Beauty and heart, not flames and tar: Fort McMurray was far from what I'd imagined

This First Person column is the experience of Karly Ellis, who lives in Edmonton. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

Like many of those who call Fort McMurray, Alta., home, I was driven there by necessity.

I needed a job.

As a Calgarian who'd never been north of Edmonton, Fort McMurray seemed like a land of mythical proportions — a dark place with piles of flaming tar shrouding a brooding, treeless landscape, too removed from my everyday life to exist apart from the stories that surrounded it. The prospect of me living in an Alberta folktale, a place famously compared by Canadian activist Maude Barlow to the barren Lord of the Rings landscape of Mordor, was never a legitimate life prospect. Until it was. 

The oil industry was visible all around me in Calgary. I watched my friends head into the University of Calgary's pristine Schulich School of Engineering to attend classes in the hopes of one day working in that sector. Downtown, I saw the Louis Vuitton-clad masses funnelling into gleaming buildings owned by giants of the oil and gas industry.

But as a student of music working in the arts, I felt detached from it. The closest I ever got to the gears and cogs of Alberta's energy sector was attending opulent Stampede week parties thrown by oil companies. My understanding of what it meant to work in oil and gas was a fat paycheque and a lavish downtown desk job. 

Somewhere in my distant thoughts, I had a vague notion that a slightly nefarious place in the far reaches of the province was perpetuating this grand machine. Calgary and Fort McMurray seemed only peripherally connected; the latter was certainly not connected to me.

Then, in spring 2020, the phone rang.

It was the early and uncertain times of the pandemic and the Fort McMurray Catholic School Division was offering me a job. After finishing my undergraduate degree at the University of Calgary, I spent several years working and travelling before getting my education degree in Edmonton. I was keen to start teaching.

The world seemed just unhinged enough — and I was just eager enough — to venture past the precepts of my imagined future and into the mystic north. My husband and I loaded up our truck and headed toward the unknown.

I was first struck by the rugged abandon of the landscape. For most of the five-hour drive past Alberta's capital, there is not much but rolling hills, thick pine forests and a smattering of lakes. Then we reached Fort McMurray itself, proudly sitting on the banks of the powerful Athabasca River that carved its way through the city. 

As Highway 63 descended into the expansive river valley, we saw the city unfold in front of us. Its small downtown core was completely enfolded by nature. A thick canvas of trees clung to the steep slopes of the river except where large patches revealed the wounds of the near past. The wildfire of 2016. The flood of 2020 that happened just a few months before we arrived.

We passed over the roaring Athabasca and started our climb up the other side of the river bank. The forest continued to envelop us but it's full and vibrant over there, untouched by the fire. I was so aware of the nothingness around me. 

An abundant community of people balances the wild emptiness. It's a vibrant mix of Atlantic Canadians, Indigenous peoples from the nearby First Nations and Métis communities, and other people who've arrived from all over the world.