The Fort McMurray fire will not defeat its people

When Prometheus the Titan stole fire from the gods on Mount Olympus and gave it to humankind because he felt sorry for them, he also gave the gift of tools, specifically metal works.

The fire could warm and sustain life. It could also kill and destroy. But by using the other gift of Prometheus, humans could build or rebuild and fashion the new. Out of destruction caused by one gift, could come the restoration not only of things, but of hope.

In 1974, four or five of us travelled to Fort McMurray to broadcast an episode of a CBC Radio program called "This Country in the Morning". At the time, the town had a population of about 8,000. A few years earlier, Big Oil had created its huge extraction engines to draw from the earth the precious material which would generate vast wealth for Alberta. 

It struck me as a raw, hungry town, peopled by raw, hungry men who worked doggedly to tear the money out of the oily sands.They came from across continents. Many came from Newfoundland in the distant east. The money those men sent home helped to support a faltering Newfoundland economy, until its offshore oil wells and royalties came in some time later.

I talked to some of those Fort Mac people on the radio. Yes, they were there, most of them, for the high wages. But what they had in common beyond the money was the sense of building, of creating a future in a barren place. In their imaginations they saw what I couldn't -- schools, churches, hospitals, rows of streets and modern homes, shops stocked with the necessaries from the south, a place for the young and the bold, a place for families. Oil workers, young men and women and oil field veterans, came from all over North America and Europe and drove roots into the harsh ground.

The place went from town to city in a relatively short time. The population before last Monday was around 88,000. It was a modern, multi-hued northern city where you could buy or build a fine house.

And then the fire carried it all away. The images, graphically cruel, will linger with us forever.

Highway 63, the only road to the south, lanes of bumper to bumper traffic. Families sleeping in cars, in shelters, trying to get food or gasoline. Vast blankets of choking, acrid smoke. A school bus with children in it, flames lapping close to the road. Whole forests and subdivisions ablaze and disappearing. Terror-driven mothers and fathers and children and pets, if they could save them, heading south, never knowing when they could go back.

If there was anything to go back to.

Catastrophe creates kinship, call it "disasterhood." And in it, people reach out to each other. There have been dozens of stories this week of Albertans opening their homes to their neighbours who would soon become friends. One man described driving south with his family, stalled in traffic, not knowing where they would end up, when suddenly a man appeared at his side window with bottles of water.

A wildfire, once it becomes a crown fire at treetop, is almost impossible to put out. In a structure fire, firefighters know where the flames are and where they are likely to move. They can be contained. The flames of a wildfire, however, move anywhere, shifting at any time and with great speed. In these cases, like Fort McMurray, only the weather can stop what the weather created. 

Families tell heartbreaking stories of losing everything but the clothes they stood up in. Some grabbed photo albums, one man saved his divorce papers. Still others, mortgage papers, favourite toys, love letters.

For the rest of us, trying to imagine what the 88,000 evacuees have gone through is almost impossible. The flames burn away our ability to comprehend. For many, their ordeal will be a pivotal point in their lives. They will talk in years to come of the time before the fire and the time after.

This fire is personal. It not only destroyed a city, it destroyed our very human illusion of permanence; that things will always be the same. The fire told us otherwise.The fire told us that it can happen to any of us at any time. Fort McMurray will come back. Its people are too tough, too resilient to let it die. They have a prehensile grip on survival and they will rebuild.

In 1993, the American writer Norman Maclean wrote a book called Young Men and Fire. It told the achingly sad story of a group of smokejumpers who died in a Montana wildfire in the 1940s.

In it, Maclean wrote: "Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophe, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts."

Fort McMurray and her amazing people will be back.