NOTE:

This is a modification of an article I started this winter about our trip back to Uranium City two years ago to shoot a documentary film about the town. In some ways it i= s a continuation of the article I wrote a couple of years ago about UC, and I h= ave left out a lot of details about the town that I wrote then (You can find it= on this website under ‘trips back’.)

This is a more personal arti= cle than the others I put on this site, and I have sketched some memories of li= ving in town. Like Peter Wilson, I hope that other people who lived in Uranium City will be inspired to share the= ir own stories. Uranium City has such a rich and varied hi= story. I can only write about the town from my own perspective; I hope that others will write theirs. Otherwise, all this history will eventually be lost.

If you have any comments or corrections, email me at:

beckett_tim@hotmail.com

Sincerely,

Tim Beckett

SHOOTING OUR WAY BACK TO URANIUM CITY:

We circled Uranium City three times before landing, alternating two cameras between myself, David Segerts and Ole Gjerstad, a director and producer from Mon= treal. Dave, whose mother, stepfather and half-brother still lived in town, hadn’t been back in seven years and he veered between elation and per= plexity as he described what it was like to see the town again. I’d been back= three times since I moved south with my family in 1980, but I’d never seen = the abandoned town in winter and I too was entranced. Snow covered the weed-fil= led yards and half-abandoned roads and the lines of rooftops and roads stretched gracefully across the hillside to the bottom of Cinch Lake, so that the town looked almost the same as it had a quarter century before = when we flew in on the PWA jetliner. Only an entire neighborhood of foundation w= alls poking through the snow marked the desolation of what lay below.

We’d come to shoot the beginning of what we hoped would be a feature documentary. I’d first = had the idea in 1996. I’d already begun writing about the town but the combination of the spectacular countryside, kilometres of abandoned houses,= and the story of the town’s rise and fall seemed to possess all the eleme= nts of a great documentary. I shot some footage of the town in 2000, then again= at the 2002 reunion in Cypress Hi= lls, Saskatchewan, then teamed u= p with Ole and brought in Ray Jones, an ex-schoolfriend who lived in Ottawa, and David, who was then also li= ving in Ottawa. After more than a year of funding applications and treatment rewrites, we secured just enough development money from the CBC and a small Saskatchewan net= work to head north.

We arrived in late February,= 2003. Weeks before it had been so mild that the lakes had not completely frozen o= ver, now, at night the air was so = frigid that the skin felt as if it was about to crack, and even in the daytime the temperature barely rose above -35 C. Yet it was good to see the town in win= ter - it’s natural season after all. Snow obscured the ruined houses, and dazzling sunlight reflected off the snow; at night the Northern Lights shimmered overhead like bands of phosphorous.

We stayed on Fredette Road behind Ben MacIntyre School. Our house h= ad been reclaimed just a few years before and even after we’d fired up t= he wood stove and spread clothes and camera equipment on the couches, tables a= nd beds, it still had a trace of the mildew smell that permeates all the empty houses in Uranium City. For dinner we went to David’s mother’s house. Mary Seegerts lived with Dave’s stepdad Archie = in a bungalow just up from what was the RCMP station. Mary worked as a cook for = the mining and exploration camps up North and we ate well: stew, caribou, even salmon. After dinner Archie sat in the living room, playing guitar and sing= ing in a melodious voice. He’d just come back from the Barrens where he a= nd Lawrence Laroque had gone to hunt caribou. The herds hadn’t come south that year because of the changing climate and he and Lawrence had travelled hundreds of miles by skidoo, following trails and open lakes, staying in sh= acks along the way or even out in the open air.

If, on my last trip in 2000, townspeople had clung to their optimism, then by 2003, most people were resigned to the town’s fate. The hospital was due to close that summe= r, possibly taking the school and the last of the government services with it.= Jim Price, the pilot who’d been in Uranium City since the ‘50’= ;s, had moved south; Margaret Belanger, who’d been in town just as long, = had left two weeks before we arrived; Danny and Rodney Augier had also left wit= h their father James after their mother Luffy had passed away; Denise Bougie, whose store and restaurant in the old liquour store on Main street had been the centre of town life in 2000, was also in the south. The hotel foundations h= ad been filled in and a skidoo trail ran through the middle of the foundations. The Holland Motel had closed, and the motel’s twenty-foot ariel had fallen across the blue picket fence into the road, and the minivan that had served as taxi and ambulance lay on one side, it’s front wheel torn o= ff; Bill Holland sr. had moved south, survived a lung transplant, then passed a= way the year before. The Athabasca Inn had closed, as had the Bougie Diner up t= he street. The front door of the MacIntyre shoe store - the name still visible= in outline across the front - had been pried open and inside, we found a vault, it’s iron door gaping open, and a ten-foot icicle hanging from the ceiling like a dagger. Overhead, on Hospital Hill, the satellite dish and r= adio tower kept watch as they had since the 1970’s.

In the abandoned town, a few= more houses had collapsed or were on the verge of collapsing. Packs of wolves had been spotted in the town’s outer reaches, and came downtown at night, luring dogs from the yards. Three foot berns, topped with red flags, had be= en placed at the bottom of both Nuclear Avenue and Uranium Road. Raiders had been comi= ng in over the ice road under cover of night and dismantling entire houses, hauli= ng away the lumber and any valuable fixtures, leaving piles of refuse behind in the foundations.

Yet even so, a part of the o= ld town survived. A curling bonspiel had taken over the curling rink and people had come in from Camsell Portage and Fond-Du-Lac; pick-up trucks and snowmobiles lined Uranium = Road. All four rinks were in play - two men’s teams, two women’s - and the lobby upstairs was filled with kids and adults watching the game or tak= ing a break between rounds to consume hot dogs, hamburgers and hot chocolate se= rved in the lobby. Behind the rinks, on the hill leading to the Eldorado store, three teeangers were snowboarding down the hill onto a ramp they’d ma= de out of boards and old tires. = Dave went curling with some friends from town while Ole and I filmed him and eve= ryone else curling, then all three of us took turns filming the people in the lob= by. With a hundred or more people coming and going from the rink it felt as if = the old town had sprung up from t= he abandonment and everyone seemed happy to be in each other’s company. “I think,” said Ole, “that this would have been the kind = of town I would have liked to live in for awhile.”

A few people from the previo= us trip remained.

Ilea Parkes ran the last rem= aining store in the wooden building next to what had been the post office. In my d= ay it had been an arcade where we hung out playing Space Invaders or pinball, = but now it was filled with dry goods, candy, and shirts with emblems like ‘Would the last one to leave Uranium City, Sask. please turn out the lights?’ Mrs. Parkes had been in the area since the 50’s, first= at Gunnar where she and her husband Ray ran the comissary then in Uranium City where they ran, variously, the taxi stand, general store, and the motel. Mr= s. Parkes was a spry woman in her sixties who opened and closed her store at t= he same time every day whether she had customers or not. Her goods weren’= ;t cheap. A box of toilet paper and a bag of potatoes cost $15, and not surprisingly most people in town flew in their own groceries. She directed = us to a small room off her store where she displayed her paintings. “I always wanted to be an artist,” she explained, “but I didn̵= 7;t have the time until now.” Her watercolours showed talent and confiden= ce. Most were of northern scenes - mineheads, wolves, ravens; the aurora boreal= is and the Gunnar town and mine. The best recalled the colours and dynamism of= the Group of Seven and her most interesting paintings were series of studies of branches and foilage which had the delicate simplicity of Japanese prints.<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'>

Andy and Clarice Schultz wer= e a few steps closer to moving permanently to their converted shed on the edge = of downtown. The shed had been converted into a comfortable home, with a pictu= re window looking out on Nucl= ear Avenue, and a machine shop in the rear half of= the building. A half-dozen vehicles, reclaimed from around the townsite, lined = one length of the shed and various gutted vehicles, skidoos, engine blocks and anonymous parts filled a yard on the other.

They’d come in by skid= oo over Lake= Athabasca, hauling up gear in big = sleds. The winter had still been mild then and Clarice said she wouldn’t cro= ss the Big <= st1:PlaceType w:st=3D"on">Lake again by skidoo. “We ha= d to circle around pools of water, jump a few pressure ridges. Only time I’= ;ve ever been scared of the B= ig Lake.” We dra= nk home-made stout with Clarice and Ian Kelley, who’d rented us our hous= e, while Andy made dinner in the kitchen. Andy had the gourmet touch: even the macaroni and cheese he made that night tasted great. Ian was a Newfoundllan= der who’d come to Urani= um City in the late 80’s where he married Jackie, a nurse at the hospital. He was very Irish-looking, with a round face and a light fringe of moustache, ad a brig= ht Irish/ Newfie sense of humour. He too had worked at the hospital a few years but now he worked at Ekati, one of the diamond mines that are transforming = the NWT - two weeks in, two weeks out.

After a long day shooting in= the cold it was pleasant to sit in the warm kitchen drinking stout and wiating = for dinner. Pinot Noir, Andy and Clarice’s Black Lab, sat curled in the corner near the stove. Outside, the temperature dropped below minus fourty = as the town sank into darkness. I noticed that boxes of Preperation H had been stacked on the shelves, five and ten high.

“Someone have a problem?”
Clarice laughed.

“We read about them in= a fishing magazine. Best lures around.”

Later, we watched a vi= deo Ray had given Dave to show Andy and Clarice. The video was a compilation of footage shot in UC and area from the 1950’s on, ranging from a black = and white BBC documentary, to brilliant 35 mm colour films processed by Rix Athabasca, Gunnar and Eldorado, to grainy CBC news clips from the early 80’s, showing the impact of the Eldorado announcement and the afterma= th. The BBC man interviewed everyone from Gus Hawker ‘The Famous’ in front of his store to native schoolchildren, teachers and miners who’d come from Ireland, Eastern Europe and across Canada. In the company films, = the mineheads rose up against blue sky and virgin forest, and miners and their families waved from the newly-constructed bunkhouses as the music swelled up like music in a Hollywood blockbuster. T= he CBC footage showed the town just after December, 1981 announcement – vehi= cles pulling in and out of the parking lot hotel, Mr. Robinson inside his fluorescent-lit drugstore, and various other townspeople reacting to the ne= ws that the town’s lifeblood would close in six months. Then the footage jumped forward a year or two, and faces familiar from high school vented th= eir frustration at the town’s fate from the bar of what became the Athbas= ca Inn.

Driving back through downtow= n, I felt the echo of the town’s early days. I imagined what it must have = been like to walk those midnight streets, carved only a few years before from rock and forest, part of a tid= e of hundreds of men and women pouring in from across the globe to work in the m= ines which had sprung up around the town. I wondered how it had felt for those e= arly pioneers to look up and see the phospherescent Northern sky, to walk along = the muddy streets past the Atomic Cafe or the old hotel, or to see the cold brilliant stars cast out over the dozens of white canvas tents huddled on t= he edge of downtown; to live in a place that had grown in just a few years fro= m a few shacks along a caribou trail to a community of five thousand with movie theatres, three weekly newspapers, schools, churches, and stores. How lumin= ous that sky must have seemed, how full of promise, and such a journey from the settled south in those days that for many Uranium City must have felt like a town carved out of the surface of an alien planet.

In my day, the mineheads sti= ll popped up across the landscape like abandoned, reminders of the era that had been. All that remained now were the dozens of miles of roads, winding thro= ugh the bush. But even in winter, with a little over a hundred people left in t= he town and the saplings taking over the few false-front buildings that had survived, an echo of that early promise hung about the greying boards, the false-front of what had been the Robinson drugstore, the yellow lamplight cutting through the gloom like a hermit’s lamp far out in the void. <= o:p>

I’d chosen to work wit= h Ole, a tough, energetic Norwegian, because he’d already made two films abo= ut the North - Amorak’s Song, and Kikkiik, both about Nunavut (as well as another couple of films about Africa), and I felt that he’d understan= d a community like Uranium City. We’d come up in February because we want= ed to capture the town in winter, before the hospital closed. David, a few yea= rs older than me, had left town in the middle 70’s. He’d been back regularily until the middle 90’s, but Uranium City had been out of his thoughts for many years, as it had been out of mine unt= il I came back in 1996. He’d lived in Edmonton, Vancouver, Ottawa and upst= ate New York, and worked, variously, as a cameraman, actor, producer, writer, director as well as a land surveyor and was working on an account of growin= g up in Uranium City when I met him. Originally, we’d planned to shoot Dave shooting himself going back to his home town then have Ray - who had to stay behind at his Ottawa job at the time of the shoot - do the same at a later date. When we arrived in town we decided to put me in front of as well as behind the camera. My blonde hair and blue eyes and Dave’s long hair = and Dene features, and our respective histories in the town, made a good contra= st on camera.

We began in the New Town, the basin of cedar-pannelled houses and condos that would have fit well in a to= nier area of Vancouver<= /st1:City>. Some of the houses at the edge of the hill had been undermined by undergrou= nd streams, and had shifted off their foundations or collapsed into a jumble of beams, wallpaper, windows and staircases; others had been stripped down to a skeleton of wooden beams. In one second-floor apartment we found a mattress, two chairs, and several dressers and woman’s skirts, draped on hangar= s in a closet as if their owner expected to return later that day, but every oth= er building was empty, as if they’d been abandoned before anyone had even moved in. <= /p>

We filmed Dave in the teache= rage and me in our old blue ranch house on North Saskatchewan Drive, Dave in the bleachers of t= he skating rink where the ice had been poured, Dave talking to relatives about= his father, who’d died in a boating accident when Dave was seven, then at= his father’s grave at the graveyard down Uranium Road. Finally, we ended up = at Candu High.

The high school, for me, was always one of the hardest buildings to go into. I’d moved back the ye= ar before it was re-opened after a fire had destroyed the original building. I= had good memories of the classes and the teachers, and my friends. I never found the same sense of community in any school down south - nor, for that matter, ever achieved the same grade average. I’d learned how to program computers, how to write (I wrote a whole sci-fi novel, probably awful, my f= irst year back in Uranium City), and played badminton, floor hockey and, especia= lly, basketball, in the gymnasium, attended school dances, met my first girlfrie= nd and made friends, some of whom I’ve stayed in touch with to this day.=

By the time Candu High re-opened in 1978, it was one of the best-equipped high schools in the Nort= h, with two full-size gymnasiums, film labs, computer rooms, Super-8 cameras, = auto shop, carpentry and metal shops, science labs, home ec rooms with stoves and sewing machines, typing rooms and an inpressive library with a half-moon st= age in the back. The school had been one of the last buildings in this part of = town to lose power and water - the last class graduated in 1983, and the school itself remained functional until 1985, when it was still being used as an administrative centre.

When I first came back= in 96 and 97, it seemed almost terrifying - the boards still covered the windows and the junction at the centre was pitch black; the air tasted stale and dead. The gymnasium floor = had buckled from underground streams and heaved like the surface of the ocean, = and the reinforced windows throughout the building had been smashed through.

Going inside the school with= two other people made it different. The boards had been ripped from the windows= and enough light penetrated the junction to see the old scoreboard by the gymna= sium entrance, the inside of the teacher’s lounge, and the stacks of books= and comics in the teacher’s auxiliary. The art class upstairs - where once we’d attempted to mould vases and bowls on the pottery wheels and draw hands and faces from live models - was bare but for a layer of tiles and fa= ded shopping catalogues on the floor. Outside, the prow of Beaverlodge Mountai= n was just visible through the jagged holes in the windows. We set up our cam= eras and Dave talked about how he and some of his friends had been hired in the middle 70’s to dig out the crawlspace beneath the original school. In the rebuilding they’d discovered that waste rock from the mines had been used in the foundations. Dave and the others were given no protective gear, no warning even.

Afterwards, we filmed each o= ther going through the classrooms and discovered news clipping from 81 and 82, o= ld excercise books and papers scrawled with notes left by the students. I beca= me almost comfortable strolling through the empty school but later when I came back on my o= wn to retrieve a forgotten lens cap, the cavernous school was just as intimidating as it h= ad been before.

Our next stop was the hospit= al. My mother had been a nurse at the hospital both times we lived in Uranium City, and we lived on Hospital Hill for a couple of months before we moved south = in 1980. I don’t remember much about the hospital except that it was alw= ays very busy. By 2003, the space where our house had been was taken over by br= ush but the hospital itself, and much of the neighborhood behind it, looked remarkably similar to how it had looked in 1980. Given that the government = had been threatening to close it since 82, it’s very presence was somethi= ng of a miracle.

Inside, the hospital was nea= rly empty. We interviewed one of the doctors, a big South African who had been = in town nearly seven years. I’d seen him with his handsome wife and blon= de, almost angelic-looking children, first at the bonspiel then at church. Desp= ite his size, the doctor seemed a gentle man. Like many South African doctors, he’d immigrated to Canada by agreeing to spend time in a remote location but he genuinely liked the q= uiet and freedom of the North country, as wel= l as the Northern people and said that he would be sorry to be leaving in the spring.

Later, I interviewed Margaret Powder, a slender, pretty woman who worked as a nurse. We knew each other a= bit in school, and she remembered me from my previous visits. She talked about = how ghosts had been seen in the rooms and that one presence had been so persist= ent - the nurses thought it was the ghost of an old man who’d died in the hospital - that a medicine man had been called in set the spirit free. The medicine man must have done his job - no one had felt the presence since, though others had come and gone. &nbs= p;

We talked about the sweatlod= ge that we’d both attended in the fall of 2000. There had been two seper= ate sweats, and I’d been invited to the second by Bill Holland jr and his= wife Lorna, who was one of the Laroque’s. Bill and I had been the only whi= te people. Another medicine man, Hector, had come up from Saskatoon on a tour of the Athabasca region, and a lodge had been built in Bobby Augier’s back yard, just off downtown. On one side was= a house half-eaten by a fire, on the other a house with broken windows half-hidden by yellow saplings. Margaret said that at the first sweat they = had heard the cry of an eagle, then the flapping of the eagle’s wings as = it flew out of the circle. No eagle appeared&= nbsp; in the second sweat, but the sound of chanted Cree in the darkness a= nd the emotion that passed about the enclosed space, as burning sweetgrass hun= g in the heat, had been intense and somehow fitting in the context of Uranium City.

The hospital staff was resig= ned to the closing and perhaps almost relieved that the date had finally been set.= One nurse told us how, the summer before, she had used a broom to chase away a black bear that had tried to sneak in the back door. Outside, the hill spar= kled in the sun and even the cinderblock hospital looked curiously beautiful. Da= ve and I followed the old footpath into Fredette Valley, still used = by the kids going to Ben MacIntyre. At the bottom was the old wooden footbridge, a= nd the creek, completely frozen over. Water gurgled under the ice, and the tre= es were dazzling white in the sun. It felt good to be back in this place that = no ruin could touch, that would always be the same no matter what happened on either side.

We interviewed a few more pe= ople, some who planned to leave with the hospital, some who, like Andy and Claric= e, intended to stay as long as they could.

Jim Pfapffenroth is a Baptist minister who has lived in Uranium City with his wife = since 1986, when they came with the express purpose of saving souls. In this they have several antecedants, including Father Bern Brown, (who wrote a lively = book describing his life in the North a few years ago, including several of his original paintings) who established the St. Barbara’s Catholic Church which still stands on the edge of the Ben MacIntyre schoolground. St. Barba= ra - patron saint of miners - is empty except for Christmas and Easter, when a priest flies in from Fond Du L= ac or Stoney. In the meantime, parishioners go to Jim’s Baptist Mission.=

Jim hails from Missouri and has been both a farmer an= d a pilot. He still flies, bringing children from surrounding communities to the Beacon Bible Camp, on Ace= Lake whithin view o= f the airport. Hundreds of kids, almost all native, fill the camp every summer and missionaries come up from the US to help build and run the camp. A few years ago Jim and another family took over some houses at the bottom of Fredette Road, bringing in their own windows and fixtur= es, and reclaimed their houses from abandonment.

That morning Jim said prayer= s for those who were sick, and for those travelling the ice road. Jim’s wife played the organ and the congregation sang hymns then Jim gave his sermon, based on readings from the book of Job. “Life is unfair,” he declared, relating what Job had had to endure from God then cited as a pers= onal example how his pipes had frozen the night before, leaving him and his fami= ly without water. We too had been woken up by an incredible gurgling in the si= nk and when Dave and I rushed downstairs, the main pipe was shaking as if possessed. Ian Kelley had come by and said the pump at the water plant had = broken down. Our pipes were saved but it was a vivid reminder of how thin the line between man and nature in UC - if Jim could reclaim a house then his and all the other occupied houses could just as easily return to nature. Though he never said so directly, I felt that Jim’s sermon was in part directed= at the trials of the town, so close to not existing with the hospital about to close.

Later, Dean Classen sh= owed us some photographs of Jim baptizing the newly-faithful in Ace Lake, in front of his camp. Jim was hip-deep in the water, and had a serious, amo= st profound look, as he dipped each baptisee’s head beneath the water, reflecting the strength and intensity of his belief. After the service, I a= sked Jim what Uranium City had been like when he first a= rrived. Thinking for a moment, he said: “Well, it was like any small town exc= ept the buildings were all boarded up and there were hardly any people.” Then: “As long as a few stay, we’ll stay as well. We have our c= amp and our church. This congregation might be an indication of our future thou= gh. Usually we have twice as many as today.”

Afterwards, we went to see P= at and Danny Murphy at their compound near Milliken Lake. We found them= in their winter house at the end of their wooded lot. When I first met Danny in 96, he wouldn’t even allow me to take his picture, but this time he needed no coaxing to let the cameras into his house. His winter house, like= his summer house, constructed with beams, telephone poles, windows and lengths of wood from the mines and from town, and felt cozy with the wood stove and the light angling in through the slats over the living room windows. Pat, still recovering from knee surgery, sat in an easy chair in the living room. We filmed Danny in the bedroom on = the second floor, which also doubled as a greenhouse. The smell of earth and vegetation filled the air; Danny said that in winter they got all their fre= sh vegetables from the greenhouse. Over tea, Danny related his days in Uranium City in the 70’s, when he= 217;d moved from Windsor= , where he’d worked at an auto plant. “Party goin’ on all t= he time hey. Didn’t matter what time you got off your shift, you’d find somethin’ goin’ somewhere. Card games too, 24 hours a day.”

On the way back, the poplar = trees, heavy with snow, bent over each side of the road, so that it was like drivi= ng through a long, snowy cathedral. I remembered how different the country aro= und Milliken could be from that around Uranium City, darker and a = little more wild, the hills more blunt, the caverns a little deeper. In the fall, = when I’d last been here, the colours of the turning leaves had been spectacular, with the bronzes, yellows and reds one finds in Ontario or Quebec. In the 70’s my father us= ed to take us out skiiing in the hills around Beaverlodge Lake or up to the Lorado minehead, perched on top of a hill like a beacon to the surrounding area an= d once we’d taken skidoos out to Gunnar, crossing Martin over to Cinch and t= hen Milliken and raced down the abandoned Gunnar airstrip, watching the minehea= d and the mine buildings appear out of the bush like the ramparts of some lost ci= ty. My last fall in town the entire ninth grade had gone on a camping trip out = to Goldfields. For most of us, the biggest thrill was to be out in the bush, relatively unsupervised, with two classrooms worth of the opposite sex, but= the land too had a mysterious quality that seeped into our conciousness. Yellow leaves scattered about the roads and forest floor, and the air was cold and crisp with late autumn. The Box minehead had been torched a couple of years before and the skeletal headframe rose like a ruined temple from the bedroc= k. We explored the Goldfields townsite where foundations and street signs poked from the tall grasses and nests of saplings then climbed Beaverlodge Mountai= n to look out over the dazzling sweep of the Athabasca= country, then at night a teacher told us ghost stories on a hillside overlooking Lake Athabasca. (Ghost stories abound in the area.= As late as 2003, people recounted seeing a solitary figure dressed in a black = hat and coat, standing by the skidoo trails near the townsite. The figure always vanished before anyone could see who it was.) An early snow, cutting off ro= ad access, brought us back to town early, but I think we could have stayed out there for a week.

The Box frame remains but the Lorado mine and mill – listed in period maps as the fourth town in the area, besides Uranium City, Eldorado, and Gunnar – had, by 2003, been decommissioned. As drove from Murphy̵= 7;s, all we saw was a concrete arch and the tailings pond, cordoned off with a w= ire fence and signs reading ‘Danger - Radioactive’.

Pat and Danny said they̵= 7;d seen gales of green and red dust blowing off the Lorado tailings field into= the woods. The mill had been in operation just two years when it closed in the = first crash in ‘59, the owners dumped a stew of sulphuric acid, radium, lea= d, and uranium into Nero Lake, effectively k= illing it. As late as 81, no one had any idea how toxic these fields were. Legend = has it that in the early 60’s, Eldorado management played golf on the tailings field, and in my time pit parties were held in the shadow of the Lorado mill. The fine, rust-brown surface, and the complete absence of any vegetation, made the tailings field seems as exotic as the surface of Mars. I’d walked over Lorado and other fields at Gunnar and Port Radium many times as a kid, and though one would have to spend several weeks camped out= on the edge of the field to really be in danger, this exposure sometimes worri= es me.

We went down the Fredette Valley past the bridge. Dave and I talked about our seperate experiences coming do= wn to the valley, and the waterfalls, to think, be still, to escape. The water= fall was frozen in a sheet of solid ice, as if the water had solidified all at o= nce and the white of the falls looked beautiful against the black rock around i= t. Water burbled beneath the ice sheets and we taped the sound of the water wi= th the mikes. Dave’s half-brother Wilfred had come down with us and he h= eld the boom mike during interviews and took a crew shot of Dave, Ole and I together against the waterfall. I liked Wilfred - he was a quiet man, with = an intense yet gentle air. He was descended on one side from Gus Hawker and li= ved off downtown with his wife and two children, and worked in the mines south = of the Big <= st1:PlaceType w:st=3D"on">Lake, two weeks in and out like ev= eryone else.

After the shoot, we went bac= k to Wilfred’s house where Wilfred and Dave went through a box of photogra= phs. Baby pictures and paintings of wolves, eages and Jesus ministering to his f= lock covered the walls. Wilfred’s wife Sandra had baked muffins and the air was warm with a wood fire and the stove; Suzie Quatro’s ‘Tumblin’ In’ played in the background like an echo of the ‘70’s. Wilfred showed us a photograph of his wedding – Jim Papffenroth presided over Wilfred and Sandra, sealing the knot with a kiss = in front of Ace Lake – then some pictures of= a forest fire which had nearly come into town a few years before. “This= is what we looked forward to in the summer,” Wilfred said, “Goin’ out and fighting fires.” In one of the pictures, purple-black smoke billowed out over Fredette Road. The fire had been seven miles away and i= f it had any closer the town would have been evacuated.

The town had been spared that year, but fire had still claimed many of the buildings. Wilfred showed us a picture of the old hotel, engulfed by flames as part of a campaign in the l= ate 90’s to clean up the townsite. Wilfred hadn’t been there but Sa= ndra had. Half the town had turned out to watch the fire and some people had been crying because the building had been such a prominent symbol of the old tow= n.

I looked over the photograph= s a little sadly. When I was a young man, the hotel had been both intimidating = and fascinating. I went to the cafeteria with my friends to sit in the booths by the windows and have french fries and pop, watching the steady coming and g= oing of the miners, townspeople and kids through the lobby. The few times I went down at night, both the lobby and the bar were both bewildering and excitin= g. Fights broke out in the fourty below cold, and the lobby and the hall would= be packed with people. Sometimes we hung around the back, looking in the windo= ws of the bar into the haze of cigarette smoke into the strange adult world in= side.

I went inside that bar only = once. It was in the early morning, 1998, fifteen years after the hotel had been abandoned. Heavy fog softened the lines of the buildings and cut off the surrounding hills so that it felt like the town was suspended in space. The hotel’s front door had been sealed shut, a giant ‘EH?’ spray-painted in yellow on fhe front, but the door to the bar was open. Ins= ide the bar was dark but for a shaft of light from a window in the back, and the counter had been kicked over on it’s side. The heavy glass doors of t= he refigerator were still intact and inside I found a Carling Old Style box, t= he cardboard warped with age.

Upstairs, the lobby looked m= uch as it had in 1980, except that the windows were all boarded up, and a heavy ch= ain sealed the front door. The front desk and the boxes for messages and keys w= ere still intact, but inside the cafeteria, the circular counter seats, booths = and even the counter had been removed, and at the back it was as dark as it had been at the centre of the high school. The hotel, while less menacing than = the high school, felt more eerie, and I remembered people in town telling me th= at they didn’t like to go into the hotel because there were too many gho= sts. Though I’d explored every other building in town, in the hotel I couldn’t go further than the lobby. With the boards on the windows, t= he lobby felt entirely removed from the intersection outside, as if the grey l= ight and stale air inside the high-ceilinged lobby came from some place deep wit= hin the hotel, and the darkness at the back of the cafeteria led to a whole separate town of darkness and ghosts. I went back down the hall and, with s= ome relief, stepped back into the cold and fog outside.

Our last visit was back up Hospital Hill to see Dean Classen. Dean lived in the Eldorado duplex he bou= ght for a few hundred dollars after the mine closed. His Suburban was parked outside and his two youngest children were playing in the living room of his comfortable home, complete with carpets and good furniture; an echo of his parent’s old house which sat on top of Uranium Road.

I’d been a frequent vi= sitor to that house for a year or so when I was friends with Dean’s younger brother Brant. Before the Classens had moved up the hill, they’d owned our blue ranch house and built the extension that became the living room, complete with sunken fireplace, before they sold the property to SMDC who leased it to us. I remember Dean in the living room of his parent’s house, wearing a silver disco shirt and cranking up Kiss or April Wine on t= he stereo. Like many northern kids, the Classen boys spent most of their free = time out in the woods, hunting, fishing, trapping, or out at the family cabin. B= rant had often taken me out on his trapline, or out hunting squirrels or rabbits= , or on camping trips into the country. Once, when we were twelve or so, we skied out to his parent’s cabin with a couple of his cousins. I don’t remember where the cabin was now, but it took a full day of skiiing in thir= ty below cold the cabin, we fired up the sauna until it was blistering hot, th= en jumped outside into the snow o cool off.

I met with Brant a few times= in Vancouver, where = he lives now. Once, when Ray Jones and= I were both in Vancouver, we met with Brant, Murry Petryshyn and Shawn Rasta - we’d all known e= ach other in high school - and went to a few bars around town. It was a memorab= le evening, not least because of an undercurrent of sadness, since we were all linked by a place that no longer existed.

When the mine closed, Dean&#= 8217;s father lost the money he’d invested in his bulk fuel business and Dean took over what was left and runs the business to this day. That evening Dean had just drove in with his two youngest children over the ice road from the south, where his wife Gisele and their children were passing the winter. Ol= e, a grandfather himself, played with Dean’s kids on the couch, and Dean a= nd I drank single malt whiskey and chatted. His parents live on Vancouver Island, a half-hour drive from where most of my family eventua= lly settled. Dean wasn’t sure what would happen once the hospital closed.= The Rare Earth mine was still a possibility, as was Goldfields, but no one real= ly knew what to expect. Dean was quietly optimistic: the town had weathered so much in his time. As I sat there, I wondered what had kept him in town, long after his schoolfriends and family had left. Every year, he worked to keep = the curling and skating rinks open, sat on town council, and helped to maintain= the town’s infrastructure. He was an enterprising man who could have done well in the south. I thought that he must really love the town to stay and devote so much to keeping it alive.

Even then, Uranium City still felt like a town in motion. Pipers and Navajos flew in and out every = day, engines droning overhead. A friend of Andy and Clarice’s drove in acr= oss the ice road, taking the long route down from Fort MacMurray, across Saskat= chewan, then North again, dropped off a boat to use in the summer then a few days l= ater Andy and Clarice boarded up their house and all three of them flew back to MacMurray with Pinot Noir. Paul Bougie flew in for a night, picked up his w= ife Dolly, who was pregnant, then took the ice road back south. Bill Holland jr= and Alan Augier flew in a at seperate times from their shifts at the mine, and,= the day after we left, James and Danny Augier drove in as well.

We went down to the ice road= the day before we left. The road is maintained three weeks a year and runs from Stoney across the narrows to Fond-Du-Lac, along the = Athabasca’s north shore then crosses the P= ortage to Beaverlodge and joins the highway to the airport.

The ice road - and the arrival of the barges in the summer - was part of Uranium City’s personality, for isolation defined it as much as anything else. Even in the= old days, the only way in or out for most people besides the ice road was by air and the sound of the big jets screaming over town into the airport was part= of daily life. Three years before they closed the mine, Eldorado bought their = own DC-10, custom-made so that they could fit cargo in the back, and offered mi= ners and their families free flights to Saskatoon. Up until 1990, the jetliners still stopped at the Eldorado airport, though = they must have often stopped empty.

I’d been out on the ol= d ice road which ran from Bushell across Athabasca to the winter road on the south shore. My parents liked to drive out to the mouth of Black Bay where the surface stretched bl= ue and white as far as the eye could see. Fissures rended the ice, plunging down i= nto the icy blackness, and ice ridges ran across miles of frozen lake like a gr= eat icy moat. When the road was last open in February, 1982, it was as busy for= a few weeks as a southern highway as the moving trucks rumbled North and townspeople streamed south, sometimes abandoning boats and even vehicles on= the side of the road when they proved too heavy to tow.

A red light still blin= ks from the tower overlooking what was Eldorado, but of the ranch-houses, duplexes, bunkhouses and sprawling rec centre which made up the town, and t= he machine yards, mill, mineheads and offices that made up the mine, nothing w= as left but a single tin shed and a few roads laid out in a grid. The handsome cedar-beamed lodge where I’d stayed in 2000, still sat on the edge of= the townsite. Harold Gravesley, who runs the lodge, was Eldorado’s only permanent resident.

We circled through the plate= aus that made up what was left of the mine, then walked down to the lake. Three fifteen foot signs s= tood a ways off the shore, announcing the ice road and cautioning drivers that they took the road at their own risk. Two vehicles crept toward us from the south shore, and as they came closer we saw that the lead vehicle was an oil tank= er. We walked out to the signs and waited. Dave said that the ice was six or se= ven feet thick, and though this was apparently thicker than the legal limit, it seemed absurdly thin with an oil tanker bearing down. All around the magnificent tableau of snow and ice shone dazzling white in the sun. The hi= lls around the lake were dusted with snow, as serene as a network of extinct volcanoes. I filmed the truck as it approached across the lake, steady at e= ight km/hr to keep behind the waves it generated in the ice. When it was almost = upon us, tire chains clanking on the ice, I couldn’t quite shake the image= of the cab and it’s heavy load breaking through six feet of ice, and thr= ee of us scrambling ahead of the cracks with freezing water spraying up between the ice floes. I felt the ice shifting beneath my feet, rippling with the weight of the truck’s wheels like hard putty rippling out from a weig= ht at it’s centre. The trucker waved as he passed then shifted gears and= his truck angled up the grade which seperated lake from land and disappeared in= to the bush that covers the Eldorado townsite.

After a promising start, our= film never got made. 2003 was not a great year for documentary film in Canada. We had funding approved once, then twice, then taken away again. Ole’s w= ife got sick and I was beset by numerous personal troubles. Dave moved to Vanco= uver (where he works now as a youth guidance counselor). Ray is still in Ottawa.= One day, whenever I can raise some more money, I’ll revive the film.=

In the meantime, the town li= ves on. The hospital closed, as predicted, in the summer of 2003. Ray Jones wen= t back with James O’Reilly that summer and filmed the auctioning off of the hospital’s leftover furniture and equipment. Ian Kelley and his family and many other hospital staff left shortly thereafter but Andy and Clarice = have made a permanent move to their converted shed on the edge of downtown, haul= ing up an incredible 10,000 pounds of goods from their old home in Fort MacMurr= ay, most of it by charter airplane. Dean Classen is still in town, sitting on t= own council.

The Rare Earth mine at Hoida= s Lake appears close to becoming reality. Dean’s partner, Kevin Lowadoski is= so sure of the mine he wants to run a road from the minesite into town. Exploration crews are moving back in. With uranium prices up, the land arou= nd Uranium City is in demand again. “Lotta strangers in town,” Says Clarice, “Lookin’ in through our window.” Encana, one of = the biggest gas producers in North America, has inherited Lorado mines as part = of a larger deal and are looking at ways of cleaning up the tailings pond which = is leaching acid into Beaverlodge through Nero. Clean-up at Gunnar is also in it’s beginning stages.

Jim Papffenroth remains, run= ning the Bible Camp and Baptis= t Church, as does Mar= garet Powder, who works at the nursing station which replaced the hospital. Wilfr= ed and Sandra remain, with their children. The arenas are opened each winter, = and bonspiels still held at the curling rink. The population, officially 86, sw= ells in the summer months as families and old-timers like Archie and Mary Segerts return, and people come up from the US to help Jim run the Bible = Camp. Several lodges still operate in the area - FishHook Bay, out on Beaverlodge, ‘Luffy’s Lodge’ on Lake Athabasca run by James Augier and named in memory of his deceased wife, and a smaller lodge run by JJ Bougie.= Ben MacIntyre is still open, with seven students.

Ole left after a week, takin= g the cameras, but Dave and I decided to stay for another weekend. It was a relie= f to be free of the cameras. Shooting in the cold had been exhausting, and for D= ave it had been a painful, if exhilarating week.

An electrical fire broke out= at Margaret Powder’s house and she and her husband Wayne and their two children had to rush to a neighbor’s in the middle of the night. The = fire was stopped before it spread, but two walls of the children’s bedroom= had to be demolished. Dave, Wilfred and Wayne spent the weekend rebuilding the walls, and everyone in town helped out - Jim came by with a box of pizza, presumably from down south.

I spent the last day w= alking through the town. I wasn’t sure what would happen with our film, or t= he town, and I wanted to see as much of the town as I could in case I never ca= me back again. The temperature had risen to an almost tolerable minus 20. I wa= lked down Uranium Road to the neighborhood beyond Candu High. By mid-afternoon, = the sun was beginning it’s descent towards the hills behind town, and two= km of empty houses spread out along the hill. As I passed the high school a big dog bounded up behind me, so big and running so fast that at first I though= t it was a wolf, but it was just a big friendly dog that wanted to explore the t= own awhile. In a garage off the main road was an old Ford Fairlane, left behind during the exodus of 1982, and in one of the houses along Uranium Road I fo= und a 1960 Saturday Evening Post, which I later traded to Dave for a copy of the 1980 Candu yearbook. The dog and I climbed the steps of one of the Eldorado houses which bordered the playground of what had been Gilchrist School. The school had been burned down a couple of years before, and the swings and ju= ngle jim and the concrete pad that had been the foundation were all that remaine= d, covered now with snow. From the house’s second story I could look out= over the whole southern half of the town. The snow-covered rooftops lay draped a= bout the hillside like a woman’s body, coming to rest at the edge of the forest. Tall spruce jutted up behind the hill and behind the spruce lay the white surface of Martin Lake, then the cres= t of the lovely hill which surrounds the southern edge of the lake. But for the empty windows staring blankly from the snow, it might have been an Alpine Village in BC, or the Alps. As the sun dipped closer towards the horizon, t= he snow turned a brilliant blue in the shadows, and the houses were streaked w= ith pink, gold and yellow, reminding me how beautiful Uranium City had once bee= n, how beautiful it could still be if one knew how to look. I walked back up Uranium Road and down to our old house at the bottom of North Saskatchewan.= The dog ran ahead of me, veering into the bushes then running back periodically= to check if I was still there. As I stood amidst our house, I felt the past co= me alive all around me, as if the ghosts I’d felt on other trips had returned now that I was alone. Our house, and the other houses along the street, seemed to accrete their missing parts and stood whole all aroud me.= I saw the streetlamps glowing along the street, the neighbor’s window, glowing yellow where moments before there had been only space and heard my mother’s voice from a back room, muffled by the radio burbling in the corner and the carpeted floor. I saw my friend Bentley and his sister Sylvia coming up the bend from Nuclear Avenue, wolf-whistling through their teeth = to tell me it was time to walk up to school. I saw the edge of the apartment t= ower - no more than a few foundations now - staring down from it’s perch on the top of the hill. Looking out the back windows I saw the neighbor’s houses on the street below - the Bougies, still more or less intact by the = foot of the skihill, the Piesenger’s machine shop, the Schillings, the Hasslen’s at the end of the street, the house of the ----- girl next = door then, towards downtown, the Dixon’s, the Augier’s, the Turner&#= 8217;s; Bentley and Sylvia’s. I heard the Twin Otters droning overhead and the sound of their engines echoing up behind the hill as they decelerated into = the MASL base on Martin Lake, and saw the girls who came over to take care of my three younger brothers and sisters when my parents flew south, playing Blon= die, the Knack, and Pat Benetar in the living room and hamming it up for each ot= her around the kitchen table.

The last of the sun ebbed fr= om the street, and the houses turned dark. The dog came inside, paws crunching on = the mouldering tiles then left as suddenly as it had appeared, trotting down the steps and disappearing up Nuclear Avenue. Cold right through, I followed so= on after, walking up Nuclear past the empty or ruined houses that had become as familiar to me on my trips back as they had been when I lived there. The Augier’s old house, roofless now, hauled over the Big Lake from Gunnar in the late 70’s on the back of a flatbed truck. Bentley = and Syliva’s house, reduced to a pile of beams and shingles, the ‘K= ISS - Rock n Roll Over’ sticker still visible on what had been Bentley’s bedroom wall. I’d grown curiously comfortable with th= ese empty places now, and when I reached the ice bern which seperated abandoned from liv= ing town, I paused for one last look, almost sad to leave my old neighborhood behind.

That evening Ian Kelley came= by and we went for a ride. I’d run into him earlier that afternoon. He w= as wearing a beautiful red wool coat with beaded fur gloves and had been taking advantage of the relative warmth to take his little girl out for a skidoo r= ide. Now we viewed the darkened town from the warmth of a truck cab. Ian said he liked to drive around town at night. “Never see a soul – you fe= el like you’re completely alone in the world. Like you’re living in Dodge.” Outside, a quarter moon cast silver beams across the snow and black windows reflected back from rows of empty houses. <= /p>

I got Ian to drop me o= ff at the edge of downtown, where Wayne Augier lived. I hadn’t seen Wayne a= ll week, and I wanted to say hello and give my regards to Danny and James who = were due anytime. The house was dark and no one answered when I knocked, so I wa= lked back down Uranium Road. Without the comfort of the cab, the town had become more menacing. The curl= ing rink was closed and the street and all the buildings in it were dark. The two-story teacherage loomed at the end of the street, it’s smashed windows burning blackly outward. I realized that if everyone left after the hospital closed, the whole town might look like this and for a moment the e= mpty town seemed truly sinister. A popping sound erupted from the metal roof of = the skating rink, as if ghosts inhabited the darkened space inside and were mak= ing their presence known. I hurried my pace, anxious to reach the heart of the occupied town.

I noticed a light burning fr= om the doorway of the skating rink. I went inside and found the three teenagers I’d filmed snowboarding on the hill playing pick-up hockey at the far= end of the rink. The popping I’d heard had been the slap of the puck agai= nst the boards.They skated over and we chatted a moment until, my feet and hands turning numb from the cold, I went back outside.

Overhead the northern lights billowed across the empty town like steam shooting from a kettle, red melti= ng into white into palest blue, so powerful that the very air seemed to crackl= e. Behind the lights, the stars were spectacular, and I made out the constellations I’d studied as a kid - Orion the Hunter, hanging over = the twin domes of the rec centre, the Big and Little Dipper, Plaiedes, Cassiopi= ea. I felt the same rush of assocations that I had in my old house and one even= ing in particular came back to me. It had been in early winter, perhaps a month after our camping trip. I’d been at a party at the top of the hill wi= th all my friends from school and what seemed like half the town and even the miners from the Eldorado bunkhouses. After the party shut down, everyone fi= led along Uranium Road in a big procession, going to the hotel or another house party. I’d met a girl at the party and we were walking together in the middle of the procession. A light snow drifted through the beam of the streetlamps. The girl was beautiful, with teardrop eyes and long brown hair= and I and many other boys had been admiring her from a distance. I felt, for the first time in my life, that I’d been allowed into the adult world, instead of just observing it as I had at the hotel.

We all remember the first ti= me we fell in love, don’t we? Nearly a quarter century later I could still = see the people in the procession and the yellow windows along the road, and the girl’s face beside me. I could hear the music and the buzz of voices = from the door of the Zoo bar, and see the faces milling around in front of the hotel, breath steaming into the cold night air, and the red tail-lights of = the taxis on their way out to Eldorado, and the bang of the hotel door as people streamed up and down the concrete steps that led to the lobby. <= /span>

I knew that no matter the su= ccess or failure of our film, no matter if every building was abandoned and the downtown became as dark and cold as the rest of the town beyond the hill, I could still return to whatever was left of this stretch of Uranium Road and that moment would come alive, again and again.

In the meantime, this spirit= ed town, so cruelly treated by fate, persists, like Job, on faith and it’= ;s own curious energy.