Fort McHell

A friend e-mailed me three pictures from a job site on an oilsands project in Fort McMurray. Her accompanying remark was, "Some of the things I see every day."

What a strange mixture of rustic frontier-town quaintness and colossal mechanistic nightmare.

The vast skeletal scaffolding, the towering cranes and endless miles of steel cable, the rows of standard-issue white Alberta pickup trucks—and everywhere the antlike workers scurrying about in their hardhats and coveralls. All dedicated to wringing the filthy lucre of oil from the tarry sand of that pocked and blasted moonscape.

I suppose some would find awe and wonder in such things. But to me, seeing these damnable things every day would be like living in the right wing of a Hieronymous Bosch triptych. I suspect she feels the same way.