Coal Black Heart (29 page)

The summer before he moved back to Glace Bay for good, I found work on the island myself. My father’s cousin ate lunch every week with the editor of the
Cape Breton Post,
the Sydney daily. One phone call and I was working the evening seven-to-two shift as a junior sports reporter, which was a bit like going home again; the first time I stuck my head into the composing room, one of the linotype operators asked me if I was any relation to Clarie Demont, since they had worked together decades earlier at the Glace Bay
Gazette.
I used to hitchhike over to Sydney Mines to see my uncle Ted Singer and Aunt Mora (née Briers), or bum a ride with a co-worker to the other side of the island, where Ken’s parents had a cottage overlooking the ocean not far from the old Inverness mines.

In the summer of 1980—despite being beset by insomnia and living in a converted beauty salon in downtown Sydney—I certainly didn’t catch the whiff of terminal decline in the air. Afternoons, when the weather was good enough, I’d head down to the harbour and watch the coal boats heading to and from the shipping piers. At the tavern on nights off I’d see miners and steel-workers standing in the middle of the floor, daring you to bump into them. I walked around. Anybody could see it was a giddy time for them.

“More coal sold than at any other time in our history,” declared the headline inside Devco’s breathtakingly optimistic 1980–81 annual report. In it, the Crown corporation revelled in the three million tons it had loaded in the past year, and the investments in equipment, techniques and technology that had resulted in a per-shift productivity level double what it had been when the company took over. Omitted in the prose was one relevant point: during the most notable year in Devco’s fourteen-year history, the costs of producing and selling the coal still exceeded revenues by
$10.5 million. Surprisingly, nobody seemed too concerned. “For the first time in the short history of the corporation, and perhaps in the long history of coal on Cape Breton, a long range strategic plan has been developed,” the next year’s annual report trumpeted.

By then, No. 26 was nearly tapped out and feasibility studies had already started to see if new mines into the Harbour and Phalen seams in the same area made sense. Ottawa had approved a series of proposed upgrades for the Prince mine. There was loads of grand talk about the potential for the Donkin-Morien project, which was forecast to result in the biggest underground coal mine in Canada. Reading this all these years later, you have to wonder if anyone really believed these words—or if they were shaded and reconfigured until they sounded like precisely what the political masters in Ottawa wanted to hear. Maybe the Devco executives were like those optimistic souls who think that if they say something loudly and hopefully enough, it will be so. Because everywhere else, the coal business was obviously ailing.

The coalfields of Pennsylvania and Virginia were coming off a decade of overexpansion fuelled by the growth in demand that was expected to accompany soaring oil prices. The surge never materialized, and a slump in the steel industry, the second-largest user of coal after power utilities, was causing prices to drop and layoffs
to soar. In the United Kingdom, a historic clash between a prime minister unwilling to prop up what she saw as a failing industry, and the colliers clinging to their jobs and a way of life shook the country. Britain had never seen anything like the 1984 miners’ strike, sparked by the threat to close twenty mines employing twenty thousand workers. It took a year to wear down the pit villages and mining communities. Even so, as the miners began to trickle back to work, no one could doubt that Margaret Thatcher had taken on the strongest union in the land and won.

In fairness, the Devco executives had no way of knowing that in the early 1980s the world would slip into recession, taking the coal market with it. Or that in 1984 Devco would be hit by a pair of fires and a decision by Sysco to close its second coke battery, another blow to domestic sales. As the losses climbed, a new government with a free-market ethos swept into power in Ottawa. Brian Mulroney—perhaps with an eye on his British counterpart—decreed a commercial mandate for Devco; the industrial development function was handed over to a new Crown corporation. Now solely a coal company, Devco was ordered to make across-the-board cuts.

My cousin was one of them. In 1987, after finishing his BA at the University College of Cape Breton, he got on with a local brewer. A year later he received a call from Devco; a job had opened up. But it was underground. Turn it down and you’ll be struck off the company books forever, he was warned. Ken was destined for the Prince colliery out at Point Aconi. Then, just as the month-long training ended, he learned that he was bound instead for the gassier Lingan-Phalen colliery.

He was twenty-nine years old and had never been underground in a real working coal mine, so his eyes itched from lack of sleep when he walked into the wash house the first day. It spooked him to hear the walls shift and creak during the walk from the rake to
the workface. There, they took one look at his size and told him to start erecting the wooden chocks used to support opened sections of roof until steel arches could be inserted. “I was right down there on the battlefield the first day on the job,” he recalls. “They just threw me to the wolves.”

For six months he hated everything about the work. One night he was working the back shift—eleven p.m. to seven a.m.—on top of the wall, the dirtiest spot on the pit. It was so dark that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. The wood was slick with ice: “It was like fighting with a harbour seal.” If ever there was a moment when he said, I’m out of here, it was then. And at that precise moment, something magical happened. To this day Ken’s unsure whether his buddy in the control room pumped radio station CJCB throughout the entire mine, or just in the section where he was working. All he knows is that suddenly, inexplicably, Bobby McFerrin’s soaring falsetto a cappella voice—which was everywhere on the CJCB airwaves in 1988—filled his ears. “I said, if you’re here, well, the hell with it—you’re here,” Ken recalled. “Don’t worry. Be happy.”

The mine was still a dangerous place. A man died in Lingan the same year Ken went underground there; a friend lost a ring finger, other miners busted limbs and suffered concussions. One day in 1993 Ken blew out his anterior cruciate ligament, forcing him to leave the steep slopes of Lingan and move over to the Prince mine—one of only two still operating in the province, now that Westray had shut for good.

By then, my work was taking me back to Glace Bay again. Even I could see that, without a single operating mine, the place lacked its muscular purpose. Charlie MacLeod’s bookstore had
disappeared. So had the Union Marketeria, Zilbert Bros. grocery store and the old stone wall near Knox Hall where the teens used to hang out when I visited on summer vacations. Some of the landmarks around Senator’s Corner—Ellie Marshall’s Store, Markadonis’s Shoe Repair, the Savoy Theatre where I noticed, on one visit in the mid-1990s, that the old R & B crooners the Platters were set to perform—lived on. Wandering the streets, searching for the kinds of characters that populated my dad’s stories, I now found mostly pensioners, the spring gone from their step, their wild days barely a trace in the wind.

So few of them were my people. The Briers connection on this island had dwindled to an aunt, uncle, first cousin and some distant relatives. The DeMonts were hanging in, but Ken—who had a longtime partner, Anne, but no children—might be the last relative of mine bearing that name to live here. Dispersed as we were to the mainland of Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec and the United States, we were plainly part of the Cape Breton diaspora. In the last twenty-five years, while the population of Canada has grown by one-third, Cape Breton has lost 14 percent of its people. Rural areas everywhere in North America are emptying out. People here were even leaving the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, the newly formed amalgam of the island’s colliery towns. An unnerving percentage of those left behind were senior citizens or people lacking the skills to make it elsewhere.

Coal couldn’t save them. Globally its market continued to plummet; at home Nova Scotia Power continued to depend upon high-quality coal from abroad to run its thermal plants. Nova Scotians had run out of patience with the strikes, the rampant absenteeism and the poor productivity in the mines. They had had it with the staggering amounts of money—by some sources as much as $3 billion from Devco’s creation until 2000—that successive
federal governments had spent to keep the company afloat. As the millennial end loomed, coal miners, increasingly, were seen as idle deadbeats forever draining the public purse. No one could remember the time when Cape Breton coal had fired the war effort and industrialized the country.

By 2000, if Ken didn’t quite love the work, he at least enjoyed the sense of accomplishment, the camaraderie and the decent wages. Like most of the newcomers, he had signed on thinking he might have a job for life. Anyone could see that that promise wasn’t going to be kept. Instead, he took a severance package and headed for the local college to enrol in a course to become a residential community worker. His timing was impeccable; within months, the last whistle sounded at the Phalen mine and Devco management announced they wanted to sell the Prince. With no buyer in hand, they said they had no option but to close Cape Breton’s last subterranean coal mine even though Devco had failed to fulfill its mandate to diversify the Cape Breton economy. Which is why, one summer day in 2001, I hopped in a rental car in Halifax and started driving toward Point Aconi.

On the way, I took a detour. I wanted a last glimpse of the Sydney steel plant. After pumping an estimated $2.8 billion into it, the provincial government was giving up—shutting the mill, auctioning off the assets and putting hundreds more out of work on an island where the jobless rate already approached triple the national average. Steel left another legacy; the old tidal estuary leading to the harbour, now so thick with raw sewage and poisons that a grown man could stand on the surface, had become one of the worst toxic waste sites in North America. Upstream from the Sydney tar ponds stood the abandoned coke ovens plant, polluted to a depth of twenty-four metres with tar, ammonia, light oils, benzol, ammonium sulphate and other by-products. Farther to the west, crowned
by a handful of rickety wooden houses, loomed the city’s landfill—sixty hectares of waste, in places sixty metres deep—accumulated over a century of uncontrolled dumping.

A few months earlier, an affable ex-serviceman named Eric Brophy had taken me for a spin through Whitney Pier, around the mill and coke ovens. Within the space of two blocks, Brophy reeled off the names of dozens of former and current residents who had died from cancer or heart disease. They weren’t strangers, these names on the roll call of woe. Brophy pointed out where his old pal Charlie had lived, the place where his buddy Wally had grown up and the homes where his childhood cronies Fraser and Alex had resided before cancer took them. He drove by the house where his first wife, Lorraine, who had died from the disease in 1995, had been born, and the small home where his current wife, Peggy—who had contracted cervical cancer and had later lost her first husband to cancer—had grown up. Brophy even showed me the house where he had lived as a child, and where his father, Frank, another cancer victim, probably contracted the disease.

It was the bleakest possible symbol of post-industrial Cape Breton. Yet there were so many ways for a visitor to understand that this place was on a new trajectory: the humming silence of the vacant houses and boarded-up storefronts in New Waterford; the news that the UMWA’s fabled District 26 had been placed in receivership because of a precipitous loss in dues-paying members. I kept hearing that Glace Bay was still a great place to grow up. The young were leaving in droves. Once boasting a dozen coal mines, Glace Bay was Devco’s town no longer, a fact reinforced when a call centre—one of the few growth industries on the island—took over the Crown corporation’s old offices there.

At Point Aconi—the air soft with summer heat—I screwed up my brow and tried to picture the men underground on those
subterranean roads that ran out under the Atlantic Ocean. Mid-afternoon, which meant that the day shift would be on the way back, inside metal cars, maybe sitting silent instead of playing tarbish, the island’s distinctive card game, and talking to pass the forty-five minutes it takes to reach the surface. Once there, take off the helmet and overalls, hang the work clothes on the hooks and head for the shower to wash off the grime. Then, hair still slick—dressed for all the world as blandly as a flock of Etobicoke accountants bound for Home Depot on a Saturday morning—they would emerge into the parking lot.

There was a time when they might have picked up speed heading for their cars. Today, they seemed in no hurry to board their Dodge Dakotas, Ford Windstars and Honda Civics. I walked over to a couple of them, reporter’s notebook in hand, and asked how they felt about things. To a man, I can see from my notes, they were polite and patient—weary stoics more than disappointed cynics. They talked about the uncertainty over what was next, and how it was hard to know who you were when the thing that most defined you disappeared. At that point, all they knew was what was about to vanish—not what the future, which has a tendency to take care of itself, would bring. I came from a world of five-year plans, high-fibre diets and the dream of a cushy retirement. Words fail me when I try to say how much I admired them standing there on the cusp of the new millennium, in a world bereft of all certainty.

One of them was a year older than me. His name was Steve Woods and his people had been going underground in Cape Breton for five generations. As we talked I discovered that his folk, like mine, came from England, where home was likewise Lancashire. Our ancestors, in both cases, would have arrived in a swirling haze of desire. The pioneer days were over. All they had was a setting and a sense of urgency. For a time their lives continued in parallel,
until something caused them to diverge. And maybe all that separated us—a man with uncallused hands trying to make some sense of his past and another, who worked in a tunnel under the ocean, with a question mark for a future—was a choice here and a road not taken there. Writing these words years later, at a desk in Halifax, I’m still not sure. Yet I do remember that day: the light filling the afternoon, the rank taste of the coffee, and the stiff-legged walk of the miners before they climbed into their cars and vans and disappeared into legend.