up trails of dirt and dust. There, in the intimate cataclysm of a smaller pit, they waited in a group of two or three for their turn to approach a shovel, workers to their queen. And then away again, urgently, to deliver the next load.

The window pressed against my forehead. To the east and the south, I saw forest. But to the north, there was only the mine.

I wasn’t horrified. But I had a funny feeling. Some kind of problem with scale. The trucks and the shovels looked so tiny—such toys and yet so huge. I had spent all week thinking about bigness, about weight, running through the synonyms for huge, and running through them again. The biggest machines in the world, they towered over a person with such magnitude and force. Now they were earnest beetles in a sandbox, themselves dwarfed by the vast footprint they were hollowing out.

“They look like ants!” Terris was shouting over the headset.

But they did not look like ants. They were too big to be ants. And somehow their very failure to be mere specks made them grow ever larger, and part of this growing was how much they seemed to shrink.

Vertigo rushed into the eye that tried to see it. And with the horizon circling around us, I knew that the mine itself, the panorama-swallowing mine, was barely a pinprick on the spinning body of the globe, and the globe itself a mote in the void, and the void itself a mote in another void, and I sat with my head pressed against the window—and felt, just a little, like puking.

Tell folks that you’re making a grand tour of polluted places, and they tend to get excited. A surprising number of people say they want to come along, and, although this turns out to be mostly talk, it’s gratifying to know the market is there.

Most of all, people want to know about the list. How am I choosing my destinations? Based on what? And they have suggestions. Everyone has a favorite: a city that struck them as horrifically smoggy, a developing-world landfill they read about. Some make an easy leap from Chernobyl to Bhopal, taking up the theme of industrial disaster. But that doesn’t seem quite right. And what if I want to check out a place that is the perfect embodiment of an environmental problem but that isn’t particularly gross? Should I abandon it, just because I’m worried it won’t count as “most polluted”? The criteria flood in: kinds of pollution, areas of the world, recreational possibilities…