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, but the supervisor has no idea! He’s proud of his project.
“Soon there’ll be hiking trails and lookout points and nesting sites for birds. We’re already putting in snags, see.” He points to a tree trunk that appears to be growing upside down. The roots are in the sky. I’ve never seen anything like it.
My grandfather laughs aloud, his humour genuine. “You people really have got things wrong side up.”
The supervisor laughs too. “It looks that way, I have to agree! But the roots provide a great platform for bigger birds to build their nests. We’re hoping that osprey, maybe even eagles, will make it home. And once the trees have grown up a little, animals will come back. It’s already happening over at the East Mine. They have a herd of bison grazing there.”
“Wild?” my grandfather asks.
“Not exactly. They’re fenced in. We’re concerned about overgrazing.”
“You mean you let them out now and again for photographs to put in the newspaper,” my grandfather says.
I scowl at him, trying to tell him to shut up.
“Fifty years from now,” the supervisor says, sweeping his arm across the horizon, “all of this land will be covered with trees, and the area will be productive.”
“Productive?” my grandfather queries.
“Yes. It’s a great opportunity for the logging industry.”
I hear my grandfather’s quick intake of breath. “I can’t listen to any more of this,” he tells me. “Let’s walk.”
I don’t much want to go with him, but it beats planting trees. Frank raises his head as we trudge past. “Don’t go far,” he warns. “And keep out of the restricted areas.”
“Restricted areas? This is the land of my ancestors. How can it be restricted to me and my grandson?”
Frank glares at my grandfather. “I’m serious, Dad. It’s dangerous around here. I don’t want you and Adam getting into trouble. And I don’t want you making me look bad, either.”
“Okay, okay,” my grandfather replies. “We’ll behave!”
CHAPTER NINE
The white-chested male is exhausted. He needs to eat in order to keep searching for his home. He spots a pond. The morning sun bathes it in golden light, convincing him that a shoal of small fish swims just under the sparkling surface. He pins his wings and dives. By the time he realizes his error, it’s too late to turn back, and he splashes into the water. He bobs up quickly, flapping his wings to get airborne, as he always does. But this time his wings refuse to lift him more than a few inches from the surface. He struggles, as if carrying a fish more than twice his weight, but his curved talons hold nothing. Barely skimming the surface, he flies in a ragged pattern, his wing tips splashing frantically and his feet paddling wildly, until he reaches the shore. Immediately, he begins teasing his feathers with his beak, trying to clean his plumage, but it doesn’t work. The blackness sticks to his beak, and when he tries to rub it off by dragging his head along the ground, it just gets worse.
The white-chested fish hawk is covered in oil.
