Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast

by John Vaillant

These garage-sized payloads are dumped into a “hauler,” and the Caterpillar T797 hauler is one of the biggest dump trucks in the world. It is three stories tall and weighs four hundred tons—unloaded. There are hundreds of machines like this operating in the mines north of Fort McMurray. Far too large for ordinary highways, they must be transported north in pieces. It takes twelve oversized semi loads traveling with escorts to move the component parts of a single hauler. The tires alone are thirteen feet tall and cost $85,000 apiece. When one of them catches on fire—something that happens more often than one might expect, due to the terrific friction their loads generate—it must be deflated from a safe distance with a rifle bullet.

Because of this capacity for self-awareness and self-control, science has generously named our species Homo sapiens, or “wise man.” In Latin, sapiens means not only “wise” but also “rational” and “sane.” However, given the degree to which our character and culture are now determined by our relationship to fire, and its avatar, the petroleum industry, there is a case to be made for a revised nomenclature.

“Keep calm and carry on,” taps deeply into Canadian national virtues, which favor “Peace, Order, and Good Government” over “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Disaster is, almost by definition, a kind of existential dissonance. For the individual, it is cognitive dissonance made manifest: a disruption to one’s personal and physical world order so profound that you don’t know where to file it, how to measure it, or even how to react—because you have no precedent, because it’s simply too big and violating to grasp.

Palmer knew this road intimately, but now he felt disoriented. Landmarks are how we navigate and scale ourselves to landscape; their steady, dependable presence projects a sense of permanence and inviolability, which helps to anchor us in space and time. We don’t call them “songlines,” as they are known in Australia, but they serve a similar psychic role: we know when we see a familiar feature that the next one—a sign, a gas station, a tree, a hotel—will be coming along shortly, and in this way we stitch our homeworld together. Even though we may only name them when giving visitors directions, these are the waypoints that guide us through our daily rounds. Between their disappearance and the smoke, Palmer was becoming a stranger in his own hometown. This was happening now on a city-wide scale: the memory palace was burning down.