Coal Black Heart Page 2
Sometimes it’s impossible to know precisely what happened; other times the stories read with grim clarity. On May 13, 1873, a miner named Robert McLeod set a routine gunpowder charge in the uppermost coal face of the Drummond Colliery, in Westville, a few kilometres from Plymouth. According to accounts, an unusual amount of gas was ignited, filling the mine with smoke. Making matters worse, the ventilation system stopped working. The manager ordered an evacuation. As the miners were leaving and a squad of firefighters were entering the mine, an explosion ripped through the tunnels. Miners from nearby collieries arrived and tried to rescue the trapped men and boys, whose moans echoed upward through the airshaft. A second explosion hit, killing one of the rescuers. In desperation, the mine was sealed to starve the fire of oxygen. On the surface, “men and women wander about in groups,” the newspapers reported in the days following the catastrophe, “their saddened countenances betokening the great grief that has fallen upon them.”
Five years later, an explosion occurred in the Foord Pit in nearby Albion Mines, killing Jason Nering, James Mitchell, Lewis Thomas and Edward Savage. The rolls of the dead included Donald McKinnon, Charles Boram, the MacDonald boys—Alexander, Angus, Murdoch and Ronald—Angus McGilvary and Hugh McElvie. Also no more were Laughlin Morrison, Thomas Sullivan, Dan Cummings, Merles Benoit, Rory McKinnon (father and son) and twenty-three others.
On January 18, 1918, the Allan Shaft—the most dangerous in a risky lot of seams—exploded. This time the Pictou County church bells rang out for Thomas Adderly Jr. and Clement Barcey, for Robert Winton and Peter Zomoskie, for Isaac Luther and Victor Humblet. Some families suffered more than most: the Bartholomews (Louis and Joseph), the Hanuses (Alfred and Cammile), the Kayenses (Felican and Joseph). Joseph and John McAulay were also among the dead, alongside William and John McLellan, Floriand, Louis and August Vaast, and Desire and Sylvia Laderie. All told, eighty-eight men died that day. Most every family felt the pain—including the Johnsons, who lost a clan member named James.
I noticed, examining the rolls of the dead, that another Johnson, Peter, was a solo fatality during an accident in the McBean Mine in 1957. I have no idea if he and James were related. But I’m still willing to bet that there was some sort of connection between the two of them and Eugene Johnson, who was laid to rest in a lovely treed cemetery in a nearby hamlet on the same day that I attended Lawrence Bell’s funeral.
Illumination does not come often to someone like me. But somehow and somewhere in those grim days after the disaster I had a vision of the black residue that coal has left everywhere in this province. Without coal, whole sections of Nova Scotia might not have been settled at all, or at least might have been settled more slowly. Without coal, Nova Scotia might still be just a collection of scattered farms and fishing villages. Without coal, the province’s people would lack their edge and urgency—their spirit forged by a flame that comes from betting everything, year after year, on the vagaries of a single commodity.
But the trade-offs! Jesus, the trade-offs. All those names on the miners’ monuments in Westville, New Waterford, and Springhill. All those old men coughing their lungs out at Cape Breton Regional Hospital. All those shattered communities, devastated wives and fatherless children. All those economies locked in the last century even as the new one begins. Coal has a lot to answer for in Nova Scotia: whenever one of us grouses about our province’s fractious politics, we’re on some level talking about coal. Anyone who laments the state of our hard-luck economy is really complaining about coal’s legacy. Why are the rural towns and villages emptying out? What’s responsible for the pockets of abject poverty dotting the countryside? Where do our appallingly bad health statistics come from? The deeper I dug through my job as a reporter, the more likely I was to find that coal was the answer.
The Westray disaster, as much as any single event, showed how coal, politics and have-not economics intersect in Nova Scotia. It was hard, for example, to sit in a Toronto high-rise office with Clifford Frame, as I did a year after the Westray tragedy, and not feel the crushing injustice of life. The Curragh Resources Inc. CEO—all Foghorn Leghorn elegance in his dark suit, green tie, handkerchief and cufflinks—seemed precisely the kind of guy who would be hailed as a saviour by the Nova Scotia government when he arrived in the 1980s, offering to create jobs in a place that sorely needed them. “They wanted somebody they thought they could work with and not be pushed around by,” Frame said. “The province and the feds gave me the encouragement. If I didn’t have that encouragement, I wanted nothing to do with that project.”
Encouragement, in this case, meant a total of $12 million in federal and provincial funding, loan guarantees and interest rate subsidies for Curragh. There were lots of people who told the governments not to do it. But the coal industry has always been adept at backing just the right legislators and politicians to make its sooty dreams reality. And there’s always the jobs card. The money was well spent as far as the politicians were concerned. The province’s Conservative government had been rocked by a wave of mishaps and tawdry scandals. Its popularity was plummeting. Even Donald Cameron, the party’s Pictou County strongman, was in the midst of a close battle for his seat. What a stroke of unimaginable luck, then, that five days before election day a Curragh subsidiary announced it was creating three hundred jobs by developing a $127-million mine in the midst of Cameron’s riding. When the polls closed, Cameron had held onto his seat by a few hundred votes and the Tory government—will miracles never cease—had been returned to power with a slim four-seat majority.
Eugene Johnson, I later discovered, had voted Tory. When I went to see his widow on the one-year anniversary of the disaster, she told me that he had been happy to finally follow his forebears underground. By the time the mine officially opened on September 11, 1991, Eugene’s excitement was fading. He told his wife, Donna, about the sections of roof collapsing. He was sparing her the worst: the endless list of flouted safety violations, the sub-par ventilation, the dangerously high levels of methane gas and coal dust. The managers who intimidated the crew, and even tampered with safety equipment, in an effort to pull more coal out of the seam, to keep the revenue coming for a parent company that badly needed cash flow.
On the night of May 8, Eugene said goodbye to his wife and hugged his two sons, both under ten. Once the twelve-hour shift ended, Eugene, who played the guitar and even wrote some poetry, was due for four days off. The Commission of Inquiry’s report into the explosion—The Westray Story: A Predictable Path to Disaster—picks up the story from here. The spark was probably caused when the continuous miner—an electrical machine that literally carves the coal from the working face of the mine—struck either pyrites or sandstone in the coal wall. The tiny flame should have faded harmlessly. Instead, it ignited a cloud of methane gas that had been allowed to accumulate in the shaft due to improper ventilation. Some of the miners may have had a ten-second head start. It’s hard to think of them racing down the shaft as the rolling flame—which consumed all the oxygen in the roadways and left poisonous carbon monoxide in its wake—licked above their heads. Breathing in the carbon monoxide, they would have fallen on the spot. When the fireball hit a thick layer of coal dust—another contravention of provincial mining regulations—it triggered a massive explosion that burst through the entire mine, devastating everything in its path.
I’ve thought a lot about coal since Westray. And that has led to a revelation. It took time to merge together our extended storyline. But noodle around a little—with the help of the Internet, the archives and some energetic distant relatives—and a pattern becomes clear. My family’s tale is no different from that of millions of other Canadians: centuries of struggle in the underclass of the old country, a decision to take a flyer on a new life in a new world, then a long slog making some other guy rich, until we finally abandon the muck, woods and subterranean depths for the expanding middle class. In between, the usual mix of heartbreak, triumph and tedium. There is, as far as I can discern, onl
y one constant thread running through our collective yarn. Coal.
Coal brought my people here from the farmlands of Scotland and England’s industrial heartland, and drew us inexorably to Cape Breton. Coal mining brought our disparate tribes together and then, for better or worse, gave our lives an organizing principle. Without coal, no me; at least, not someone with the same genetic topography, the same inherited molecules, predilections and phobias. It made us all who we are. When coal mining disappeared we scattered to the winds; a century after the Brierses, DeMonts, McKeigans and Browns arrived, they’re mostly gone again, to Halifax, the outskirts of Chicago, Toronto and Montreal. As I write these words, I have precisely one uncle, an aunt and two first cousins—including the only remaining member of my people who has worked a coal seam—still living in Cape Breton.
So the story of coal is my story too, which means that the best way to understand my family’s storyline is to understand the history of that soft, sooty black mineral in this province. There was a sense of urgency; time was wasting. The links between family members had invariably started to fray. The elders with any direct connection to coal were dwindling. My father had Alzheimer’s; the last of my uncles still living in Cape Breton underwent bypass surgery; during the writing of this book their other brother went to bed one night and did not wake up, and the final Cape Breton uncle on my mother’s side also died. I wanted to make sense of their stories while they still echoed in the air.
So much about the story of coal mesmerized me. I’m far from the first writer with a thing about the subterranean life, those unimaginable passageways and cities where thousands of men led parallel lives inside the earth. I also got hooked on the story because it seems to encapsulate everything about Nova Scotia: its geology, settlement and economic development, along with its social history, place in the world and aspirations for the future. It’s a story that’s connected to the great events of the world, but at the same time remains an extraordinarily human journey. The chronicle of coal in Nova Scotia is the story of how a simple black rock irrevocably changed a society and its people. It’s a narrative of outrage, but also a drama filled with heroism, loss, the cruel but hypnotic spectacle of time and the inexorable force of economic progress. As much as anything, it’s a story that ends with a question: what happened to these people after their land was eviscerated and emptied out?
Not everyone sees them the way I do. “Grim” is a word often used to describe coal miners and coal-mining towns, particularly in the thirty years since the industry began its inevitable decline in these parts. It’s not a word they necessarily use to describe themselves—even if few of them would wish a job in the pits on their sons. Weirdly, at least in the view of the rest of the world, they talk mostly in positive terms: of the camaraderie of soldiers, professional athletes and other men who have shared intense, dangerous work; of the professionalism that comes from doing a difficult job well. There is a swell of pride evident even in the voices of broken old men when they say, “I am a Cape Breton miner,” a “Springhill miner” or a “Pictou County collier.”
People in Calgary or Toronto or even, to a lesser degree, Halifax, seem to think of coal miners as quaint, kinda sad relics of our industrial past—their stories relegated to the songs of Rita MacNeil and the occasional earnest CBC drama. Or as brutish throwbacks out of D.H. Lawrence, who do what they do for a living because they’re too backwards or set in their ways to have another choice.
The other popular refrain about Nova Scotia coal miners nowadays is that they were lazy parasites. They were forever on strike. They wasted “our” money in an industry that had no good economic reason to exist. Just writing those words makes my bowels churn. I fully understand that, in this day and age, people who can’t justify their paycheques in economic terms have no real excuse for living. I’m also willing to accept that going into the pits at the start of the twenty-first century—even if you’re desperate for a decent paycheque in a place where a 20 percent unemployment rate is the norm—demonstrates a certain lack of originality.
Yet what about perseverance? What about duty? What about valour? Because that more than anything was what kept me coming back to the miners. When I spoke earlier of being utterly stunned upon learning that men were still coal mining in Nova Scotia, I forgot to mention my next thought: wonderment that someone actually had the courage for such a thing. I’ve kept coming back to their stories because I admire the miners and their families for the most childish reason possible: because they strike me as heroic.
It’s hard to imagine a more savage and inhuman industrial environment in which to make a living. Their fate was never their own to control. Someone else—adventurers in London, profiteers in Boston, corporate villains in Montreal—always signed their paycheques, owned the food they ate and the shacks in which they lived. Yet rather than fleeing it, or surrendering to it, they transcended “the deeps” with their humanity, their collective strength—their courage, which lingers long after the last whistle on the last shift has sounded. Not showy reality TV–style courage. A quieter, workmanlike heroism, which doubtless appeals to me in this deep, visceral way because I’ve never done anything remotely brave myself.
Unlike the bulky guys who were huddled around the flaming, hollowed-out oil drums one January day eight years after the Westray disaster, blockading the Lingan power generating station just outside of Sydney to protest the closure of one of Cape Breton’s two remaining coal mines. A few of the workingmen’s hands lacked thumbs and index fingers. Even the non-smokers among them hacked and coughed, their lungs flayed by decades of inhaling coal dust. Most of them were in their forties. But all coal miners look older than they are. “Ancient ahead of our time,” one of them said. “Our bodies ruined by the mines just like our fathers’ and grandfathers’ before us.”
Fighting to be heard above gale-force winds, I yelled a question about the treatment they were getting from the federal government, which was closing down their mine, and the importance of telling readers their side of the story. Somebody laughed mirthlessly. One miner couldn’t meet my eyes, as if embarrassed to be in the presence of someone making a living in such an unmanly way. The flames made their faces look timeless, tribal, somewhat dangerous. “For what it’s worth,” I finally said, “I’ve got a cousin in the mines: Kenneth Demont.”
A pause.
“Well, Kenny Demont’s cousin,” a voice from the dark said, “you know much about coal mining?”
“Not as much as I should.”
Rugged Angus Davidson, forty-one years old, the third generation of his family to work the coal face, stepped into the light where I could see him. “Maybe it’s about time you learned,” he said.
I couldn’t have agreed more. Even if it meant connecting that moment with another, hundreds of millions of years before humans climbed out of the trees. It happened in a place called Pangaea. Which, I guess, is where we will start.
CHAPTER ONE
No Vestige of a Beginning
John Calder—who has a doctorate of geology in his pocket and a tiny silver hoop in his left ear—sees things way differently than you or I. Let me illustrate. Late morning on a mild fall day; the year is 2007, which means the airwaves bulge with hos and booty, George Bush and Paris Hilton, get-rich-quick and hours-long erections. The icecaps are melting. Governments everywhere seem mean and dim. Yet there stands Calder—greying hipster hair, blue mackinaw, green army pants, distressed hiking shoes—on a beach that is canted on an angle of a couple of degrees into the waters of Chignecto Bay, putting everything in its proper perspective.
When Calder looks at a section of cliff, he doesn’t just see rocks. He considers the looping bands of land—the messy stuff that looks to an untutored eye like a dragon’s spine, interspersed with featureless layers that even I recognize as sandstone—and sees entire continents shifting, grinding together and colliding. He glimpses chains of mountains erupting skyward and then covering unimaginable chunks of the earth. He sees the world pull
ing apart and superoceans rushing in. When Calder looks at a rock on the beach with a couple of squiggles on it—or at least that’s how it looks to me—it triggers in his temporal lobe images of plants shaped like feather dusters stretching high into the prehistoric sky. Or it bombards his brain with visions of six-foot-long insects, mandibles snapping like nunchuks, struggling through the primordial muck. When he walks over coal, I imagine, his liver starts to quiver.
I’m here because I want him to teleport me back, oh let’s see, about 300 million years. Because only by understanding what happened then on this piece of geography can I grasp everything that followed. The best place to see the epochal story of how coal came to be formed in Nova Scotia is at the cliffs of Joggins, a next-to-nothing of a place that stares across Chignecto Bay at southern New Brunswick. Luckily I’ve got the perfect guide. Calder, a respected geologist with Nova Scotia’s department of natural resources, understands the science. He also has what geologists call “the picture”: the ability, as John McPhee, the writer, explains, to take lingering remains, connect them with dotted lines and then fill in the gaps to “infer why, how and when a structure came to be.” Calder possesses yet another gift: an unwavering eye for the narrative line. He can see the big story along with the big picture. “We’re walking in the footsteps of giants here,” he says, starting down the beach toward the Joggins cliffs. Miraculously, I actually know what he means.
The Joggins cliffs failed to transport me the first time I saw them—on a high school field trip. So today I’m trying to make up for that youthful myopia, that failure of imagination. I’m not the first person to search for enlightenment here. In 1842, by design and coincidence, the pioneering thinkers on the emerging scientific field of geology descended on Joggins, the place Calder likes to call the “coal-age Galapagos.” Picture two mutton-chopped men picking their way over the rocks. Abraham Gesner, the one with the broad shoulders, dark hair and piercing eyes, came from German stock via the Netherlands and New York’s Hudson Valley. He was a restless sort who had bigger ambitions than a farming life in Nova Scotia’s luminous Annapolis Valley. Just out of his teens he had tried shipping horses from Nova Scotia to the West Indies, but had been twice shipwrecked. Chastened, he had returned to his father’s farm and, in 1824, married the daughter of a local doctor. Legend has it that the only way the father would consent to the union was if Gesner accepted his financial help and enrolled in a London medical school. Eventually, he returned to Nova Scotia with a medical diploma—and also an abiding interest in geology, probably due to exposure to some of the powerful lecturers in the new science in the United Kingdom.