Heather Plaizier's Canoe Journey

Heather Plaizier was a participant in the 2013 canoe trip. Here is how she saw it.

 

Canoe Journey to Fort Chipewyan

In western Canada, the Athabasca River spills and flows from the glaciers in the Rocky Mountains, through central northern forests, prairies, and towns. It crashes along northward to Fort McMurray, where it begins to collect the greasy debris from bitumous sands along its banks, and from 160 thousand square kilometres of strip mining and in situ operations. 

I sure would have loved to canoe this river in 1950, to witness the natural state of this ecosystem before men and women went crazy with efforts to extract energy and profits from its subterranean sands.

We do know the ecosystem was rich back then. The river, land, lakes, and muskeg supported a network of wild and human life. The water was drinkable. The fish were healthy. The muskrats and moose were abundant.

In August 2013, we took eight days to paddle from Fort McMurray to Fort Chipewyan. Our group of ten included one Métis and three Nehiyo men, three men and one woman of Jewish heritage, one woman of Filipina heritage, and me, a woman of Dutch heritage. Four of us are in our twenties, including two of the three women; two in our thirties and forties; and four of us, including me, in our fifties and early sixties.

I felt like a young kookum on that trip, with some good skills, but still learning to listen.

Ni toh tam. Try to hear. If I listen carefully, I may understand.

These river banks, in August, are covered in willow and mint. They shelter magnificent clouds of bugs. There are few birds, though four pelicans lead us northward on our first day of paddling. We camp on beautiful sandy islands. We are graced with warm sunny days and cloudless nights with northern lights. If the water were clean enough to invite a swim, we might imagine ourselves on an idyllic nature retreat.

But the water is not clean. And the air on our first days is punctuated with the sounds of frequent cannon blasts. We pass industrial operations that are stripping, spewing, and hauling dusty grey products and by products, and orange sulphur. We camp near ‘the bridge to nowhere’, where busloads and trucks of workers rumble constantly, with metropolitan rush hour intensity all day and evening long. The only village in the area is Fort McKay, yet the traffic reveals the extent of human presence in the territories beyond the shorelines of the river. 

Men and women are digging, dragging, draining, and sifting for bitumen. They are burning vast amounts of precious natural gas and coal generated electricity, transported hundreds of kilometres from the south. They are pouring energy, water, and chemicals in, to pull bitumen out; leaving behind the spent and toxic waters in massive, barely contained artificial lakes, until we figure out what to do with them; blasting cannons all through the days and nights in a token attempt to warn the birds away. Dummy orange men are perched on floats all over these toxic lakes: archaic scarecrows and tactics in what pretends to be a savvy, high tech scheme. The air poisons the breath and lungs of newborn children in Fort McKay. As I pass the pretend buffalo paddock and pretend reclamation areas on the return trip, I feel truly saddened and alarmed. This massive activity is blasting along even though the ‘developers’ and regulators really have no clue how to manage the magnitude of the destruction that is being left behind. Driven by an economic mindset where disaster creates profit.

My quiet, listening voice says ‘fools’. Stop. Listen. Look. Feel what we really need.

The last days of the trip take us further into muskeg, river delta, lakeland, and then the stunning beauty of the rocks and shield beginning near Fort Chipewyan. Pelicans greet our arrival. We have been met and hosted by Métis, Nehiyo, and Dene folks at multiple points along our way.

There is no return road from Fort Chip in the summer, so we hire the local barge operator to load us with our canoes and gear and carry us the two days back up river to Fort McKay.

We are blessed with knowing this river, these lakes, these people, and each other in a closer way. We carry the prayer to stop the destruction, to start the healing.

Heather Plaizier lives in Edmonton, Alberta.