The Road Of Ashes
It’s a good thing we’re not equipped to feel the grief all at once.
All the trees have been reduced to charred cores of trunks with occasional twigs like burned matches. They stick up from a vast expanse of blackened ground, heaped with ash, where stubborn embers still creep and smoke still billows up to form a thick cloying miasma. It’s like fog I can profoundly taste even through my N95 mask, and makes my eyes water. It’s like that for as far as the eye can see in every direction.
After we race through it at highway speeds for more than an hour, it’s still the same everywhere we look. A photograph may capture a glimpse, but can never convey that immensity. It seems to go on forever.
Finally we reach the town of Enterprise, the gateway to the Northwest Territories, or more precisely, the place where Enterprise used to be. For each of the few still recognizable buildings, nine or ten others have been utterly reduced to ash. The place where Winnie’s stood, the first restaurant north of the Alberta border, is only identifiable by a singed scrap of sign and a concrete footing. You could rebuild the buildings, but the land is just an enormous scar now, and will be for years to come. Some structures remain, but the town is still gone.
