A community with heart,
Reporter has seen his hometown go through a lot of changes, but the plucky, we-got-your-back spirit stays the same
When I was 18, I had a job in a car wash. I’d just graduated from Father Mercredi High School in Fort McMurray, had my life in front of me and had no idea what I wanted to do with it.
My friend Adrian Stoll had worked at the car wash, Mel’s Mohawk in Thickwood, through our senior year and helped get me hired. The job was simple: wash out and sweep car wash bays as they’re used and keep the grounds of the store tidy. I think I made $7 an hour. One moment always stuck with me from that job. I was changing the garbage by the vacuums near the exit of the car wash. There was a strip mall across from the carwash and in the rare perfect storm of traffic, you’d have someone exiting the car wash, someone backing in or out of the strip mall, and someone trying to drive away from the vacuums. It always created an impromptu threeway stop and more often than not an awkward no-you-go-first moment before it was resolved.
In the year or so that I worked at that car wash, Fort McMurray began to change. The population sat at around 30,000 to 40,000 when I grew up there. Then in the late 1990s, new neighbourhoods were being built and the cost of housing started to skyrocket. Surveyors popped up everywhere, sizing up the city for a growth that few of us could have fully anticipated.
So at that one memorable threeway stop, the same awkward moment popped up. The guy leaving the car wash rolled ahead as the gate lifted for his exit.
All three drivers looked at each other and hesitated. Then the guy leaving the car wash unleashed a wellconstructed string of obscenities, told everyone to learn how to drive and ripped out of there.
It was a small thing, but one I started to notice more as the present oilsands plants began to expand and more companies arrived, looking to pull the billions of barrels of oil that sit under northern Alberta out of the ground.
The city that I knew began to feel transient, its passers-through showing up, working, making a lot of mon- ey and taking it home, or on to their next adventure and using Fort McMurray like a rest stop.
Remember Pottersville, the alternate reality version of Bedford Falls in It’s A Wonderful Life? For years — 20 of them, actually — I felt like that’s what my hometown had become. Then it caught fire. Two weeks ago my family’s group text chat flaunted their glorious weather in my often-chilly Toronto face. By Wednesday, the chat had turned to terrifying updates on how quickly the fire outside the city turned with the wind, roared and pillaged thousands of homes.
Voluntary evacuations quickly be- came mandatory. As thousands fled north to work camps, like my sister Nancy, her husband Tom and their three young kids, or south through the fire, like my parents did (my mom channelled the guy at the car wash as she tried to convince my dad to turn around; he wouldn’t), the real Fort McMurray showed itself and I was wrong. Bedford Falls came to life in Fort McMurray this week.
We’ve all read stories about people helping each other on the side of the road, sharing whatever they took with them going out the door, of homes opened to strangers. Around the province there were free meals at restaurants and recovery days of- fered up for free at the West Edmonton Mall’s waterpark and galaxy land (my nieces and nephew lapped that up).
What’s blown me away is the resiliency of the people who are going through this. Some have lost everything and everyone else is hoping day by day, update by update that they’re not next on that list. Still, every person I’ve spoken with at home, as scared as they might be, has said the same thing: Fort McMurray will come back from this.
At its core, in the people who have built lives in Fort McMurray, that got-your-back spirit was always there. My friend Adrian’s dad, Harold, was a firefighter at Syncrude until he retired five years ago. With his children’s homes in danger, he came out of retirement at 64 and is helping fight these fires. It’s one of the most heroic things I’ve heard in a week where it feels like everyone out there is wearing a cape.
As it grew and changed, as it became an economic powerhouse for Canada and had its name dragged through the mud at times, Fort McMurray was always a community with more Harold Stolls than guys who blew through three-way stops. The rest of us are just having our eyes opened to it now.