Bittersweet Sands: Twenty Four Days in Fort McMurray

by Rick Ranson

Overview

In Bittersweet Sands, Rick Ranson recounts a twenty-four-day shift at an oilsands operation undergoing a shutdown, giving us a glimpse at a world most of us only know from the evening news. Along the way, he encounters a group of engaging roughnecks, including a husband-and-wife welding crew, a petty fascist safety inspector, and the tough-as-nails secretary that keeps them all in line.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781927063620
Publisher:	NeWest Publishers, Limited
Publication date:	10/15/2014
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

A natural-born raconteur, Rick Ranson, the third child in a family of six children, was raised by an enthusiastic, story-telling Royal Canadian Air Force Captain, and grew up in military bases across Canada, from Vancouver to Labrador. When he was 16, Ranson followed his wanderlust and hitchhiked from Winnipeg through the US to Toronto, and then from Winnipeg to Mexico, before surviving a canoe trip from Winnipeg to New Orleans. Today Ranson spends his time living between Winnipeg, MB, and Key West, Florida.

Ranson has worked as a longshoreman, a drill ship's welder, a boilermaker, a farm equipment salesman, an editor for McGraw Hill, a forklift operator, a business owner, and now a published author. Ranson has contributed to several publications, including The Cottager Magazine, Gam on Yachting, Western Producer, and The Herald. He is also the author of Working North DEW Line to Drill Ship, which chronicles the eight years Ranson spent working as a welder in the Canadian Arctic. Paddling South: Winnipeg to New Orleans by Canoe was released in October 2007 and was shortlisted for the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction at the Manitoba Book Awards. Paddling South was translated and published in Germany in 2009. Rick's latest book, Bittersweet Sands: Twenty-Four Days in Fort McMurray, was released in Fall 2014.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from "Shutdown"

The shutdown begins.

The black gold dribbles to a stop, the lights in a thousand sensors dim, the needles in hundreds of gauges freeze. The refinery lies still. All that piping and all those vessels seem to sag, then slip into a lassitude of waiting. The thunderous, vibrating rumble of a working refinery becomes just a memory of an echo. The only sound within the now-sinister labyrinth of pipes and chrome is the faint but constant hiss of heating pipes like a steam locomotive idling in a railway station. Small wisps of escaping steam smell of wet cement, oil, and the rotten-egg whiff of hydrogen sulfide. Men speak in whispers at such times. They look over their shoulders as their steel-toed boots clang in the quiet, echoing on the steel grating. The pipes that once vibrated with the precious liquid now hang limp, glinting dull in the sun like a burnt-out forest of tar-streaked chrome, all right angles and silence.

Before he had clicked off, the voice on the phone had a final excited message:

"After the first shutter, they're going to transfer everybody to the second one, then a third, and on and on. Jeez, man! A thousand guys, seven twelves, maybe fourteens. We'll be buying our own Brink's truck to carry the money. I'm getting on that shutdown. This'll be the biggest shutdown this year."

My truck roared to life. I was hustling out west.

Going to McMurray.

Going to a shutdown.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Bittersweet Sands:

"Beyond simply finding a throughline through a collection of anecdotes, Bittersweet Sands succeeds in offering a compelling portrait of that unusual community, one that rarely factors into discussions of the oilsands: hard men drawn together by work, getting rich, but isolated from family and friends and left without much else aside from each other to help pass the time."
~ Paul Blinov, Vue Weekly

"Bittersweet Sands is a quick and easy read. I felt that I had a better understanding of the flavour and feel of life in Fort McMurray after I read it. If you have relatives that work in the patch, you might want to pick this one up."
~ Alexis Kienlen, Daily Herald-Tribune

"The book is certainly not a full picture of life in and around Fort McMurray, but that cannot be expected from a 24-day snapshot taken by an out-of-town worker. Instead, it is an entertaining collection of stories told from a familiar setting."
~ Jessica McIntosh, Fort McMurray Today

From the Publisher