Three years earlier, he had been the only surviving juvenile from the summer’s brood. When icy winds had gusted through the trees and his parents had flown away from the nest, he followed them. But when they went their separate ways, he shadowed his mother. She had led him on his first migration.
Guided by the curving lifelines of the rivers, mother and son flew south over America’s heartland, avoiding the pockets of industrialization where the air was thick. Instead, they flew high above the Great Plains, where gangs of man-machines moved across the brown earth in unnaturally straight lines, leaving clouds of dust in their wake.
Each beat of the young bird’s wings had brought him closer to maturity, closer to independence, until he suddenly stopped following his mother and headed out in his own direction.
Before long, the air warmed and tasted of salt. Something told him it was where he was supposed to be. So there, in the solitude of Louisiana’s bayous and backwaters, he had made his home.
Two winters passed.
Then the urge to find a mate overcame his need for food and comfort. His wings had a mind of their own, launching him high into the air to carry him back to northern Alberta where he was born. But he did not retrace his original flight path. Instead, he flew westward to the edge of the great mountains, then north alongside them — three thousand miles, over a landscape that he had never seen before, to the place of his birth.
But the place of his birth is nowhere to be found.
Shaded from the spring sunshine by a white canopy, the men in suits say it’s a great day, an auspicious day, and one that has been a long time coming. They say it’s proof that the company takes its environmental responsibility seriously and that they are proud of this new phase in the oil sands industry. They say that Energyse has been working for many years to reclaim a tailings pond and that all the effort and expense have led to this wonderful day when trees are delivered from the nursery and are planted by hundreds of volunteers. I feel a swell of pride to be included in the process, but then the suits go on … and on … and on. It’s boring. I put in my earbuds and pull my hoodie around my neck to hide them.
Finally, the speeches end and each of the suits plants a tiny tree, pausing mid-dig for photo ops. Frank spots my earbuds and glares at me. I glare back, and he turns away, but even over my music I can hear him talking to others.
“I hope these photos get into newspapers across the country,” he says. “People need to see that the land is being put back to how it was before the mining started.”
I can’t imagine that all this bare ground will become forest again with trees as big as the ones we saw on the drive up, but the people here seem to know what they are doing, and obviously reforestation is a priority, so I don’t get why my grandfather is so negative about it. I guess he’s stuck in his old ways and doesn’t want to see anything change, not even when it’s for the good of the country.
Having planted their little trees, the suits quickly climb into the limos and take off, leaving us choking on dust. The supervisor is giving us instructions, so I take out my earbuds and listen. He tells us to pair up and work across the land in rows. Frank quickly throws his arm around Angela’s shoulder, leaving me to work with my grandfather. None of us would have it any other way. I place each little tree into the shallow hole that my grandfather digs and then use the toe of my boot to gently press the earth back into place around the stem. Apparently the trees with long soft needles are pines, the ones with shorter prickly needles are spruces, and the ones that look like dead twigs are poplars. My grandfather shows me the faintest trace of buds breaking on the stems.
I’m close enough to Frank to hear him telling other tree planters about his role in the mining process and about his haulage truck. “She’s not like the trucks you see on construction sites in Edmonton or McMurray. When I stand next to her, my head only reaches halfway up the tire! The power shovels are the only machines on site that are bigger than my baby. They scoop a hundred tons in one bite and dump it in my truck so fast that I barely have time to stop.”
There are many things I hate about my father. He can be a real jerk. A total ass! But all the same, I have to admit I’m proud of what he does here. Who wouldn’t be impressed by the 797 he drives?
The supervisor checks out the trees that my grandfather and I have just planted. “You’re doing a great job,” he says. “Do you have any questions?”
I do, but I don’t know how to ask them without seeming like an idiot. I thought I’d learned everything about the extraction of oil from the sands at the recent school trip to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, but now I realize that I don’t even know what tailings are. I must have been thinking about something else that day. I smile at the memory of Chrissie. She was in a different class from me, so we hadn’t met at school, not officially, but I’d seen her in my neighbourhood. I even knew where she lived, because I sort of stalked her one day.
When we’d assembled for one of the demonstrations, there was only one guy between us, a short kid from Grade Eight. I elbowed him out of the way until I was standing right next to her, our arms almost touching. She looked at me like I was invading her space, but then she smiled. My bones went soggy, almost too weak to keep me upright. At the time I thought it was love. Now I wonder if it was leukemia.
Despite the Chrissie distraction, I had learned a lot on that school trip. A woman spooned greasy black sand into a glass beaker. She poured in boiling water from a kettle, stirred it, and let it rest. Bitumen soon rose to the top. The sand settled to the bottom. And dirty water was in the middle. She told us that the same thing happens in the processing plant, except on a bigger scale. She said that the sand is returned to the open pit mine as part of the reclamation process, and the water is reheated and used for the next batch. Chrissie said that the glob of bitumen, dangling from the Popsicle stick in a thick, goopy strand, looked like stiff molasses. I agreed, even though I had no clue what molasses was. But it was easy to see that the stuff was way too thick to flow through a pipeline. No wonder they have to thin it down. The word they used was upgrade.
“Any questions?’ the tree-planting supervisor asks again.
Holding a miniature spruce tree in one hand, I raise my other hand and wait, like I’m in school. I feel foolish, bring my hand down fast, and blurt out my question.
“What exactly are tailings?”
“Tailings are the slurry that’s left after the oil has been extracted from the sand. We pump it to a tailings pond and leave it a while so that any remaining oil can rise to the top and be skimmed off. Most of the sediment settles out too, so then we can recycle the water for washing more oil sand. Recycling is important. We don’t want to use more water from the river than we have to.”
The supervisor’s explanation sounds fine to me, but I can see that my grandfather is not convinced.
“What happens to the sediment?” he asks.
“That’s always been one of our most challenging issues,” the supervisor admits. “We want all of the land here to be reclaimed and returned to the province as soon as possible, so we’re constantly working on new ways to dispose of tailings safely.”
“You mean you haven’t been doing it safely for forty years!” my grandfather says.
The supervisor looks ready to bolt for his life, like a startled rabbit. “I’m here to help you plant trees,” he says, bravely holding his ground. “Once these babies grow up, the land will be much better than it was before. It was useless back in the day — too wet to do anything with. But we’ve made it higher and drier.”
“Good idea,” my grandfather says. “It was only muskeg.”
I hear the subtle sarcasm and know my grandfather is pissed off,