Athabasca

When I first stepped off the plane it was minus fifty degrees. The words “cold” or “freezing” don’t do justice: a new word needs to be invented, maybe combining excruciating and frozen. (exfroziating?) I broke out into a strange red rash over my whole body that lasted my entire first two weeks on site. I couldn’t get warm, no matter how many layers I put on and at night a shivered under the blankets. After a couple turns up there I got used to it. Eventually minus fifteen was a nice warm day.

I was employed on the Athabasca Oil Sands Project in Northern Alberta for a year. I needed a job, the door was open and the money was good. It was hard being away from family and friends for so long but the week off every month and the cash to enjoy my time off made it worthwhile.

My first trip onto the new Kearl Lake refinery occurred in the dead of night. It is difficult to describe the feeling I experienced driving through the tank farm, extraction and froth areas that evening. All the workers had gone home, the site was deserted and lit up with floodlights like some haunted sports arena from a sci-fi movie.

The pipes and vats, overhead racks and convoluted metal tubing made me think of Mordor or the dark satanic mills of William Blake. All the humanity and compassion seemed to be sucked out of the air by the howling arctic winds that blew snow and dust over the roadways: How could man envision and design such a place?

The destruction of the environment is profound. First the forest is removed. Then, sixty feet of topsoil are dug up by the giant earth machines. Under that lies the black tar sands that the oil companies covet to produce bitumen. Billions and billions of dollars are sunk into developing the industry. One major oil company is rumored to have invested $20 billion in three years and they still have not extracted any of the raw crude oil yet.

It seems utterly backwards to power the plants by using clean natural gas in order to make dirty bitumen. And despite the enormous expense, the oil giants still make money. It doesn’t really matter what the oil costs because our global industrial complex is powered by oil — we are completely dependent on it so the world will pay no matter the price.

That probably makes me and everyone else that worked up there hypocrites. Unfortunately, we are all part of the system: we drive cars and heat our homes; we use the plastic products produced by petroleum daily; we drive on roads made of asphalt to get to our corporate jobs where we work to maintain and further the goals and aspirations of wealthy, powerful men who seem to have no concern for us, our environment or the future of our planet.

And for this, we take our dearly-earned paycheques and try to build a better life. We feed our kids and give them an education in the hopes that the world we hand over to them will be better than the one that was handed over to us by our parents and grandparents. Will the cycle continue until all the oil is gone, and the forests destroyed and the Earth is completely plundered of all its natural resources?

The alarming reality is that there is no Plan B; our national leaders have little thought of the next 100 or 500 years. Oil is just part of the system we live under here on Earth; our leaders appear to function with the sole purpose of staying in power and not for the betterment of our planet as a whole, regardless of their rhetoric and overtures of philanthropy and goodwill.

However, the good news is there are people who care about our planet and the life it contains: we can soldier on, hopeful and confident that this empire of materialism can be overcome by the love and respect of all living things and we can, in time, usher in a new era of freedom and brotherhood on our ailing planet, third from the Sun.

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If you enjoyed this story you can read the entire collection of Athabasca: Oil Sands Poetry here