The kids looked absolutely exhausted.

They sat on the floor of the field house at MacDonald Island Park for the closing ceremonies, and it was clear that they were both tired and delighted. What was the most thrilling to me was seeing kids from different zones – meaning different areas of our province – sitting together, having connected or reconnected at the 2018 Wood Buffalo Alberta Winter Games.

The closing ceremonies of the games were the culmination not only of several days of athletic competition but of months and years of work on the part of the organizing committee. It was my genuine pleasure to play a very small role as the media and publicity chair for the event. It was a very busy weekend, not only for the athletes, the organizers and the volunteers, but also for the families who descended on our region to watch their children compete.

During the competition (or at least the two days that I was able to be on site having been felled by the flu on the first day of the games), I had the opportunity to speak with people from across the province who were visiting our region for the first time.

The most common things I heard were: “Your facilities are amazing”, “This isn’t what I heard about Fort McMurray”, and finally “it’s really great here”.

It was nice to hear these affirmations from visitors to our region; after all we know how wonderful Wood Buffalo is but the external world has not always been kind to us. As the games volunteer working with media it was also a delight to welcome external media to the region. Our media guests, some who had never been here before, had the opportunity to see our region in a different light than oil sands or wildfires, but rather that of a sporting competition.

The ensuing media coverage was almost completely positive. Stories of the games were told but they also reflected stories of our region; our places, our people and our tremendous spirit as displayed by the 1900 volunteers who gave of their time to make the games happen.

For me, it was a genuine pleasure. It is always a delight for me to work with people who are not only professionally committed but who bring passion and enthusiasm to what they do. Working with the games staff and members of the games committee showed me their genuine dedication to the end result, which was not only the delivery of the games but delivery of an unforgettable experience for the athletes involved.

One of the comments often heard at the games was that some of these young adults could be the next Olympians. And while that is true what I kept thinking is that for some of these young adults this may be their only big competition; the only time they have an opportunity to compete at this level and in games of this nature. And so it was so important that the experience be a positive one for them; one they would remember for years to come no matter what their athletic future holds.

When I looked around that field house as the closing ceremonies unfolded, I saw young adults who were not only tired but happy. Whether they had won medals or not, they had had the opportunity to participate in a sporting event with their peers.

Some of the kids sitting on that field house floor might well be the next Olympians. Whether they are future Olympians or not, they are our future – the future of our province, and what a tremendous honour it was to host them in our community.

And what an honour it was to host the officials, the coaches, the parents and the media as we celebrated not only sport but our youth and future. From the opening ceremonies and the bright young smiling faces to the last moments before they boarded the buses to head home, it was simply a joy to have these young adults in our community.

We sent some of these young adults home with medals, but more importantly we sent all of them and the adults around them home as ambassadors for the Wood Buffalo region. They saw our facilities and our schools, stayed in our hotels, ate in our restaurants, and met our remarkable people who volunteered for these games. I believe there is a value in that that cannot be measured in economic terms.

I have had the very good fortune, both through my professional work and volunteerism, to participate in many of these events and work with other members of this community to deliver them. I am so very proud to have worked on the 2018 Wood Buffalo Alberta Winter Games, and it is a memory I will carry with me just as I do with all the other events I have had the great pleasure to participate in.

Who were the real winners at the Alberta Winter Games? Was it the young athletes who came to compete, but also made new friends and had an exciting new experience? Was it the organizing committee comprised mostly of volunteers who had the opportunity to feel such pride in delivering this event? Or perhaps it was all of us and our entire region as we had the opportunity to once again welcome the province into our home? We have seen so many challenges in our region; from the economic downturn to the wildfire, we have braved some very difficult times. How truly remarkable is it that despite all of that we remain hospitable hosts, avid volunteers and community enthusiasts?

What I saw during the Alberta Winter Games in our region was a community that has come together despite the challenges to ensure the successful delivery of an event. We wanted to ensure our visitors went home with good memories and a positive experience of their time Wood Buffalo.

And when I looked around that field house during the closing ceremonies and saw all those smiling, tired faces about to head home on their buses, I knew that we had found success.

Games time is now over; but the memories will live on, both for the people who were part of delivering it and for the young adults who visited our region, many for the very first time, finding a beautiful place where the northern lights dance, the rivers flow and the boreal forest grows.

I have asked her where she wants to go on our next vacation; back to Disney World and a cruise, perhaps, or maybe Ireland this time?

When she texts back a few days later I am both bemused and perplexed, as it shows what a complicated creature my child truly is.

“Chernobyl,” she texts. “I think we should go to Chernobyl.”

Chernobyl? The site of a massive nuclear accident, a name forever etched in my brain as I recall watching the coverage on television as the dire fears of a nuclear meltdown were realized and thousands fled their homes due to the radioactivity they could not see but that was truly lethal in the most horrific of ways.

Yes, that Chernobyl.

She is in first year Engineering now, and has discovered a fascination with nuclear science. She is in fact considering a trajectory change, switching her focus from mechanical to nuclear and I suspect this has spurred the sudden interest in visiting the scene of a nuclear plant gone terribly wrong.

She sends text after text showing that it is now safe, at least for small segments of time, using terms like millisieverts and other words beyond my simple comprehension. And while she does so, I begin to browse Chernobyl on the internet, quickly finding photos of the perhaps-forgotten part of the disaster: the city of Pripyat, evacuated in the first 48 hours following the disaster and uninhabited since.

Here is the merry-go-round in the amusement park, forever stilled. Here are the houses, the schools, the hospitals, the playgrounds, gradually decaying into dust and nature (of the sort that has been left behind after being irradiated) beginning to take over.

An entire city of 50,000 people gone in two days, never to return.

And as I view the photos I find myself beginning to feel ever so slightly ill, as this seems eerily familiar to me, far too similar to a city emptied of over 80,000 people in a matter of hours just under two years ago.

“You can tour the hospital,” she texts. They do guided tours through the city, and you can see where the firefighters who initially responded to the crisis eventually dropped their heavily irradiated fire equipment before finally fleeing (but not likely before they acquired a massive dose of radiation, and the ensuing health consequences). You can tour the streets and the school, look inside the houses and see an entire community that was abandoned.

It sets me into a long train of thought, as fundamentally it feels like this is a sort of “disaster tourism”, although in this case one heavily endorsed and promoted by the country in which it occurred. The tours are perfectly legal and popular; there are entire packages available.

For me, though, there is another layer of complexity as it feels so close to what we experienced in my community in May of 2016. When we fled we had no idea if we would be able to return; were it not for the fact that our water treatment plant, hospital and other basic infrastructure were spared, we may have found ourselves the residents of an abandoned city to which we would never return.

Both my head and my heart hurt as I ponder it.

“You could write about it,” she texts.

And in that she is right, there is no doubt there are powerful things to be written about Chernobyl and Pripyat, and even about the similarities to my own experience in a community that was ravaged not by radiation but wildfire. There is a lure in that, but there is something else that tips the scales.

There is the desire to feel myself challenged, to bring myself to that pit of sadness and back out again, to immerse myself in that abandoned city and realize that for the people who were forced to abandon it life went on, even if it was very different and very likely very difficult.

Just as life would have gone on had I never been able to return to my own city if a wildfire had not just singed it, but destroyed it entirely.

Chernobyl and Pripyat are perhaps examples of human error, maybe even hubris. But so too they are examples of resiliency, like turning this site of disaster into a way to generate revenue in a country desperate for it.

“Okay,” I text. “Maybe not this year, but yes. Chernobyl.”

And so I will one day stand in an empty city and reflect on their experience and ours. There will be a mix of emotions I am sure, some of them relating to the fact that I was able to return home to my community after a disaster while they had not; but  I also know I will feel there what I feel here in Fort McMurray: a sense of  the courage, resiliency and indomitable nature of the human spirit, even when the worst happens.

Even in the midst of an empty city.

Sam at 10 in Abasand, Fort McMurray

“When I tell people at university that I’m from Fort Mac it’s amazing how many of them are, too,” says my daughter as we drive home from the airport.

What catches me isn’t that other kids at her school are from Fort McMurray; it’s that she says she is from Fort McMurray.

I pause and say: “You tell them you’re from here? Not from Calgary?”

You see, she spent the final two years of high school living in Calgary, choosing to leave Fort McMurray for a variety of reasons; and when she did I somehow assumed that when it came time for her to claim her hometown, she would claim our larger and admittedly likely more-exciting-for-a-teenager neighbour to the south.

She looks at me with that expression kids reserve for their parents when it is clear they are a bit senile or perhaps just dumb; “of course I say I am from here, this is my hometown”. And she gazes out the window as we drive home, watching the snow drift and the valley of downtown Fort McMurray come into view.

And I smile, because this is truly something I have always wanted: for my daughter to one day proudly say she is from Fort McMurray, Alberta.

This year marks the longest continuous stretch I have lived in one place, including as a child. Fort McMurray has now been my home for longer than anywhere else, and I know that while I have deep and abiding affection for Toronto and Saskatoon, the other contenders for my heart, that Fort Mac (and yes, I call it that with love) will always be where I consider home. It is the place where I have found people who inspire me, thrill me, love me, encourage me, compel me and on occasion drive me completely fucking crazy; who could ask for anything more than that?

My daughter came here as a child, of course, and had little choice in where to grow up. But the truth is she grew up here, in this place of opportunity and challenge, this quirky northern Alberta city-that-is-not-a-city and that is marked by an incredible vibrancy and energy (and one that has nothing to do with oil).

That she has chosen to claim it as her home town, eschewing her other home of late, makes me even more determined and committed to ensuring this community continues to be the place where children like her are proud to call home.

Communities don’t just happen; they are built by the people within them, and if the people who reside in them so choose, communities can falter and fail. Just as with brick and mortar buildings, communities need maintenance and tending, investment and loving care. And just as with buildings, with neglect comes consequences.

And to be very frank, just as with buildings when the exterior conditions become more harsh, that maintenance becomes more critical. When cold winds blow and hard rains pound a building, the necessity of shoring up the walls and roof becomes very clear; and in our region in the past few years we have seen the cold winds of economic change and the hard rain of blow after blow, including a devastating wildfire that threatened to topple us entirely.

And yet here we are, tending to our home. And why do we do it?

For me, it’s all about the kids, ones like my daughter who will undoubtedly leave one day and venture far away, but who can carry with them the strength, courage, tenacity and pride they found right here in their hometown.

As the car rolls on, I glance at her as she gazes out the window, seeing her hometown roll by. And I smile, as I am filled with pride; in her, in us, and in our hometown.