I
was living in Halifax—a married father of one looking through French windows into a curtain of drizzle—when an editor from Toronto called early one Saturday morning in 1992. Only something momentous made
Maclean’s
magazine, where I worked, start ripping up pages at a time when the latest issue should have been heading for the printers. Saddle up, he said, because a fireball had shot up a coal-mine shaft in a place called Plymouth, trapping twenty-six men underground. Reporters know that bad things happen in this world. The shock to my system was nonetheless extreme. It hurt to imagine the agony of those men and their families. Yet to this day I remember, more than anything, my disbelief that men were still risking subterranean death thousands of yards from blue skies so that our lights would go on. At that instant, my universe perceptibly tilted. I felt both stupid and craven. And an obsession was born.

This kind of disconnect from the comforts of everyday life isn’t unusual in our time and place. We rarely gaze around the kitchen and reflect that the paper we’re reading, the coffee we sip
and the chair on which we’re parked have all come from far away, and by virtue of someone else’s labour. I, of all people, should have known better. To my knowledge I had never laid eyes on a single miner who worked the Pictou County coal seams. Yet at that moment I realized that these were my people as surely as if we owned the same surname, gait, and DNA. Somehow, in the headlong rush of life, I’d managed to forget that generations of my ancestors had taken the long ride underground to hack out the black stone that has transformed societies and launched empires. And that even the non-miners who shared my genes lived in coal’s grimy shadow.

This wasn’t just some dusty historical connection, either. An hour later, as I headed north from Halifax in my Toyota, one of my cousins could have been working a shift in one of the last operating collieries on Cape Breton. I, however, was a city boy brought up with the expectation that I would pursue some occupation that kept my face clean and the family’s narrative line moving upward. Everything I knew about coal came from the old stories that had hung in the air while I was growing up: the back-breaking, dangerous work; the pitiful wages; the years of indentured servitude to companies that not only controlled where the miners and their families worked, and when and for how much, but also owned their homes, even the stores where they bought their food and clothes.

Lord, it sounded cruel, this world of damp and dust and lethal cave-ins that began with something as simple as a whiff of gas, a few unstable rocks, a spark from two pieces of machinery brushing together. This world where children like my grandfather—who went into the mines at age eleven—spent their days working in pitch-black tunnels. A world where a good year meant new shoes for the kids and a bad one a casket in the parlour and a roomful of mourners in the dining room. I devoured those stories of shining
heroes with inconceivable names like Tugger Head, Noodle Neck, Jimmy Oh-My-Back and Shiver the Pit, who could put in a day in the colliery, wash off the coal dust, then guzzle hooch and dance the night away to Scottish fiddle tunes that hadn’t changed since the days of Bonnie Prince Charlie; of base villains like Roy “the Wolf,” who starved women and children for an extra penny of profit, and the company goons who shot good miners dead in the street.

Then somehow, over time, I put some of the old stories aside. I now knew that energy meant oil derricks and guys in stetsons, not the sooty black stuff that used to get shovelled into Grammy’s cast-iron stove. I always loved the reflected glory of having a coal miner for a cousin; it sounded tough and exotic, like being born in Tuktoyaktuk. But it never really dawned on me, as I fired up my laptop for a day of serious typing, that my younger cousin, Kenneth, was donning his helmet and going underground to do a job that didn’t offer much in the way of a career arc, or a cushy retirement around the pool in Sarasota.

I knew the facts to be these: at 5:20 that morning—May 9, 1992—an explosion had erupted in the Westray coal mine in the village of Plymouth, Nova Scotia. The blast had been so strong that it had blown the top off the mine entrance and shattered steel roof supports throughout the mine. Twenty-six men were trapped in the mile-long shaft. Draegermen—coal miners specially trained in rescue techniques—were on the way from Cape Breton and elsewhere. The mine company operatives and the politicians who had paved the way for the Westray mine’s existence were already ducking for cover.

Which is why I was taking the turnoff on the Trans-Canada and driving east down Foord Street, named after the coal seam that had settled the town. Past the blocky little semi-detached homes—built a century earlier by the coal company—that had been shaken
by the explosion early that morning. I drove beyond the war memorials and the monument to the men who had died in Pictou County coal mines. Past half-empty store windows, a derelict movie theatre, the old-timers in their windbreakers and tractor dealership ball caps killing time in front of the government buildings.

The town’s main drag was mostly empty, adding to the funereal air. So I just kept driving, not noticing the signs marking where a village ended and the open country began. Across a narrow river and beyond stands of second-growth forest, a collection of silos appeared. I headed straight for them until a Mountie waved me up a road. I parked on the shoulder behind the radio and television vans, and walked up the hill to the building where the reporters had been corralled.

I aimed some borrowed binoculars at the fire hall and watched family members and their supporters—clerics, social workers, counsellors, I imagined—arrive at the community centre. They came in ones and twos, walking stiffly and slowly as if to avoid what waited inside, or in small knots, clutching each other for support. Watching these people, stripped of any pretense about fairness in life, seared my eyes but I couldn’t look away.

Everything is surely connected. I believe that statement as fully as any Buddhist or conspiracy theorist. It’s now generally accepted by scientists that the world is 4.5 billion years old. Within that context, 300 million years ago, when the first vegetation covered what would become Nova Scotia’s Pictou County, was just yesterday. Those plants died, began to decay, were covered in layers of dirt, sand, silt and mud, and were eventually flooded by overflowing rivers and seas. When the cycle had occurred enough times, coal—made from plants that last saw sunlight 100 million years
before dinosaurs trod the earth—was formed. It’s the connective tissue of time. Because of coal—ancient fossils, really—lives have been altered; families changed; the entire world reconfigured. Or to put it another way: a piece of vegetation blooms, and 300 million years later twenty-six men are trapped underground, and the pall of tragedy hangs over a hollowed-out place at the eastern edge of North America.

As the draegermen searched for life underground, I had to bone up quickly on coal mining in Nova Scotia. I read. I walked around. I talked to ex-miners like James Linthorne, a fifteen-year mining veteran whose father was the last man to die in a Pictou County coal mine before the Westray tragedy. I visited people like James Cameron, a wonderful Pictou County historian who wrote the best book ever penned about coal mining in this province. Often I just drove around. I wasn’t quite sure where to go, because I barely recognized the world any more.

The lights, I finally understood, don’t just automatically turn on. In provinces like Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia, in countries like the United States, China and Germany, electricity usually means coal, a mineral that emerges from the earth pretty much ready for use. Coal, along with oil and natural gas, the other immensely concentrated fossil fuels, run most modern economies and power virtually every action of modern life.

Energy used to depend upon growing crops for humans and animals to eat and wood, brush and other vegetable matter to burn. Fossil energy, as environmental writer Bill McKibben explains, “depended on how much plant matter had grown eons before.” It was all there, waiting to be discovered and to be unleashed. And that unleashing required real men doing hellishly dangerous jobs that would leave the rest of us soft-handed paper-pushers and keyboard jockeys—us dislocated souls stunned by the
news that a young calf has to die because we simply must have osso bucco—curled up in the corner bawling for Mama.

This, in a small way, I now knew. I also understood that coal had once been king in this province. That under the ground I now trod had once thrived amazing subterranean worlds straight out of Jules Verne. And that at some earlier time one hell of an interesting story took place in coal towns like this throughout Nova Scotia. I tried to imagine what the tangle of thick forest running down to the Pictou County rivers and seashore must have looked like to the English Protestants arriving from Philadelphia, to the Highland Scots lured by free passage, a farm lot and a year’s provisions, and the soldiers who fought for the Loyalist side in the American Revolution. One of their group, a local surveyor, is given credit, in some circles, for discovering the first coal outcrop in the area. But members of the Mi’kmaq First Nation, who told of lighting fires igniting outcrops of black rock, knew about it long before the whites arrived.

Coal lifted Pictou County—and most of the rest of this province—out of its pioneer existence. In time the true extent of the Pictou coalfield was sketched out: 165 square kilometres within which lay twenty-five seams of bituminous coal, one atop the other, separated by rock strata and faults. Some of those seams—notably the Foord—were as thick as any in the world. “The most striking features of the coal seams and enclosing strata,” an early mining expert wrote about the Stellarton seams, “are the irregular folds and numerous faults in different directions which together with the rapid variation in thickness makes the most difficult mining conditions your investigator has observed in any of the coalfields of North America or in Europe.” Translation: the whole structure was shot through with thick clouds of explosive gas and, therefore, prone to spontaneous combustion.

Chances are that John McKay, “son of the Squire, usually known as Collier,” had no inkling of this when he dug the first coal mine in Pictou County in 1807. I had to assume that the Englishmen who followed twenty years later were better informed. I read about how an outfit called the General Mining Association (GMA) built the first steam engine in the province, which was used to pump water out of the mine and hoist coal to the surface. How they imported skilled British help to operate their mines. And how, in 1839, the company opened the Albion Mines–Abercrombie Railway—its English-made locomotives the first to run on iron rails in Canada—to carry coal to the piers.

I can’t be sure after all this time, but I think my heart started to thump as I discovered this stuff. As the new mines opened—the Acadian, the Cage, Thom and Stellar pits, the Drummond pit—emigrants came from the British Isles, Europe, Newfoundland or elsewhere in the Maritimes. Coal industry service companies flocked to Albion Mines and throughout Pictou County. Eventually, the coalfields brought the Industrial Revolution—in the form of ironworks, steel mills and other heavy industry—to the backwoods of Nova Scotia. With time, brand new settlements emerged: Westville, the site of a major coal discovery in 1866 and within a few decades one of the fastest-growing towns in the country; Trenton, which came into being two decades later, after some blacksmiths founded an ironworks to make anchors and iron fittings for sailing ships; Thorburn, where a mine opened in 1872. It was enough to make one writer observe, twenty years after the GMA’s arrival, that it had founded “a colony of miners.”

One morning four days after the Westray explosion, I drove through Stellarton, past what’s left of Mount Rundell—the mansion where
the mine manager and his chatelaine once entertained British tycoons, Canadian prime ministers and visiting royalty. Past the long-closed mine entrances and what remained of the coal company shacks. With time, the inexorable forces of “progress” and global economics had intervened in Pictou County and the other coalfields of Nova Scotia. Capital fled elsewhere. Oil began to replace coal as the choice to power the world’s electrical grid. By then, many of Pictou County’s coalfields were simply exhausted: the collieries too old, deep and expensive to operate; the coal deposit more heavily mined than any comparably sized area anywhere on the continent. A few mines managed to live a hand-to-mouth existence. Eventually, the last miners punched out there too. People drifted away. Businesses closed. As the rest of the world hurtled toward the new millennium, anyone could tell that the towns of Pictou County were redolent of the past, not the future. Even if stories of great drama and heartbreak lingered just below the dust.

It’s an unseasonably warm spring day, as if the land barely remembers what happened just days ago. By the time I arrive, mourners have already filled the white clapboard United Church in the settlement of Eureka, at the forks of the East River. So I stand outside amidst the bulky men with the ill-fitting suits, the women in their Sunday dresses, the haunted-eyed seniors and confused kids. “Amazing Grace” sounds through two loudspeakers mounted outside the church. Birds chirp in the nearby trees. Heads bowed, we listen to the voice of the Reverend Marion Patterson eulogizing Lawrence Bell, twenty-five, whose body was one of the first to be pulled from the Westray mine. Patterson speaks of Bell’s love of hockey and the guitar, his zest for life. “Let us not say goodbye to Larry,” she concludes, “just good night.” Then the five hundred or so mourners walk to their cars and begin snaking their way to the cemetery.

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