By Tim Querengesser The oil in Fort McMurray won’t run dry anytime soon. But McMurray the city is a place people struggle to call home. Despite growing steadily since oil-sands mining began back in the late 1950s, the city still smells of drying paint and freshly poured concrete. Most Canadians can’t grasp the scale of this ka-boom town, which has more in common with the overnight cities exploding in China or the immigrant-and-oil-fueled metropolises sprawling across the Middle East than sleepy cities in Canada. Give it another decade and McMurray will likely double yet again, to as many as 250,000 people, thanks to a hundred-year supply of bituminous oil sands nearby. This city draws dreamers from all over the country and around the world. They come looking to make a fortune, and, if possible, a regular Canadian life.

It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Wednesday in Fort McMurray. As I drive through rush-hour traffic along treacherous Highway 63 (in the ditch: one jackknifed tanker-truck and one rolled SUV), Paradise City by Guns N’ Roses plays on one of the adrenaline-infused radio stations targeting the city’s endless supply of young males.

The grass is green and the girls are pretty, but McMurray struggles with the home part. Properly speaking, it’s not home for the city’s shadow population of about 10,000 contract workers living in trailer parks at the oil sands upgraders, it’s not home for the thousands of Asian and African immigrants pouring coffee for $15 an hour, and it’s not home for social workers living at or below the poverty line while helping people worse off than them. Few are from here. Fewer want to be here. As one Newfoundlander put it to me, “I don’t want to spend my six days off in Fort McMurray. It’s good to get out.”

The great thing about a ka-boom town, though, is that nobody thinks about it in the present tense. It’s to the future that McMurray peers and there, in the distance, some see Paradise City. To get to it, many are determined to unravel the current McMurray – the city of drug problems, housing shortages and greed – and make a community people want to live in. Of course, little of this talk would have been audible just a year ago, during the dizzying peak of the oil-sands surge. But then the global economic collapse came along, an estimated 15,000 contract workers disappeared, and breathless McMurray finally inhaled.

“For the last decade it’s been a real struggle to juggle all the balls and make a community everywhere else in Canada would expect to have,” says Fort McMurray’s mayor, Melissa Blake. Slim, graceful and quietly confident, Blake confides that this includes luxuries like flushing one’s toilet whenever it’s used: The town’s sewage system (now upgraded) once struggled with demand.

Technically, Blake, 39, is the mayor of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, the largest municipality in Canada by area. McMurray is one of the municipality’s eight hamlets. Hamlet? In the scale-mocking world of Canada’s oil sands, it somehow fits that the city is a hamlet, despite topping 100,000 people in 2009. Back in 1995, when it was still called a “city,” it only had about 30,000.

As we chat in her plush office overlooking the clogged streets of McMurray’s 1960s downtown, the dozen or so women that make up Blake’s staff are decorating for Halloween. Try finding a male in here and you’ll discover the city’s gender split: Most men go to the mines, leaving the offices to be run by women. There are other surprises: In one corner of Blake’s office is a crib for her baby, yet in another is a plaque from the conservative Fraser Institute.

Trying to keep up with the oil sands is the main theme of our conversation. Back in 1996, Blake says Wood Buffalo forecasted $25-billion in industrial investment in McMurray over the next 25 years. It instead saw $60-billion over the past 10 years, with more to come. That rampant growth has affected economic diversity and urban planning, leading to housing shortages, a cost of living seemingly on par with New York City, and an ongoing strain on the place’s sense of community.

“What I’m pleased to say is that we’re actually starting to get into economic diversification,” Blake says. “We’re working with our stakeholders in the region and we’re asking, ‘If this is today, what is it 25 years out? What is it 50 years out? And how do we mobilize ourselves?’” With McMurray’s population growth, “It’s almost a blank slate for the future,” she says. “So, we can pretty well choose to do it any way we like. But we’d like to do it much, much better than we have in the past.”

Evidence of that better future is at MacDonald Island Park. The largest recreational facility in Canada, MacDonald Island cost $180-million to build (the Bell Centre in Montreal, the second busiest arena in North America, cost $270-million). The park features several indoor hockey rinks, a swimming pool, indoor soccer pitches, a banquet hall and a new and very busy library. After leaving downtown, I cross the still-under-construction bridge spanning the Athabasca River. The recent past Blake talks about is evident here. To the west are two sprawling suburban developments sliced into the boreal forest. One, Timberlea, is so new it has only a few stores to serve thousands of residents living in the endless blocks of townhouses. After nearly being rear-ended at a stoplight, I finally leave the town limits for the oil sands themselves. The road signs list the operations as if they’re places. Once I’m in the buffer zone between McMurray and the mines, the pace changes from purposeful to frenzied. The split highway is suddenly a stampede of buses filled with workers, and swarms of dirt-caked trucks with 12-foot “buggy whips” (designed to make them visible to drivers of the mines’ three-storey dump trucks) arching in the wind. The sheer volume of the headlights streaming back to town after a day’s work reminds me of Toronto’s Highway 401 during evening rush hour. To accommodate this volume, the highway has been expanded so quickly that a Syncrude welcome sign now faces the wrong way: The direction of the road has been reversed but the oil giant hasn’t found the time – or personnel – to turn the sign around.

After climbing “Super Test Hill” – named, it’s said, for the stress it puts on loaded trucks, I can finally see Syncrude’s 3,500-hectare tailings ponds and its upgrader plant. You don’t just see the ponds, though, you drive right through them. And the smell of bitumen and sulfur is so strong it makes me nauseous. I get out of the car to fire off some pictures. Every few seconds I hear the piercing crack of a rifle from dozens of propane canons designed to stop waterfowl from landing atop the ponds and dying. At night, with morose yellow lights reflecting off steam clouds above Syncrude, the banging makes me think of a war zone. You also sense paranoia here. Just a few weeks earlier, 21 Greenpeace activists infiltrated the Suncor operation and shut it down. Combined with proposed legislation in the U.S. Congress targeting “dirty oil” from oil sands, the stunt has people on edge.

I continue north, finally reaching the area’s original settlement – the First Nation reserve of Fort McKay, home to about 400 residents. Based on assets, this is the richest First Nation in Canada and it’s clear why. The reserve isn’t so much near the oil sands as inside them. “We’re heavily involved in the oil sands business,” says Jeff Winsor, the assistant band administrator, who’s originally from Newfoundland. “The reserve’s done very well for itself.” This includes several Fort McKay companies servicing the industry and a handful of joint ventures with others, including the Creeburn Lake Lodge located on reserve land, where workers live near the mines in relative luxury. It also includes the plush band office Winsor works from, as well as a soon-to-be-completed multi-million-dollar elder’s facility (a partnership with Shell), a new arena and a soccer pitch.

“Even though it’s a rural reserve, it’s very much an urban reserve because of the influences from Fort McMurray and the activity going on around here,” Winsor, 30, says of Fort McKay. “Obviously, the oil sands have had an impact on traditional ways of life, there’s no sense in hiding from it. Then there are environmental concerns. I think the chief [Jim Boucher] and council have taken the opinion that it’s far better to be in the boardroom and working with companies than sitting outside, screaming and shouting.”

Back in the 1980s, when the industry expanded towards the First Nation, Fort McKay was a fierce opponent and fought it “tooth and nail,” Winsor says. Now, “you have this huge industry around you, and it’s far better to be on side than just kind of continually fighting for no reason,” he says. “You’re not going to get anywhere.” Back in town, there’s a different struggle for balance. It’s here that I meet Kevin. Last year Kevin says he made $143,000 as a construction worker. He owned a boat, a house and a truck. He lost it all, starting with his job, in April. Now, the handsome 35-year-old, originally from Fort Chipewyan, smokes crack daily and hangs out with others beside the Salvation Army, where he sleeps. “There’s a lot of closet crackheads here,” he says. “You’re broke, you’re bored, it’s a vicious cycle. The dealers are right in front of you.” Sure enough, as we talk, a 20-something man in a basketball jersey and with gelled hair walks past and makes eye contact with Kevin, who shakes his head. Crack goes for $40 a rock, Kevin says, and it’s easy to get. “That’s the hard part: You try to quit and bang, it’s right there on your lap.”

What might surprise is that Kevin and several other 30-something men here, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, are wearing work boots and Carhartts, talking about the fluctuating price of oil and forecasting which industrial development will be hiring next. They’re part of the city’s large population of working homeless, men and women who linger when the good times leave, knowing that they’ll doubtlessly come back.

This is the reality of Fort McMurray. And it’s one that, until recently, was tackled by a few large non-profit organizations, like the Salvation Army, and a patchwork of smaller ones, mostly working from church basements or off of kitchen tables. It costs $10,000 and up each month to rent a small store on Franklin Ave., McMurray’s main urban vein. Wages in the sector also struggle to allow people not making big bucks to live well. The only relief has come from the oil sands companies themselves.

When I ask what finding real estate used to be like for non-profits, Diane Shannon, executive director of the United Way, responds, “Oh, unavailable, unaffordable – very unaffordable. Even the United Way had this little office. There was no privacy. If you were having a meeting with someone talking about their application for funding, a door could open and anyone could come in off the street.”

That’s changed with the opening in April of the innovative RedPoll Centre, right on Franklin. The United Way shares the space, financed partly by Suncor Energy, with six other non-profits. “The Suncor Energy Foundation has made a commitment to the sustainability of this community, and that’s not just a sustainability to the environment,” Shannon says. “It also refers to the sustainability of the community as a whole and its people. A huge proportion of the community is tied to Suncor as an employer, so really, they’ve taken their responsibility to this community very seriously. They understand that the non-profits help the community and all the people in it.”

The building serves as a nexus for social aid and is helping the non-profits build something called The Link, a formalized system for them to work together and voice their concerns to industry and the politicians, “just so they’re not on their little island all by themselves trying to save their little world,” Shannon says.

On Saturday morning, I watch two worlds collide near the busy Advanced Bottle Depot, where Randy and Pat are sharing a bucket of fried chicken. The two live in a tent by the Clearwater River and have three shopping carts full of bottles they’ve collected. “There’s a lot of crackheads living down here,” Pat says. “I chase them out. I’m not on the street sayin’, ‘You got money?’ This is how we live; we’re trying our best.” He’s slightly drunk and clearly upset. Apparently the Newfoundland woman running the bottle depot has banned him, again. He accuses her of being “racist towards natives.”

Inside the depot, amongst ceiling-high piles of white burlap bags that have been filled with different types of bottles, tetra packs, plastic jugs and other containers, the smell is rank but the place is hopping. A sign on the wall says bottles one-litre and under are worth $0.10; over a litre, they’re worth $0.25. “One customer can make between $70 and $100 on an average day,” says Tina Harris, the manager. “Some get $170. I’ve even seen some get $500.” The shop moves two truckloads of bottles per day, she says.

As we stand in the parking lot, beside a crop of hundreds of broken shopping carts, a truck from the local SPCA rolls in. Harris brags that the group generates 20 per cent of its budget from bottle returns. But she’s unhappy when she sees Randy on the street. “Ninety per cent of them are really good,” she says of the street people who come into the depot. Of people like Randy, however? “If it were up to me, I’d take them out into the bush and leave them there,” she says.

A few days later, I’m in yet another universe, being driven around in the leather-upholstered, cream-Cadillac world of Colin Hartigan. He’s the new face of McMurray: 35 and rich (he’s been Canada’s best-selling real estate agent for the past three years running), but also interested in staying and giving back. Time spent with Hartigan is pleasantly exhausting. He’s instantly your best buddy, smiling with a baby-faced grin and topping his folksy jokes with a wink or an elbow nudge. “I’m part of that next generation of leaders that believe Fort McMurray can be a great place to live,” Hartigan says, as we drive around the suburb of Timberlea. “So many people come here thinking take, take, take. I want to leave a legacy. I want to give, give, give.”

To that end, Hartigan is never at rest. He’s the president of the realtors association, sits on the boards of the minor hockey league, Keyano College and the Rotary Club, coaches a kids hockey team, and owns the Coldwell Banker franchise.

We stop beside a non-descript, 2,600-square-foot, three-bedroom home. Hartigan has his picture taken beside his namesake sign.

How much for this place, I ask, guessing $600,000? “Nine-hundred,” Hartigan says, grinning. Last year saw McMurray’s first listed million-dollar home. This year, despite the downturn, there have been 12 listed on the market. Hartigan says the average homebuyer is purchasing for their first time and they’re usually under 40. He’s sold “lots of $600,000 homes to guys in their 20s,” he says. “They’re willing to take the risk because of the rents.”

Later, as we drive back downtown, we talk about the future. Hartigan says community spirit is finally coming to McMurray. “I’ve found that there’s a stronger sense of community now,” he says. “We have a more multi-cultural society. I think a lot of people want to make it work. There’s always the lure of easy money, but the reality is that you have to work it to earn it.”

A few who are working more than earning in the quest for community have gathered near Timberlea to clean the place up. This is Tower Road, a dirt access road into the surrounding bush that attracts wildlife enthusiasts, as well as car-bound hunters and people looking to dump trash.

At “by far the worst” spot, Alberta Forestry Officers Wayne VanDijk, Paul Carpentier and Adrian O’Connell are picking up a mountain of garbage. “We’ve come across everything,” VanDijk says. “Shitty diapers, an engine block, a fridge, and we’ve already taken a stove and a furnace.”

The site opens from a garbage-strewn pathway into a large clearing in the forest that’s littered with 11 burnt out and bullet-ridden vehicles. Piles of shotgun shells are underfoot as you walk here, as is trash, scrap metal and, disgustingly, legs and hinds of butchered moose and deer.

The dreams of money and short-term gain are behind this sort of problem, VanDijk says. “It’s ‘This isn’t home so I don’t care about it,’ that sort of thing. Everyone plans to be here for a year or two, make big money and then leave. Well, they end up staying here for 20 years but keep on like they’re just going to be here for a year, instead of the big picture. That’s sad because a lot of people live here. I live here now. I’m not going to live here forever, but you make where you are home while you’re there. I don’t think a lot of people do that here.”

A big part of today’s cleanup is simply to “send a message,” VanDijk, who’s originally from Nova Scotia, says. Bluntly, it’s that Fort McMurray will only feel like home when more people treat it like one.

Tim Querengesser is an associate editor with UHB’s sister publication, Up Here magazine. This was his first trip to Fort McMurray.

A New Kind of “Boomtown”
Looking down from Fort McMurray’s municipal building – the tallest structure in town – we see a busy community nestled in a picturesque river valley. “I wouldn’t say we’re a ‘boomtown’ in the historical sense of the word,” says Philip Cooper, a communications manager for the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. Maybe not a boomtown like Dawson City or Yellowknife once was, but the place is bustling, and there is no shortage of quirks that typically come when so many different people from so many parts of the world suddenly descend on a place.

The street is full of character and characters: kids whipping around in souped-up Fords; line-ups outside bars called “Diggers” and “The Oil Can”; folks living off the funds of recycled cans; immigrant workers on their way to service jobs; Newfoundlanders hanging flags in apartment windows. But no matter where people come from or what they do, people here are generally warm-hearted and welcoming. In short, Fort Mac is, well, unique. It is at once interesting, confusing, quirky, charming, croweded and beautiful. You can probably call Fort McMurray a new kind of boomtown: a place in flux, where the only thing to expect is the unexpected. – Patrick Kane