A letter to the people of fire-torn Fort McMurray, past and present

Of all the horrifying imagesof the burningcityI grew up in, what haunts me most are the thousands of cars and trucks lined up in the darkness,engines struggling in theblack smoke,tens of thousands of people leaving allat once, hoping like hell the death highway wouldnot fail them.

Streams of red sparks sweepingacross narrow Highway 63and under the tires,bright red and orange and yellowwalls of flaming, smoking boreal foreston either side.

One road in and the same road out Alberta'skiller highway,we always called it, as it is known.

The usefulness of pieces like this ex-residents withtenuousties to tragedysharing their thoughts and memoriesevades me somewhat even now as I write.

Friends and loved ones and colleagues ask if I'm doingall right.I am,and I confess I'mfeelinga hot kind of shame at even being asked.

Thirteen trailers just blocks away from the one I grew up in,on the north side of town in aneighbourhood calledTimberlea, are gone. Other homes burn there,too.To the southit's much worse: almost all of Waterways rich with the city's history, nestledagainst the Clearwater Riveris destroyed. Beacon Hill andAbasandhave suffered serious damage.

As I write this, themenace that somehow jumped the river and the highway,succeeding where so many fires before it had failed,has growninto a 85,000-hectare monster that'sthreatening to destroy what's left, and other communities besides.

I count the city blocks. I look at Westwood Community High School. I want to seetheblue and grey mobile home my sister, mother and I shared, but Google Streetview has never been there.I'm distracted. Istay uptoo late, knowingit'spointless to do so,talking with my sister, checking theFacebook pages of people I haven't spoken to in a decade or more,of relatives my only connection to nowis my mother's maiden name alone.

Do I have any right to the connection I'm feeling now, watching pictures of burned-out trucks and husks of homes float byon the screens above my desk?

Was Fort McMurray ever home?

Like everything, I suppose, it's complicated.

For meand others I knew in the 1990s,Fort McMurray was a good place to grow upand it was a bad place to grow up.

The best, most vividmemories I have are of nature:racing abicycle down thehill and off thedock and into the Snye,where the Clearwater and Athabascariversmeet, at duskin the pouring rain of an electrical storm;the way the aspen and spruce and birchnear Clearwater School smelled whenflood waters receded;thegreen-looking wave of a cold front I watched sweep by one day,calm winds one second, hail and fences coming down in the trailer courtthe next;the smoke that sometimes blew in andstung our eyes and throatsin wildfire season.

Butit was tough to be a girl there,tougher still to be a teen girl, in a city full ofworkers supportingfamilies living elsewhere,where the men far outnumbered the women, where I found ithard to feel safe, where I felt like I never quite belonged.

I always intended toleave Fort McMurray. My familymoved there when Iwas around sixandI leftat 18,right out of high school, like a lotof kidssomeofwhomI imagineare feelingthe same guilty, helpless kind of sickness I'm experiencingnow.

Whatever my teenage, hormone-fuelledreasons for leaving, I write this because I'm sothankful for all the strength passed down to me, to my family, to everyone I once knew,by a remote city carved into the boreal forest by two rivers.

I saw that strength Tuesday on Highway 63, as an inferno threatened tokill but didn't.

The evacuation of so manyon that little road surrounded by burningtrees, as cinders and smoke leapt out from both sides,could have goneso much worse.

The steadfastness of Fort McMurrayitesis the reason it didn't.

I know nothing of the city good people have worked hard tobuild upin the years since I left. And I know nothing of what they'refeeling now, in limbo, with no idea whetherthey'll have homes to go back to.

I speak whispereduseless apologies toyou through my hands, tothe connections I broke, to our burning, smouldering city, and Ioffer them up.

We are all thinking of you.

I'm so sorry.

Find Kristy Nease on Twitter at @kristynease.