Leaving Town | Virginia Medleylane won't retire in Fort MacMurray.
At Diggers bar in the Oilsands Hotel, an older woman with short, dark, dyed black hair, skinny arms, and dark circles under her eyes stands behind a curved shooter bar, complaining to a couple of regulars about the previous night.
A man had crawled under the bar and bit her ass. She points to her trim rear end and laughs, obviously unfazed.
On this rainy Saturday night, she takes everything in stride. Two men in jeans and ballcaps play pool in the corner, but the bar is otherwise deserted.
Virginia Medleylane and her fellow waitresses and bar tenders in Fort McMurray prayed for the current oilsands boom. In the late 1980s, she worked three jobs and longed for a return to the heady days of high oil prices and well-paying jobs.
But now, after more than 25 years in Alberta’s quintessential boomtown, she longs for the quiet northern community she grew to love.
The pressures of living next to the oilsands have proved too much for her. A bout with cancer and several trips to Edmonton for treatment sealed the deal.
“I’m afraid to get old in this town,” she says, adding that she plans on retiring in Edmonton in the next couple years.
Grand Plans
The 53-year-old and her husband Jake Lane moved north from Calgary at the tail end of the last boom. Even when they were both laid off from their first jobs, she wanted to stay and make a life in Fort McMurray.
Eventually Lane found work with Syncrude and Medleylane worked as a waitress, bartender, and cleaner.
Dogsledding was a passion she acquired in the 1980s, and for a while ran a winter tourist business offering Japanese travelers a taste of northern life — including a sled ride at breakneck speeds though the forests surround Fort McMurray, and a glimpse of the northern lights.
She also volunteered with the local mushers association, and organized the Engstom Silver Run across the Saskatchewan border into La Loche.
The couple built a beautiful two-storey open-concept home in the Saprae Creek area, just south of town. Nestled in tight boreal forest, Medleylane built her house in the centre of two lots, planted wild rose bushes, and planned to stay there for the rest of her life.
In 2000 she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. The trips into Edmonton for treatment added stress to an already difficult time.
Other small changes also added up. As fewer volunteers were available for group activities, the mushers association folded, she says. The cost of keeping the dogs escalated, and in 2004 Medleylane gave up mushing, retiring her dogs and keeping them as pets.
For a while she enjoyed skiing and running with her last remaining dog, 16-year-old Lionus, on trails near her home, but nowadays, she says, those trails are almost always crowded with snowmobiles in winter and quads in summer.
Many of her friends have retired and left town. Only two per cent of the population of the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo, which includes Fort McMurray, are 65 or older.
And so, she has fewer activities rounding out her work life. With no children and only one dog left, she has little reason to stay.
Over at the Golden Years Society in downtown Fort McMurray, Roberta Overland, a 65-year-old retiree originally from northern Manitoba, spends her mornings as a volunteer secretary. She agrees that medical care is worrisome. She’s recently traveled to both Edmonton and Calgary for medical treatment. (In his 2007 report Investing in Our Future: Responding to the Rapid Growth of Oil Sands Development, former deputy environment minister and consultant Doug Radke found that Fort McMurray’s health services were performing below average.)
But Overland objects to the notion that Fort McMurray is only a city for the young. “There are things to do,” she says, “if you make an effort to get involved.”
Many of her friends have left as well, she says, but she fills her days with volunteer jobs and the occasional short-term job. She recently did a two-month stint at a nursery during planting, a very fulfilling job she might not have been able to do in a city with more readily available labour, she says.
But for Medleylane, work isn’t enough. She pushed hard for 25 years, through the worst times in Fort McMurray. She wants recreation and time with friends in her later life. Her husband will be retiring within the next few years, and they are moving to Edmonton.
“I feel really blessed that I had the opportunity,” she says, without bitterness, of her time in Fort McMurray. “I’m concerned now that young people coming into town aren’t going to have the same life that I did.”
abrunschot@see.greatwest.ca
