Critical Minerals

Aunt Amber will be moving away

and it will be a long road there.

I did a little research today.

Michael is a geologist. Of course he is. Amber always said she admired people who could read the earth like a book. He reads rocks. She reads people. That feels balanced somehow.

But if he finds work up north — a real mining town — that means Amber moves.
And I don’t love that.

I read about Timmins. About nickel. About rivers with names I had to sound out twice. About fish habitat being “unavoidably altered.” That word stuck with me — unavoidably.

Apparently nickel is needed for batteries. Clean energy. The future. Experts say the next generation will need “a hell of a lot” of it. That sounds urgent and messy at the same time.

Mining towns seem to run on hope.
Hope for jobs.
Hope for stability.
Hope that this time the boom will last.

But they also run on something else — history.
Ghost towns.
Water warnings.
Regulations that come after damage.
Communities that grow fast and shrink faster.

I read about places where the park used to be a tailings site. About mines that promised reclamation. About taxpayers footing cleanup bills when companies folded. About Indigenous communities trying to sit at the table instead of being bypassed.

It’s complicated.

Part of me thinks:
We can’t just pretend we don’t need minerals. We want batteries and phones and electric cars and clean grids. Rocks don’t extract themselves.

Another part of me thinks:
Every time someone says “fast-track,” I hear “slow consequences.” And then there’s the human side.

Mining towns aren’t villains. They’re families trying to keep grocery stores open. They’re kids in hockey rinks funded by resource taxes. They’re boarded-up storefronts when the mine closes. They’re pride and exhaustion in the same breath.

Michael would see possibility.
Amber would see stories.
And I see… distance.

I keep pretending this is about policy.
About boom-and-bust economics.
About watersheds.
About whether regulations are strong enough.
About whether “critical minerals” are being framed honestly.

But really?
It’s about Aunt Amber moving somewhere with a skyline shaped by an open pit.
It’s about Sunday tea without her.
It’s about missing her laugh in the kitchen.
She’s a writer. She could live anywhere.

She says writers don’t belong to landscapes — landscapes belong to them. Maybe she’ll find beauty in tailings ponds the way she finds it in cracked sidewalks.

Oh – who am I kidding? The north is all lakes and rivers and trees. If there is beauty to be found, Amber will find it. And there is beauty - both below and above. I’ve always wanted to see the northern lights.

What aches is this:
She won’t live just down the road anymore.