Coal Black Heart (3 page)

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.

No Vestige of a Beginning

J
ohn 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 pulling 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.

So it was entirely logical that Gesner picked a seaport called Parrsboro, on the Minas Basin, as the place to start a medical practice. He visited his patients by horse or on foot, travelling along a section of coastline where, twice a day, 100 billion tons of seawater—more than the combined flow of all the freshwater rivers in the world—pours in and out of a 200-million-year-old rift valley cradled between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The Mi’kmaqs, Nova Scotia’s first people, felt the Bay of Fundy a holy place. Gesner also discovered something transcendent in the way the surging water had stripped away millions of years of land, until the cliffs and shore shimmered with layers of geological time.

While visiting patients, Gesner made notes and gathered specimens. Before long, he was finding reason to edge along the Minas Basin all the way up Chignecto Bay to Joggins, to peruse the area’s mineral wealth. He read whatever geological books he could get his hands on, learning enough to publish his first work,
Remarks on the Geology and Mineralogy of Nova Scotia,
in 1836. “Let the great
extent of the Coal fields of Nova Scotia,” he wrote in his overheated, biblical prose, “the beds of Iron Ore, Sandstone, Gypsum, Limestone; with every kind of material proper for building both the massive cathedral and the humble cottage, be considered.”

The book made enough of a splash that a year later Gesner was hired by the New Brunswick government to conduct a geological survey of its province. By then he was in his early forties. Yet he spent much of the next five years alone, except for his native guides, pushing his way up turbulent streams and over rugged mountains that had seldom been seen by white men. By the standards of the day his geological work was decent enough. The man just had no head for business. (“With no experience in practical mining, he was not able to make a realistic appraisal of the economic potential of the mineral occurrences he discovered,” geologist Loris Russell wrote in his entry about Gesner in the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
“Thus his enthusiasm saw in every galena vein or coal seam a lead mine or a coal field.”) By 1842 the man who would later usher in the modern petroleum industry was just about broke. In desperation, he opened a museum that included his vast collection of minerals, fossils and wildlife specimens. It failed. Gesner’s creditors took over his fabled collection, in lieu of payment.

All of which is to say that Gesner may have been overjoyed at the distraction of playing tour guide for an illustrious guest anxious to see the fossil cliffs of Joggins. Sir Charles Lyell—bony of visage and possessing the visionary’s thousand-mile stare—was on a side trip during his first visit to the United States and the British province of Canada. At almost forty-five, the most famous scientist in the English-speaking world was near the pinnacle of his career. Nine years earlier he had published the first edition of his seminal book,
Principles of Geology: being an inquiry how far the former changes of the earths surface are referable to causes now in operation
—which, more than any other work, had defined geology as a science.

By 1842, Lyell was smack dab in the middle of one of the great scientific/religious debates of the millennium: how old is the earth? Before the nineteenth century there was still relative unanimity in the Eastern, Christian world that God had created the world in six days. Then heretical new theories began to appear: that the earth was the result of a collision between a comet and the sun, or had condensed over eons from a cooling gas cloud. By the time Lyell arrived in Nova Scotia, the debate within the scientific community had hardened into two distinct camps. On one side were the “catastrophists,” who believed that earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods or other calamities were responsible for the formation of the world’s surface. On the other side stood the “uniformitarians,” of whose cause Lyell was the world’s leading proponent.

Lyell’s view can be boiled down to his famous dictum “The present is the key to the past.” Or, to put it another way, the earth’s crust changes now for the same reasons and at the same rate as it always has. And geological changes are the steady accumulation of minute changes over enormously long spans of time—not the result of some calamity sent by a righteous God. By 1842 this wasn’t the prevailing scientific view—far from it—so Lyell was forever searching for proof. Which brought him to Nova Scotia.

Lyell had another equally weighty question on his mind when he arrived in nearby Parrsboro to meet Gesner: what exactly was coal? Strange to think that on something so fundamental—the nature of the mineral fuelling the Industrial Revolution that was then transforming the world—there was no consensus. Many, including a young naturalist named Charles Darwin, thought the shiny black rock that extended for miles and miles must have formed in the only
suitably vast location on the planet: under the sea. Two years earlier a Canadian geologist named William Logan had presented a paper that had knocked the scientific world for a loop; coal beds he had examined in South Wales were persistently underlaid with a layer of clay containing numerous fossil tree roots. In 1841 Logan had travelled to Pennsylvania and Joggins and found the same plant roots that were present in Wales. In his view, those were the roots of landlocked plant matter that was the source of the coal beds.

Lyell came to Joggins to see for himself. “I was particularly desirous, before I left England of examining the numerous fossil trees alluded to by Dr. Gesner as imbedded in an upright posture at many levels in the cliffs of the South Joggins,” he wrote in
Travels in North America,
his book about the journey.

Calder, who knows Joggins like a grizzled beat cop, understands precisely where to go: past the reddish-grey sandstone and the silt-stone and shale smoothed by the winds and waters of the Bay of Fundy Beneath the cliffs with their thick depths of clay, interspersed with boulders left during the retreat of the last ice sheet, thirteen thousand years ago. At one point, at least in theory, those layers of geological strata exposed in the cliffs were orderly and horizontal;
older strata underneath, each newer layer being laid atop the older ones. Then something happened that knocked the world askew and folded the leading ends of the strata into the earth. When I turn to look at the cliffs, I see layers slanting downwards—at times almost on a 90-degree angle—from left to right. Which means that we’re now travelling through geological time as we move from west to east. “About a million years,” says Calder, agile as a mountain goat on the rocky surface. “Which, of course, is nothing in the overall scheme of things.”

Geological thinking has made quantum leaps since the era of Lyell and Gessner. For a layman like me the important thing is that Calder tells me I’m not hallucinating when I stare at a map of the world: Africa’s west coast does look like it could snuggle up against South America’s east. Slide everything together and you’d expect to hear a click as the continents lock near-perfectly into place. Geologists used to believe in continental drift, that the earth’s continents were slowly drifting across the surface of the globe. With time, that premise was supplanted by a new world view that goes by the snappy sounding title of “plate tectonics.” The continents—along with the ocean basins—are part of the earth’s crust, which is divided into some twenty segments called plates, which have nothing to do with continents. The African plate, for example, covers all of Africa, but most of its 62 million square kilometres are sea floor beneath the North and South Atlantic and Indian oceans. The North American plate—Nova Scotia’s home—is 76 million square kilometres running from the mid-Atlantic right to the west coast.

Wherever they lie, these plates are rock-solid, up to 150 kilometres thick under the continents while just 8 kilometres deep beneath the oceans. Beneath them is a softer, hotter layer of solid rock that, because of its red-hot temperatures, can bend slowly like a bar
of Turkish Delight. The plates of the earth’s crust float on this layer. It’s enough to give a fellow vertigo, the way these plates are forever changing positions and moving. No one’s absolutely sure why, but over the malleable layer the plates grow, shrink, combine and disappear, their number changing through time.

This means that, considered through the widest possible lens—eons rather than years, centuries or millennia—the earth isn’t some hunk of unchanging rock. Everything, even at this very moment, is moving and in flux. At a rate of just a few centimetres a year, mind you. Still, in a time frame where a million years is like nothing, big things happen: the earth’s crust migrates, oceans open and close, continents collide; land buckles, skids into the planet’s molten core and shoots miles into the skies forming mountains.

Some 275 million years ago, before dinosaurs or mammals roamed the land, an ocean of unimaginable size closed and the earth’s latest and greatest merger took place. Geologists christened the end result “Pangaea,” meaning “all earth” in Greek. In the middle of the new supercontinent, cheek by jowl with what would become North Africa and the Cornwall coast of England, lay Nova Scotia.