NOTE: Some version of this article will eventually appear in the Ottawa
Citizen. Until that great day I thought I'd post it on the website for people
from or interested in Uranium City to read. If you have any comments or
whatever, contact me:

beckett_tim@hotmail.com 


Uranium City Return:

In 1980, when, at age fifteen, I moved south with my family, Uranium City,
Saskatchewan, was booming. Eldorado Nuclear, which owned and operated the
nearby Beaverlodge mine, was committed to staying another twenty-five years
and had just sunk 100 million dollars into both town and mine, building
offices, bunkhouses, stores and dozens of new houses. The provincial
government had built new schools, rec centres, an office and a brand new
liquor store. Uranium City's future seemed assured.
When I returned in 1996, just 200 people inhabited what, in 1980, had been
a town of nearly four thousand people. Entire neighborhoods lay empty:
windows smashed, doors hanging loosely off their hinges; weeds, poplars and
saplings pushed through yards, doorways and steps. Many buildings had burned
down or just collapsed, leaving vacant lots, or unsightly piles of lumber and
roofing shingles. The only industry left was the hospital and when the
hospital moved to Stoney Rapids, as it was scheduled to do sometime in the
new millennium, it was thought that the services would go with it. Uranium
City seemed at the very end of it's life.
But, as I was to discover, Uranium City had assumed another identity, a
much diminished version of it's former self to be sure, yet curiously vital
and persistent all the same.

Uranium City is a profoundly isolated place, only fourty kilometres south
of the border with the NorthWest Territories and separated from the rest of
Saskatchewan by Lake Athabasca. Neither road nor rail connects it with the
south and in many respects it has more in common with the NorthWest
Territories than it does with the rest of Saskatchewan. The terrain is
semi-arid, and marked by bedrock hills and dozens and dozens of lakes, quite
distinct from the sandy muskeg and forest on Athabasca's southern shore.
In the 1950's, Uranium City was a boomtown, supplying uranium to the
British and American Nuclear arsenals. Uranium was discovered in the area in
the late 1940's, and Eldorado Nuclear sank three mineheads on Beaverlodge
Lake, just north of Lake Athabasca and Uranium City grew up around what had
been a caribou trail a few kilometres west. By the mid-fifties thirty-three
mines - some no more than a hole in the ground, some large enough to require
bunkhouses and stores of their own - had sprung up around town. Gunnar, the
largest of these peripheral mines, had it's own townsite of a thousand
people.
Des Fogg, a local journalist, described the ensuing rush:

"They came from anywhere and nowhere into the wild desolation that was the
nucleus of a supra-continent. The veteran prospector came - heavy-bearded,
with faced burned brown by a thousand suns, roughened by sand and wind. The
novice came - protege of God alone. The drifter came - forsaken of both God
and man, searching for a new beginning. All of them were lured by the golden
promise of an awakening North."

The first store was set up by Gus ' The Famous' Hawker, an Englishman who
made headlines back home when he chartered a plane with his family to
see Queen Elizabeth's coronation. Tents and shacks sprung up, filled with men
between jobs in the mines, or hoping to strike it rich in the bush. Shacks
gave way to wooden buildings and in a few years Uranium City's population
neared six thousand. A hotel opened, then bars, cafes, a movie theatre and
even a mini-stock exchange. The rush of men and money into Uranium City
outdid even the Klondike Rush of the century before.
Then, in1959, the British and American governments cancelled their
contracts. Every mine but Eldorado and Gunnar shut their doors. Tents and
shacks evaporated into the bush and Uranium City's population plummeted to
less than a thousand.
We first moved to Uranium City in 1966. My father was a geologist for
Irwin Engineering, a local exploration company, and my mother was a nurse at
the hospital. Uranium City was just pulling out of it's slump. While banning
the sale of uranium for military use, the Canadian government had begun
stockpiling ore for the Candu reactor. An afterglow of the boom years
remained, and my parents mixed easily with the bush pilots, trappers,
prospectors, guides, miners, nurses and frontiersmen (and women) who called
Uranium City home.
We left a couple of years later, returned sporadically to the bush camps
around town, then moved back in 1977. By that time, Uranium City was coming
into it's own as a settled community and yet, accessible only by air and the
winter road which opened for six weeks across Lake Athabasca, it was still
the frontier. Much of the population, white and native alike, moved
restlessly through the North, and near-North, as we did - kids appeared at
school for a year then left; friendships came and went. Yet despite the
transience, there was an intense feeling of community, born of isolation and
the pride that comes from living in such a unique place. Summers were spent
fishing, hiking or swimming, winters skidooing, hunting or cross-country
skiing; stepping into the country one felt hundreds, even thousands of miles
of uninhabited territory spread out beyond the town; at night the Northern
Lights crackled overhead like bands of phosphorous. The transient population
allowed for a steady influx of new ideas; whites and natives mixed with
relative freedom, especially at school. The North has never been an easy
place to live and Uranium City was no exception - many families were poor,
fights were a regular occurrence at the old hotel, and the long, dark winters
led many into depression, or heavy drinking; the natives, like natives
throughout Canada, did not have it easy. But after I left, it was many years
before I stopped wanting to go back.
Then, on December 3rd, 1981, citing falling ore prices, Eldorado announced
that their Beaverlodge mine would close in six months. The town went into
shock: protests were made, committees held, consultants were brought in - all
to no avail. When the winter road opened in February, moving vans rolled in
from Edmonton and Saskatoon and for a few weeks the ice road across Lake
Athabasca was filled with convoys of trucks, cars, and vans on their way
south. By June, 1982, when the Beaverlodge Mine shut it's doors, just four
hundred people remained.

After that first trip in 1996, I came back a year later, then for three
weeks in the fall of 2000. I came out of a desire to make contact with the
last link to the North of my childhood, a love for the surrounding country,
and fascination with the town and the people who inhabited it.
Uranium City's present population is centered around the downtown core,
with perhaps a quarter - mainly doctors and nurses from the hospital - on
Hospital Hill, a half hour's walk from the main town. Most the population is
native - Cree, Dene, Metis. There are two general stores, a restaurant/bar,
gas station, and a motel, as well as a post office, Sask Power shed, and a
town hall that also housed the library, employment office and jail. Even
downtown only one in five buildings is occupied.
At the top of the Hospital Hill, the satellite dish and radio tower
provide a telephone link with the south and bring in radio and television
stations as far afield as Detroit. There are no police: the RCMP keeps a
cruiser at the airport and flies in once a month. For the most part the
community polices itself.
Most residents worked in either the hospital or the stores, though a few
pilots from the regional airlines lived in town. The uranium mines south of
Lake Athabasca employed perhaps a dozen men, who flew out for two weeks and
back for one.
Four years had brought some changes. The hospital was now definitely
scheduled to move, in 2002. Two new lodges had opened up - one on the edge of
what used to be the Eldorado townsite seven miles from Uranium City proper,
and another on the north shore of Lake Athabasca. Both had been doing a good
business all summer, and a few locals talked of opening fishing and hunting
lodges on Milliken or Athabasca. It was hoped that if the hospital did leave,
then tourism might bring in enough money and people to keep the town alive.
In the meantime there were hopes that Goldfields might open again, as
there have been since Eldorado left. Goldfields closed during World War II
because of a lack of manpower, and though the ore is of low quality, a
company has sat on the property for the last decade, waiting for the price of
gold to rise.
There had been attempts to clean up the buildings that have become
dangerous or unsightly or both. The idea was to burn them down, fill in the
foundations with sand, and let the site go back to nature, but the provincial
government ran out of funding before the project could be finished and the
townsite was littered with foundations filled with ash.
But was most encouraged me, as it had in 1996, was the number of people
from the town's other life who had stayed on. As always in the North, they
stayed on for a variety of reasons: love of the land, ties of family, a need
for freedom or escape or a disinclination, for whatever reason, to live in
the south.
Dean Classen, whose brother Brent had been a friend of mine in school,
took over his father's bulk fuel business, married a nurse from the hospital,
and together they had four children. Dean flew his own plane, and spent most
of his time not at work at his cabin.
Paul and Denise Bougie took over their father Jean-Paul's store when he
passed away in 1997. In the mid-eighties Jean-Paul took over the old liquor
store and turned it into a fish-processing plant. The idea seemed sound: a
fish plant ran for nearly sixty years on Lake Athabasca. But interprovincial
trade barriers limited the market to Saskatchewan, and without the flights
and barges to the mine, the cost of flying frozen fish to the south was too
high. The plant went out of business in a year and Jean-Paul converted it
into a store. Paul and Denise added a diner, post office and airline charter
service.
There were the Augier's, who'd been in the area as long as there'd been a
town. I knew Danny at school when he was big, popular kid who played Junior A
hockey. In the fall of 2000 he had just moved back to Uranium City after two
years in the south, and spent the summer guiding and fishing. He liked it out
in the country, he said, it was the only time he could see the old town
again. "They didn't just kill a town here, they killed a whole way of life."
His father James has lived in every community in the area, starting at
Camsell Portage, moving to Goldfield before starting work at Gunnar Mines
when he was fourteen. James was one of twelve kids (his father adopted
fourteen more) and his father Alex was one of the first people, white or
native, to live in the area. In the mid-sixties James moved to Uranium City,
worked at the Eldorado mine, then started his own construction business; by
the time Eldorado pulled out in 1981, he was a millionaire.
Since the closure he has become involved in native politics, fighting for
Metis rights and lobbying the government to clean up the town. He stayed,
like many natives, because of an attatchment to the community, and a hope
that a mine might return or tourism pick up. But, eighteen years later, he
wasn't sure. His wife Luffy had had a stroke the year before, and though she
had recovered well, she still needed more care than the local hospital could
provide.
"If the hospital goes there won't be much here anymore. People don't want
to go back to the old ways. This place'll be like Camsell Portage, just fifty
people."
Andy and Clarice Schultz had gone in the opposite direction. Andy's Cree
grandmother moved to Uranium City in the early years, and Andy was born there
in the sixties. He left to work for Sun Corp in Fort MacMurray, but in a
couple of years he and Clarice expect to move back to Uranium City for good.
They already spend half the year in town; last winter they crossed Lake
Athabasca five times by skidoo. If the hospital leaves and services are cut,
they'll get by, taking water from the river and building an outhouse in their
back yard.
Bill Holland junior moved here to take over his father's business. Bill
senior ran a motel, taxi service, Medivac and the Athabasca Inn, the town's
only bar and restaurant until ill-health forced him to move south. Bill
senior was something of a local legend: a diamond driller in the fifties, he
quit the camps to open a gambling hall in town where he and his cronies would
drink a case of whiskey at a time, and bet on everything from cards to
pinball games to how many kids walked by on the way home from school. Bill
junior doesn't regret the move: he married a local girl, Lorna, and they have
three children.
"When I was a kid I used to dream about having a whole town to myself. 29
years old and I'm living it. You got complete freedom up here."
A few old-timers are still around. Jim Price was a friend of my father's,
a bush pilot and prospector who lived down at the old seaplane base. Jim is
something of a hero for an incident that took place on January 1st, 1952,
when Jim was 23. His plane went down in a white-out over Lake Athabasca and,
after waiting three days, Jim went to get help for himself and his three
passengers, walking 24 hours across Lake Athabasca through wind, snow, cold
and dark. He made it to the north shore, got help, but lost both his feet to
frostbite. Six months later he was flying again, with wooden feet, and has
been flying ever since, prospecting all over the Barren Lands. That fall, at
71, he flew every day that the weather permitted.
Margaret Belanger was also there, working as the town secretary. In the
afternoons I found her in her garden, where she grew peas, carrots, and
tomatoes and we went inside for lunch. Her house was decorated with an easy
chair, nature photographs, pictures of her kids and grandkids; a well-fed cat
occupied one corner of the kitchen. On the street outside was a beat-up van
on which a friend had spray-painted flowers and hippie slogans like 'Peace,
Love and Happiness'.
For lunch Margaret served burgers, creamed corn, tomato salad, pickled
beets, and french fries, baked, and we sat in the kitchen with the CBC
burbling in the corner. The food was excellent and it was pleasant to be
sitting in this Uranium City kitchen with the fresh cold air seeping in
through the doorway, the dark forest just visible over the rooftops, and the
guttural cries of the ravens audible from the street - so pleasant that I
forgot about the empty houses and vacant lots outside, and sank into the
warmth of the kitchen and the well of my memories.
Later, as we watched the Olympics on TV, Margaret reminisced about the
days: "There were 27 different nationalities in my daughter's grade school
class, that's how international it was. And I'll never forget my first flight
in. The pilot said, 'you're gonna love this place - the land has a lot of
lakes, a lot of trees, the trees are small and there's a man behind every
tree.' And would you know it, he was right."

I rented a quad and hit the back roads. The back roads go on for miles,
winding through the myriad lakes and hills - right out 20 kilometres or so to
the abandoned Goldfields townsite on Lake Athabasca. Riding along the rutted
and overgrown roads, it was just possible to feel the echo of activity when
the mines were still active, and the ore trucks and caterpillars ground their
way through the dark winter forests, and armies of men lived in the remote
bunkhouses or were shuttled to and from town by bus. The roads seemed all the
more mysterious and compelling because of this afterglow of the town's golden
era.
Most of the mines have long since collapsed or been burned down or, as in
the case of Eldorado, run back into the earth. But halfway out to Goldfields
one finds the most serious legacy of uranium mining: a tailings pond from the
Laredo mill which has swallowed half of Nero Lake. In operation just six
years, the mill has been dismantled, but the tailings - a toxic stew of acids
and heavy metals, including radium - will remain for eons unless they are
cleaned up. What is left of Nero Lake is ringed by a yellowish white line
running five feet along the shore - nothing lives in the lake but a thick
layer of moss along the bottom, neither fish nor insects nor grasses.
It is easy to forget, after Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island, how much hope
the nuclear industry once inspired. After the horrors of World War II, a
weapon that acted as a deterrent to future wars must have been awfully
appealing, and nuclear power once promised to be the safest, cleanest and
most cheapest energy source ever devised - so limitless that it would take us
to the stars. In the 1970's, the Candu reactor was part of an emerging
Canadian identity and pride: safer, cleaner and more efficient than any other
reactor in the world. If those dreams are now tarnished, that does not
diminish the belief that once sustained them.
The tailings pond is a legacy of the naivety and ignorance of those times.
Dumping tailings in the nearest available body of water was standard practice
in the 50's and 60's, for all types of mining. Uranium mining was a young
industry, and the belief was that since the ore came from the earth the
wastes it generated could be put back into the earth with little or no
ill-effect. By the late seventies, as more became known about low-level
radiation, more stringent regulations were put into place. Eldorado Nulcear,
at least, was obliged to return their minesite to nature. Though the tailings
are monitored by Enviroment Canada, and the government regularly promises to
clean up the tailings here and at Gunnar, nothing has been done to date to
clean up this isolated blot on an otherwise pristine landscape.
Because pristine it was, as wild and untamed as any lands in the NorthWest
Territories, but with a beauty particular to the region, a beauty I'd never
forgotten even twenty years away. The real joy of the back roads was the
access they offered to the country. It was a land whose beauty I'd never
forgotten in twenty years away. Hills rose and fell along the horizon, as
serene as extinct volcanoes, and on the stoney hillsides, stripped of earth
and even surface rock by the glaciers, jackpine rose from the barest hollows.
The rock itself was covered by starburst-patterened lichen, odd tufts of
yellow moss, and ragged juniper bushes with inedible berries; thick forests
of spruce and pine hugged the valleys; as I rode down the roads and narrow
paths, yellow poplar leaves scattered through the air to settle on the ground
like confetti after a parade.
People still lived in the country as well. A few kilometres down from
Laredo, I found one of the area's last homesteaders, Danny Murphy. Danny came
north in the mid-seventies, from Windsor, Ontario where he worked in an auto
plant, and took an empty lot a half-hour's drive out of town. He and his wife
Pat spent their first winter living in a canvas tent while he built a cabin
with timbers from the abandoned mines. Now four cabins - one for winter and
summer, and one for each of his two children, decorate his pretty, wooded
lot.
He didn't miss the south. His days were full chopping wood, decorating his
cabins, tending his garden, drawing in fishing nets and hunting. Not long
before I showed up, he shot a moose and the head hung over his dog kennels,
left for the elements. By spring it would be bone-white.
We had tea on his porch then he told me where to go fishing on Lake
Athabasca, or the Big Lake, as everyone calls it. I rode out to an open spot
where the rocks were worn smooth by ice and wind and cast a line into the
water. It was a marvelous place to spend an afternoon: down the shore was the
old Goldfields minhead, rising like an abandoned church steeple from a crest
of rock, and the sand dunes of the south shore were just visible along the
horizon. As soon as I reeled in, I felt a familiar tug and within minutes I
had caught six cold-water trout, average weight nine pounds. And I felt that
one day, thousands of people would inhabit this place again, drawn by the
land, and the life such country affords.

But there were the houses. Even four years after my first visit, I never
quite got used to turning the corner to find them lurking amidst the bushes.
The ruin encompassed what had been entire neighborhoods, and their emptiness
was profound. Outside the wind shook trees and bushes and grasses, rattled
boards and creaking doorframes, but inside the houses it was always silent.
The air tasted of mould and mildew, of wood and insulation giving way to rot.

To anyone who'd known the town as it was before, when many of these houses
- cedar-pannelled, with spectacular views of the lakes and hills around town,
or nestled along the edge of the forest - were beautiful, it was a painful
sight, and the question arose how the town had arrived at the condition it
was in. One of the kids who grew up in town after the mine closed explained
it this way:
"Some kids got amusement parks, we had empty houses. We used to go round
with a slingshot busting windows. I regret it now, but when we were kids we
didn't know any better. We didn't know the people that lived in these
places."
The kids - half of Uranium City is under fifteen years of age - moved
through the empty buildings at will: playing hockey in the abandoned legion,
hanging around in what was the teacherage, even riding their bikes through
the high school. Most of these kids, like the people who moved here after the
mine closed, had never known the town any other way, and the reality is that
the damage took place incrementally, over a period of years - a broken window
here, a smashed wall there, until the vandalism engulfed the entire town.
Also, ever since it has been obvious that no one was coming back, locals have
gone through looking for plumbing, electrical fixtures and wood, all of which
are in short supply. "Going to the hardware store," they said, "100% off and
100% return."
With time, I discovered that each house had it's own personality. Some had
been stripped to their frames, spilling beams, pink insulation and lengths of
wallpaper into the weeds and grasses around the foundations; some had
collapsed, their foundations undermined, some, like our old house, were
virtually intact. But even the four years since my first visit and the fall
of 2000, had diminished them considerably and soon, in another decade
perhaps, most would cease to be houses at all.
And yet, even in their decline, the houses retained their power to haunt.
It was not a sinister haunting, rather an overwhelming sense of shock,
bewilderment and melancholy, as if they could not understand why their
occupants had so suddenly vanished. The houses had an odd vitality: like the
town, they wanted desperately to live.

Twenty years on, remarkable bonds still tie this community together, both
at it's centre and in the diaspora spread out across North America . Two
summers ago, 750 people attended a town reunion held in Cypress Hills,
Saskatchewan; the same number are expected at another reunion in Cypress
Hills this summer. Len Kilbreath, a former UC resident and organizer of the
reunion, set up the 'Friends of Uranium City' website with adress lists,
photos and a chat room. The website opened a door: through the adress list, I
have come into contact with perhaps a dozen people I knew when I lived in
town. Some I see regularly, some I just trade the odd email with: in a way
the internet is the perfect medium for such contact, less personal than a
phone call, but more immediate than a letter. One could almost say that the
old Uranium City exists as a virtual community.
Since I left Uranium City, Paul and Dolly Bougie have had a daughter,
Sierra, and Bill and Lorna are expecting another child this summer. Denise
Bougie has moved south with her family; James and Luffy Augier moved south as
well, then moved back. A grease fire broke out in the Bougie diner, damaging
store and diner, and Paul and Dolly hope to have the building open again by
the summer. In the interim, the post office is run from the local jail.
The hospital is now scheduled to move to Stoney Rapids in 2004.
Four days before I left a freak blizzard set in, and no planes flew in or
out for three days. When the snow stopped, some thirty people packed the
Bougie Diner for lunch. For such a tiny community, it was a remarkably
diverse crowd - young and old, white and native, government officials and
trappers. School was out and the kids lined up quietly at the counter for the
special, Irish stew and bannock.
When I stepped back outside, smoke from the wood-burning stoves wafted
through the clean, cold air, and ravens clung to the telephone poles, cawing
across the empty downtown. The snow covered covered not only the hills and
trees, but the debris, the overgrown yards, and the houses, making the town
look beautiful again. Jim Price trawled the skies, just a few days away from
putting his plane into storage and heading south. I listened as the plane's
faint metallic drone melted smoothly into the horizon.
It was the North, as pure and beautiful as I'd remembered it. In a couple
of months, when the lakes froze over, the skidoos would come in from Camsell
Portage, Fond Du Lac, and Black Lake; Andy and Clarice would cruise in from
Fort MacMurray. The winter road would open up and for a few weeks, depending
on the weather, the town would be connected with the south. And in that first
flush of winter, it was possible to see not only the past but also,
fleetingly, a future for this wounded town, high up on one of the world's
last great frontiers, a town that has been on a deathwatch for nearly twenty
years and continues to survive nonetheless.