DESPITE LOSS OF HOUSE, THERE'S HOPE TO START FRESH
Paul Trenholm’s Fort McMurray home is gone. He knows that. But his job remains and that’s enough to convince him to return.
“I’ve gone on the before-and-after satellite photos and it’s been burned up,” said the manager of the Rosenau Transport terminal just outside of Fort McMurray. “We were in Waterways and it just came across from Beacon Hill and destroyed everything.”
He said he feels worst for his wife and others like her who lost irreplaceable keepsakes to the fire that spread through the city in early May and sent more than 80,000 people from their homes.
Trenholm has received an email from the Canadian Red Cross saying he can return on June 4.
“I don’t know what to expect. Until it hits you, I guess, after you go and you see, dealing with that loss,” he said.
So far, he’s heard his company is going to be using the terminal as a place for the local Red Cross volunteers to offer services from and a place where he can get his bearings while the rebuild happens.
“We’ll probably go down and survey, because we had a mobile home, to see if anything is left (that’s) salvageable, anything that we can kind of dig through the ashes and see if there’s anything of value in the way of memorabilia,” he said.
A decade spent as a minister in the late ’80s and early ’90s exposed him to loss second-hand and he feels it’s grounded him enough to deal with the return to a city he still feels is home.
“I was meditating on it and I was looking at it kind of in three ways,” he said.
If people’s homes are still there, he said, they can simply return to their old life. If their homes are gone they can try and rebuild, doing what they can to return to normal life.
The third option is to start fresh and either change the way they live in Fort McMurray or look for a new home elsewhere. That’s what Trenholm is opting for.
He’ll be 55 in September and wants to figure out his retirement in about five years.
“It’s easier to do in Fort Mac where you’re established than it is to start over in another province or another city,” he said.
Others he’s spoken with believe several people won’t be going back but after discussing it with his wife he feels the idea of relocating would have been more feasible if he were in his 20s or 30s.
“I always thought of Fort Mac as the last place to make a decent living, even though you’re miles from Edmonton or other major cities,” he said, adding a good paying job allows him to reach that retirement goal despite recent events.
Besides, he said, the small community reminds him of Moncton, N.B., where he grew up.
“I like this city, I like the people,” he said.