The town of Fort McMurray occupies a set of irregularly spaced
hillsides on either side of the Athabasca River, in northern
Alberta. It has a dozen check-cashing joints, a roughly equal
number of hotels, and a gaming center called the Boomtown
Casino. It also has a museum, which is devoted to the region’s
most important resource, the Alberta tar sands. Exhibits include
an eight-foot-long rotor, half of a hundred-and-fifty-ton truck,
and a pump of Brobdingnagian proportions. Near the entrance to
the museum sits a black mound covered by a clear plastic dome. A
sign invites visitors to scratch around in the mound with a
little retractable rake, then lift up a flap and take a sniff.
Tar sands look like dirt and smell like diesel fuel. The tar
sands begin near the border of Saskatchewan, around the latitude
of Edmonton, and extend, in three major deposits, north and west
almost to British Columbia. All in all, they cover—or, more
accurately, underlie—some fifty-seven thousand square miles, an
area roughly the size