Coal Black Heart (30 page)

Way Down in the Hole

O
utside of Westville, just off a Pictou County back-country road in a place where pavement, field and forest convene, I found a spot where the land had been peeled back and chunked out. Three strip mines operated in Nova Scotia in the spring of 2007, the year a ton of coal topped the heretofore unheard-of price of $125 U.S. From an embankment hundreds of feet up and away, I watched earthmovers the size of scallop draggers scrape off layers of topography until the exposed terrain glowed black and blighted. They worked inland, in sections, a slab of wall a few football fields high marking their farthest advance. It was shot through with holes; clustered tightly together, some of them pierced the rock so unexpectedly that you could imagine the wonder when some future citizen encountered them, like cliffside caves from an ancient culture. I imagine their faces looking a lot like my own, as I stand here as shocked as Pizarro before the Incan Sun Temple. It had been six years since a Nova Scotian had gone into a coal-mine shaft. Weekly I perused the obituaries of the last generation of the province’s coal miners.
Meanwhile, the final physical remnants of its coal-black past—the pitheads, shipping piers and old railway lines—were being eroded, buried and carried away. Before long, the only above-ground hints that something extraordinary had once occurred here would be some songs and books, and a scattering of museums, plaques and memorials sprinkled through the old towns.

Way down in the hole, though, tunnels lurked. From where I stood it was only possible to see a cross-section of the underground maze where all those personal stories connected. Inside the rock, I knew, were passageways where heroes had battled, tragedies had transpired and time had hung stubborn and heavy. At the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources library I found a map that showed every abandoned shaft, hillside tunnel, trench and other mine opening in the province. I spread it out on top of a couple of filing cabinets. Then I counted the black triangles marking coalmine remnants, in parts so numerous they threatened to blot out the map below, until my eyes started to cross. But I still lacked a sense of how much of this province had been anthilled in the search for coal.

One day I called Ross McCurdy, the president of once-mighty Devco, who now spent his time selling off what remained of the dismantled steel mill, coke ovens and battery plant for scrap. He told me that 3,200 kilometres of mine workings streaked the Cape Breton landscape. The sheer magnitude of that number—equivalent to the distance from Halifax to Saskatoon—set my brain buzzing. I started to collect stories about island schools, backyards and seniors’ clubs suddenly sinking into the ground, claimed by abandoned mine shafts underneath. Throughout my travels—like a war buff visiting places where lots of blood had been spilled—I made it a point to go and see places where I knew these pathways ran underfoot. They were surprisingly easy to find. In some places
there were signs to show me the way. In others, I’d just get directions and drive through the towns that had grown up around them, passing some of the last company houses, still unmistakable despite the layers of paint, steering my car along streets named after old mines and all-but-forgotten managers, through ethnic enclaves, past beds where rail lines once lay and the final ruins of some wrecked foundry slumped.

Eventually, in the middle of these communities, Id come upon the rolling terrain once home to No. 4 in Glace Bay, the Princess in Sydney Mines and No. 2 in Springhill, where birds now called and winds carried the smell of wet stone. Ghosts, if they walked anywhere, surely trod here, on which nothing loftier than scrub grass, low bush and heather seemed to grow. In the long run, Devco’s plan was to “reclaim” eleven thousand of these acres. With time the old mine properties would be returned to forestland or transformed into ball fields, nature trails or other community green spaces.

Often when I moseyed around the old colliery lands it seemed as though the narrative was complete: my people, like so many others touched by coal, scattered to the winds; whole sections of Nova Scotia—their economies more redolent of the nineteenth century than the twenty-first, their industrial towns fading, their resources forever enriching folk elsewhere—locked in a slow, sad spiral. Sometimes I looked ahead and saw a Glace Bay, Westville or Springhill ravaged by drug abuse, crime and woeful health statistics.

Some days, though, I saw a different kind of future, one that would involve the kind of fundamental change necessary to alter the coal communities’ predestined path. I’d see glimpses of what could be, in funny places: sitting in a car overlooking Sydney harbour as a local lawyer, as if under the influence of some powerful hallucinogen, described the bulk freighters, post-Panamax container ships and cruise lines he envisioned transforming the harbour into an
economic driver for the region; slicing into a strip loin at a restaurant in a new Sydney-area trade and convention centre owned by the Membertou First Nation. One time I took a tour of the old tar ponds site. Though the mountains of leftover steel slag resembled a moonscape, clear land now stood where the coke ovens and steel plant had once loomed. Whole sections of the site—along the brook being rerouted to carry clean water into the tar ponds, on the old dump site turned grassy knoll, at the tidal lagoon where ducks and gulls floated—seemed leafy, alive, almost tranquil. Another day, driving on the outskirts of Glace Bay over a labyrinth of abandoned tunnels, I came upon a line of wind turbines, sleek, white and ten storeys high. I pulled up even with a car stopped on the shoulder of the road and asked how long they’d been there. “Since yesterday, I think,” an older man in the driver’s seat said. And then we both turned and watched the giant blades run the lights in the surrounding community.

On still another day, not far from there, my cousin Ken and I went for a spin. We stayed on the highway until we hit the community of Donkin, then took a sharp left over a little causeway by a stretch of craggy beach. From there we followed a neat gravel road until we reached the chain-link fence and “No Trespassing” sign. A quarter-century ago—during Devco’s headiest days—the Crown corporation spent $100 million on a couple of exploratory tunnels into a seam thought to contain more coal than the combined tonnage of everything mined in the island’s history. Then the price of coal tumbled. The tunnels were allowed to flood with water. The big corrugated metal storage shed and concrete pithead portals were left to the fog and salt air.

Until, that is, China’s coal-powered economy started to sizzle. Across North America, fears intensified about the safety of supplies of natural gas, electricity’s other main fuel source, pushing coal to
the fore yet again. Let Al Gore yak about the costs of releasing all that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—by 2008, as I was putting the finishing touches on this book, coal, for better or worse, was back, baby. Even in Nova Scotia, where the government had handed a consortium headed by a Swiss multinational the right to develop the Donkin seam, which would create three hundred underground mining jobs.

Nobody in his right mind expected coal to rule the future as it had dominated the past. Yet these towns were always essentially acts of faith, where dreaming of the impossible was all that ever made sense. So when my cousin Ken, car idling outside the gates into the Donkin pit-head, said he’d be willing to go back underground if a job came up there, he was simply proving that the dream still lived in this time and place. It wasn’t a dream that appeared ripe with promise, that spoke of new beginnings or a glittering future. But I now knew that this had never been coal’s lesson anyway. Geography is fate, my search had taught me, and only liars say the world is fair or that things will necessarily turn out all right. But these things too: watch your buddy’s back; hold onto hope. Most of all: onward.

The most obvious debts of thanks for this book are to the coal miners of Nova Scotia and my family members who lived the story contained within these pages.

An immense thanks goes out to my parents, Joan and Russ DeMont, for countless reasons. But I’m also deeply indebted to my aunts, uncles and cousins on the Briers and DeMont sides of the family who, over the years, filled my mind with the stories you’ve just read. My uncles Earl Demont and Eric DeMont, my aunt Rea Demont and my cousins Kenneth Demont and Lynda Singer were particularly generous with their time, thoughts, experiences and hospitality. I also want to thank my brother Philip and cousins Frank DeMont and Wendy Clattenburg for their insights.

I’m forever indebted to the family genealogists Allen DeMont and Frank V. DeMont and Andrew Alston for their help in charting the family narrative. Andrew’s generosity—he also supplied knowledge about Lancashire life—will forever stand as the standard by which such a thing is measured.

The open-heartedness of the great Nova Scotia labour historians Daniel Samson, David Frank and Donald MacGillivray—who endured my rudimentary questioning, read long portions of the book and supplied invaluable insights—will not easily be forgotten. Nor will the kindness of John Calder, who helped me understand the big picture and what Nova Scotia means to the geological world—or of Jim Myers, who shared his knowledge of sporting life in Cape Breton. My immense thanks, also, to the writers Peter Moreira and Arnie Patterson, Elizabeth Beaton of Cape Breton University and historian Howard MacKinnon, all of whom who read parts of the manuscript and provided key corrections.

Dean Cooke, the wisest of agents, came up with the idea for the book and made it happen. At Doubleday, Tim Rostron, and freelance copyeditor, Gena Gorrell, took my unhewn lumber and fashioned it into something. Susan Burns willed it into being.

A big shout out to my children, Belle and Sam, for their encouragement and keeping me grounded in the here-and-now. The biggest thanks of all to Lisa Napier, just for everything.

The concept of coal being a book that speaks through fossils comes via geologist Anita Harris as quoted in John McPhee,
Annals of the Former World,
p. 156.

The quote about the nature of fossil energy comes from Bill McKibben,
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future,
(New York: Times Books, 2007), p. 15.

The information about the first white settlers in Pictou comes from Reverend George Patterson,
History of the County of Pictou,
1877.

The theory about the first white man to use coal comes from Cameron,
The
Pictonian Colliers,
p. 16.

The Mi’kmaq relationship with coal comes from Richard, Report of the Westray Mine Public Inquiry,
The Westray Story: A Predictable Path to
Disaster,
Vol. 1, p. 3.

The dimensions of the Pictou Coal field come from John Calder,
Coal in Nova
Scotia,
a document prepared for the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources, Mineral Resources Branch, 1995.

The quote about the Stellarton seam comes from Richard,
The Westray Story,
Vol. 1, p. 6.

The early days of the General Mining Association in Pictou come from Cameron,
The Pictonian Colliers,
p. 8, and Richard,
The Westray Story,
Vol. 1, p. 8.

The “colony of miners” quote comes through Samson, “Industrial Colonization: The Colonial Context of the General Mining Association, Nova Scotia, 1825-1842,” p. 19.

The information about how heavily mined the Pictou seams were relative to others comes from Cameron,
The Pictonian Colliers,
p. 3.

The total coal tonnage mined in Nova Scotia comes from an email exchange with John Calder, a geologist with the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources.

The figure on coal mining deaths and the descriptions of the causes comes from the Nova Scotia Mine fatalities 1838-1992 database, Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management.

The estimate on Nova Scotian deaths in the Great War comes from the Nova Scotia archives. The description of the damps comes from Richard,
The Westray Story,
Vol. 1, p. 13.

The estimate on deaths in the Pictou Mines comes from Cameron,
The
Pictonian Colliers,
p. 170.

The description of the Drummond disaster comes from the
Presbyterian
Witness
of May 1873, by Richard MacNeil, as quoted on Pictou County GenWeb.

The notion of coal bringing the world out of the agrarian age comes from Freese,
Coal: A Human History,
p. 14.

For the entire interview with Frame see John DeMont, Carl Mollins and John Daly, “Clearing the Air,”
Macleans,
April 19, 1993.

For more on the political background to the Westray disaster and Eugene Johnson see John DeMont with Glen Allen, “Legacy of Despair: As the
first anniversary of a tragedy approaches, controversy still swirls around the Westray case,”
Macleans,
April 19, 1993.

The description of what actually happened in the Westray mine on the day of the disaster comes from Richard,
The Westray Story,
Vol. 1, pp. 206-207.

The “big picture” line comes from McPhee,
Annals of the Former World,
p. 62. His elaboration of the concept comes from the same book, p. 63.

Biographical information about Gesner comes from Loris Russell’s entry on Gesner in the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

The quote from Gesner’s
Remarks on the Geology and Mineralogy of Nova Scotia
is from the Gossip and Coade edition, 1836, p. 4.

The quote about Gesner’s lack of business acumen comes from Loris Russell in his entry about Gesner in the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

The theory that the world came to be after a collision between the sun and a comet comes via the incredible French nobleman Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, a naturalist, mathematician, biologist, cosmologist and author who, a century before Darwin, published a forty-four-volume encyclopedia of natural history that, among other things, explored the similarities between man and apes.

The cooling gas cloud theory of creation was hatched by Pièrre-Simon Laplace, a brainy astronomer and mathematician who sat around thinking about such things in the late 18
^th
and early 19
^th
centuries.

Lyell’s “the present is the key to the past” quote comes from a variety of sources.

Darwin’s take on the formation of coal comes from John H. Calder, “‘Coal Age Galapagos’: Joggins and the Lions of Nineteenth Century Geology,”
Atlantic Geology,
2006, pp. 44-45.

The background on Logan comes from Charles H. Smith, “Sir William Logan, Father of Canadian Geology: His Passion was Precision,” in
GSA Today,
May 2000, pp. 20-23.

The quote about Lyell’s enthusiasm to see Joggins comes from Lyell,
Travels in North America
(1845), pp. 177-178 (quoted in Calder,
Coal Age Galapagos,
pp. 39-40).

The explanation of tectonic plate theory is based on McPhee,
Annals of the Former World,
pp. 115-126, and author’s interviews with John Calder.

The information on the early natural history of Nova Scotia comes from
The Last Billion Years, A Geological History of the Maritime Provinces of Canada,
Atlantic Geoscience Society (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 2001).

Lyell’s letter to his sister is quoted by Andrew Scott, “Roasted Alive in the Carboniferous,” in
Geoscience,
March 2001.

The idea of coal as ancient sunlight comes from Freese,
Coal: A Human History,
pp. 3–7.

The information on how coal was formed comes from a variety of sources including
The Last Billion Years,
p. 109-116, Freese, pp. 17-21, and the author’s interview with Calder.

The anecdote and quotes about Lyell and Dawson’s meeting comes from Dawson,
Fifty Years of Work in Canada, Scientific and Educational,
pp. 50-51.

The general biographical material about Dawson comes from Peter R. Eakins and Jean Eakins,
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
online, from Howard Falcon-Lang and John Calder, “Sir William Dawson (1820-1899): A very modern paleobotanist,”
Atlantic Geology,
2005, pp. 103-114, and from Dawson,
Fifty Years of Work in Canada.

The quotes about Dawson’s introduction to geology comes from Dawson,
Fifty Years of Work in Canada,
pp. 34–36.

The story of the discovery of
Hylonomus lyelli,
comes from John H. Calder, “‘Coal Age Galapagos’: Joggins and the Lions of Nineteenth Century Geology,” p. 46 and S.J. Davies, M.R. Gibling, M.C. Rygel, J.H. Calder and D.M. Skilliter, “The Pennsylvanian Joggins Formation of Nova Scotia: sedimentological log and stratigraphic framework of the historic fossil cliffs,”
Atlantic Geology,
2005, p. 116.

The analysis of the importance of the discovery—and its influence on Darwin—comes from Calder, “‘Coal Age Galapagos’: Joggins and the Lions of Nineteenth Century Geology,” pp. 38 and 44, and Davies, Gibling, Rygel, Calder and Skilliter, “The Pennsylvanian Joggins Formation of Nova Scotia: Sedimentological log and stratigraphic framework of the historic fossil cliffs,” p. 116.

The first Darwin quote comes from
The Origin of Species,
Plain Label Books (
http://tinyurl.com/5uzyw5
), accessed May 2007, p. 441. The second comes from Allan J. Tobin and Jennie Dusheck,
Asking About Life: Exploring the Earth
(Belmont, Calif: Thomas, Brooks/Cole, 2004), p. 305.

Dawson’s description of his rock-hounding days comes from Dawson,
Fifty Years of Work in Canada,
pp. 79–81.

Dawson’s appraisal of the various coalfields of Nova Scotia comes from Dawson,
Acadian Geology, The Geological Structure, Organic Remains and Mineral Resources of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island,
pp. 20, 408 and 410.

The dimensions of the Sydney coalfield come from a monograph,
Origins of Coal,
Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources.

The description of the Stellarton formation comes from Calder,
Coal in Nova Scotia,
a monograph for the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources, Mineral Resources Branch, Series ME 8, 1995.

Dawson’s appraisal of the coalfields of Nova Scotia come from Dawson,
Acadian Geology,
p. 4.

The early global history of coal comes from Bruce G. Miller,
Coal Energy Systems,
Academic Press, 2005; Freese,
Coal: A Human History;
John Hatcher,
The History of the British Coal Industry,
Vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 1986). For more on the extent of the timber famine in
16
^th
century England see Hatcher,
The History of the British Coal Industry,
Vol. 1, pp. 16-22.

The quote from Marco Polo comes from
The Travels of Marco Polo.

The information about Henry VIII, the break with the church and its influence on coal comes from Freese,
Coal: A Human History,
pp. 28-29.

The descriptions of the Cape Breton voyages by Captain Strong, Captain Leigh, Samuel de Champlain and Nicholas Denys come from Richard Brown,
The Coal Fields and Coal Trade of the Island of Cape Breton,
pp. 32-34.

The information on Jean Talon comes from André Vachon’s entry on him in the
Canadian Dictionary of Biography.

The information on the early French usage of coal in Nova Scotia comes from a 2004 CBC online background report on Cape Breton coal miners (
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/capebreton/
) Accessed November 2007.

The line about British and French stopping in Cape Breton in the 1700s and Admiral Walker’s visit comes from Brown,
The Coal Fields and Coal Trade of the Island of Cape Breton,
p. 35.

The information about the very earliest extraction methods comes from Hugh Millward, “Mine Locations and the Sequence of Coal Exploitation on the Sydney Coalfield, 1720-1980,” which appears in
Cape Breton at 200, Historical Essays in Honour of the Island’s Bicentennial 1785–1985
(Sydney, N.S.: University College of Cape Breton Press, 1985), p. 190.

The section about founding and history of Louisbourg is gleaned from William Wood,
A Great Fortress: A Chronicle of Louisbourg, 1720–1760
(online edition); Jim and Pat Lotz,
Cape Breton Island
(Vancouver: Douglas David & Charles, 1974); Lesley Choyce,
Nova Scotia, Shaped by the Sea: A Living History
(Toronto: Viking Books, 1996), and the
History of the Fortress of Louisbourg
(Louisbourg, N.S.: Louisbourg Institute).

The quote from Louisbourg’s Governor Pontchartrain comes from Choyce,
Nova Scotia, Shaped by the Sea: A Living History,
p. 62.

The information about the English efforts at Burnt Head comes from Brian Tennyson and Roger Sarty,
Guardian of the Gulf: Cape Breton and the
Atlantic Wars
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 15-17.

For the details of the lease changes over the years I depended upon historian J.S. Martell, “Early Coal Mining in Nova Scotia,” in
Cape Breton Historical
Essays
(Sydney, N.S.: College of Cape Breton Press, 1980) and Hugh Millward, “Mine Operators and Mining Leases on Nova Scotia’s Sydney Coalfield, 1720 to the Present,” in
Nova Scotia Historical Review,
Vol. 13, number 2, 1993.

For the section on the creation of the steam engine I used Freese,
Coal: A
Human History,
pp. 43-69, and Bill McKibben,
Deep Economy, the Wealth
of Communities and the Durable Future,
pp. 5–8.

The figures for coal production in Nova Scotia in 1820 come from Brown,
The
Coal Fields and Coal Trade of the Island of Cape Breton,
p. 55.

The information about the coal industry in the early 1800s comes from Stephen J. Hornsby,
Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton: A Historical
Geography
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), pp. 15-16.

The quote from Brown about the government’s approach to leasing comes from
The Coal Fields and Coal Trade of the Island of Cape Breton,
p. 67.

The information about Crown ownership of land in Nova Scotia comes from Martell, “Early Coal Mining in Nova Scotia,” p. 41.

The quote from Francis W. Gray comes from Gray,
The Coal-fields and Coal
Industry of Eastern Canada,
completed for the Department of Mines, Ottawa, 1916.

The anecdote about John McKay comes from Cameron,
The Pictonian Colliers,
pp. 17-18.

The figures about the state of the 1825 Nova Scotia coal industry come from Brown,
The Coal Fields and Coal Trade of the Island of Cape Breton,
pp. 148-149.

The description of Mount Rundell and the illustrious list of visitors comes from Cameron,
The Pictonian Colliers,
pp. 24-25, and “Stellarton House
Considered One of the Most Historic in N.S.,”
New Glasgow Evening News,
New Glasgow, N.S., April 8, 1973.

I learned of Fox’s history of Rundell, Bridge and Rundell from Robert W. Lovett, “Rundell, Bridge and Rundell—An Early Company History,” published in the
Bulletin of the Business Historical Society,
March, 1949. I also consulted J.S. Martell, “Early Coal Mining in Nova Scotia” and Edwin T. Bliss’s paper “Albion Mines,” read before the Nova Scotia Historical Society, March 7, 1975. I’m particularly indebted for the thoughts of historian Daniel Samson and also his essay “Industrial Colonization: The Colonial Context of the General Mining Association of Nova Scotia, 1825-1842.”

The line about “the sign of the golden salmon” comes from Lovett, “Rundell, Bridge and Rundell—An Early Company History,” p. 152.