“I don’t think so, Walt,” Cole said quietly.
“Body not up to it yet?”
“Body is fine, Walt. It’s my heart that isn’t up to it.”
Walter put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Let’s go and get some dinner, Cole. Mom’s been in the kitchen all day. And Sarah’s got the table set. Don’t want to keep them waiting.”
They turned and closed the barn doors and walked back across the yard side by side.
The Cardinal Divide: Final Environmental Assessment
Stephen Legault on writing the Cole Blackwater series
The beginning
The Cardinal Divide was born of too much beer and not enough sun during a two-week vacation in Costa Rica in 2003. It was November and it rained nearly every day I was there. The lawn surrounding my tiny cabina became a shin-deep lake and red ants by the thousands invaded the airy hut, giving me something to do with my vacation time. Between bouts of fruitless struggle to prevent the formicidae invasion and mopping up after storm surges, I sat on the deck, drank cervaza Imperial, and read half a dozen damp and worn paperback mystery novels bought or traded from local vendors.
It wasn’t my first foray into the mystery genre. Tony Hillerman’s Skinwalkers was a gift from my colleagues at Grand Canyon National Park in 1994, and I read it on the inhumanly long journey home from the southwest that spring. For years I associated long cross-continental plane trips with Tony Hillerman books: stories just long enough to get me from Calgary to Toronto or back. My friend Paul Novitski gave me a Nevada Barr mystery in 2001, and I read a bunch of her excellent Anna Pigeon mysteries that year as well. I love James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series. But on the Costa Rica trip, I read The First Deadly Sin by Lawrence Saunders and became hooked on the genre.
I started to think about what I might have to contribute to the mass of murder mysteries crowding the shelves of used bookstores. I’ve been writing since 1988, seriously trying to get published since 1993 or so. I always imagined myself as a composer of literary essays on the relationship between people and nature, or the writer of a desperately sad, tragic work of fiction in which the protagonist reveals something core to the nature of the human condition before succumbing to a broken heart.
While I didn’t see myself penning a mystery about a mine, I have been trying to stop mines from being dug in beautiful wilderness areas for the last twenty years. In 2003 the effort to stop the Cheviot Coal Mine from being dug on the northern side of the Cardinal Divide, just east of Jasper National Park, was one of the most important environmental challenges in Alberta. I had first become involved in this fight in 1995 when, as a freshman member of the Board of Directors of the Alberta Wilderness Association, I heard Ben Gadd and Dianne Pachal talk about the new plans for the mine. The Cardinal Divide had been much on my mind since I had first walked along its gently sloping, sinuous summit some years back.
Sitting on the porch of my cabina in Costa Rica in 2003, knocking back Imperials, I started to piece some thoughts together: Could I find a way to tell a story about a cherished, beautiful place in a way that might appeal to someone other than an armchair activist or closet environmentalist? Could I do it so that the novel didn’t simply rant against coal mining, but actually told a good story?
I remember something my friend and fellow writer Greer Chesher once told me when I worked for her at Grand Canyon National Park: “You have to have a plot.” Fiction can’t simply be a new, shiny vessel in which to carry around my polemic. As an activist, I’m always searching for new ways to interest the public in an important issue. As a writer, I’m always looking for a new story to tell while delivering a poignant message.
As I sat there, watching the Caribbean Sea, I let the issue, the landscape, and the story slowly congeal in my head.
The flight back was long and, late at night on the silent plane, I sat with a tiny notebook and jotted down the names of the characters: Cole Blackwater, Nancy Webber, Dale van Stempvort, Mike Barnes.... I wrote down the events of the fictional opening crime, and then I crafted the story around the truth that would make the book a mystery. By the time I had defrosted my aging Toyota pickup at the Calgary airport at 2 AM, The Cardinal Divide filled two dozen pages in my little notebook. It would occupy my mind, and keep my fingers moving, for the next five years.
Substantive form
While The Cardinal Divide had taken shape in a few days late in 2003, it was several years before it found any substantive form. During the winter of 2004 I managed to pen the first six chapters of the book, but I lost my momentum and the book languished for a while. I didn’t stop writing, I just stopped typing. I do a lot of “writing” in my head, playing with the characters and mapping out story ideas while I’m running or walking in the mountains.
An injury in the summer of 2004 was a boon for the book. I pinched my sciatic nerve (playing with Lego with my nephew) and had to bail halfway through a 250-kilometre backpacking trip. I swallowed a fist full of Advil, found a bottle of gin in the freezer, and drove to the Columbia Valley to hide out at my friend Mark Holmes’ place. I used the remaining six days of my down time to write an outline of the entire book.
Which then sat untouched for more than a year and a half.
In April 2006 my first book, Carry Tiger to Mountain: the Tao of Activism and Leadership, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press. The year previous was consumed with the writing, editing, and marketing of that work, so Cole Blackwater was again put on the backburner. When Carry Tiger was set loose on the unsuspecting public, I found new energy for Cole Blackwater. In just over a month I penned 17 chapters, 75,000 words, and 278 pages. My one-day record was over the May long weekend, when on Sunday I wrote 31 pages and almost 8,000 words. Many, many tea bags were sacrificed to accomplish this feat.
I like writing first drafts, but to me this is a mechanical process. The detailed chapter outline written at Mark Holmes’ place two years before made the first draft easy to compose. With a detailed outline, the first draft is just a process of adding the filler to the plot. Much good narrative emerges and the general gist of the story forms, and from time to time I experience the pure bliss of creativity. But it’s the second draft where I find the real magic of writing. Here I can concentrate on the subtleties of character development and add prose to landscape descriptions. The second draft is my favourite part of the writing process. It’s the next seven or eight drafts I could do without....
Facts and fiction about the real Cardinal Divide
While most of the places and all of the people in The Cardinal Divide are figments of my imagination, the rocky buttress of the Cardinal Divide is not. It is very real, and for thirty years it has been threatened by development in one form or another. As this book goes to print, much of the landscape around the Cardinal Divide has been lost to coal mining.
The Divide is in fact a north-south height of land. On the north side of the Cardinal Divide, the waters flow to the Arctic Ocean via a circuitous route, following the Athabasca River, which flows into Lake Athabasca and then empties, via the Slave River and Great Slave Lake, into one of Canada’s greatest waterways: the McKenzie.
To the south, the waters drain into the South Saskatchewan River and find their way into the Saskatchewan River, then empty into Lake Winnipeg and drain north into Hudson’s Bay via the mighty Nelson River.
When I was introduced to the Cardinal Divide in 1995 by Ben Gadd and Dianne Pachal, various factions were conspiring to dig a twenty-two kilometre long open-pit mine along the north side of the Divide, back toward Jasper National Park. I went there on an Alberta Wilderness Association field trip and fell in love with its sensuous curve.
Battles have been fought and won, and lost, over the Cardinal Divide. While the Divide itself is protected from development in the Whitehorse Wildland Provincial Park, the area immediately to the north and west of the Cardinal Divide is not. In the book, Cole looks out at the Cardinal Divide in the direction that has recently been destroyed by road
building and open-pit mining for the real Cheviot mining operations. Five open pits are planned by Elk River Coal for the region, with two already complete. Massive road building operations have been underway for several years. Updates on the mine can be found at www.thecardinaldivide.com.
Names
I have a hard time with character names, so I poach them from my friends.
Finding a name for the book’s protagonist was my first task. In 1996 I met three brothers who own an outfitting company in Moab, Utah called Tex’s Riverways. Darren, Dirk, and Devon helped my friends and me on various multi-week river trips down the serpentine Green River, and we became friends. I think it was Dirk who started referring to me as Glint Longshadow. It was a stupid name, but for some reason Dirk had this image of me striding across the Utah landscape, fighting evil developers with a glint in my eye. It’s hard not to get attached to that image of oneself. When searching for a name for Cole I first thought of Glint, and then let my imagination run wild. Blackwater somehow emerged from my cerebral morass, and it stuck.
I stole “Cole” from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, which is my favourite book of all time (I was pretty damn unim-pressed with the movie). John Grady Cole is, in my opinion, the best character ever drawn.
My original intent was to simply name this book “Blackwater” and call it a day. But then the US invaded Iraq, which brought to light the world’s largest private army of mercenaries staffed by Blackwater USA, and my plans were shot to hell. The Cardinal Divide came into being after NeWest agreed to publish the book.
Some folks I know may find their names in the book. A word of warning: don’t think that because a character bares your name that I have attributed your characteristics to that fictional personality. I’m always bereft of ideas for names and find myself picking them randomly from the ether and saying, “I’ll just use this name until I come up with something different.” And then suddenly the book is in print and it’s too late.
Oh, and there is no Oracle in Alberta. Really, there isn’t.
What’s next for Cole?
From the very start of my scribbling, I’ve intended to use the Cole Blackwater series to tell more than one story. It might have been on that same flight from Costa Rica that I mapped out a phalanx of possible plots. These environmental and social justice stories are all important to me, ones I know about given my work over the last twenty years in the environmental movement in Canada. But as I’ve said, the books need to be more than just polemics. So there are subplots – other conflicts to be resolved – that form a narrative thread throughout the Cole Blackwater series.
Two more Cole Blackwater mysteries are in production, and NeWest has agreed to publish the next book in the series, The Darkening Archipelago. Set in the Broughton Archipelago, a wild, beautiful, and rugged region of coastal British Columbia that is being strangled by the development of salmon farms, the book finds Cole in the remote fishing village of Port Lostcoast at the funeral of his friend and native activist Archie Ravenwing, who disappeared in a violent storm. In The Darkening Archipelago, Cole helps to tie up loose ends in his friend’s work and discovers that Archie was unravelling a complex plot involving provincial and local band politicians, anti-native bigots, and a salmon farming company with deep pockets, its operations spreading like sea lice across the troubled Broughton. What had Archie Ravenwing discovered on his last voyage to the mysterious Humphrey Rock? Was his death really an accident, or was it murder?
In the third book, The Lucky Strike Manifesto, Cole teams up with his best friend and homelessness advocate Denman Scott to help stop the least fortunate of Vancouver’s residents from being evicted from their low-rent hotels to make way for upscale condominiums. Soon they learn that one by one, the homeless of Vancouver’s troubled Downtown Eastside are disappearing without a trace. Cole and Denman venture into the dark corners of the city’s underworld and into political corruption at City Hall to unravel the mystery behind one of the city’s landmark hotels – the Lucky Strike – before more homeless people vanish from its shadow.
Stitched through the plots of these books is Cole’s violent, tragic relationship with his father. What happened between Cole and his father remains a mystery throughout the second book, but its impact on Cole becomes increasingly apparent: the brutal end of Cole’s father’s life haunts him. How he will resolve the role he played in his father’s death, if any, forms a narrative thread throughout the first three books in the series.
I have a dozen more ideas for Cole, his friends, and for the myriad social and environmental issues, landscapes, and people stretching across North America (I have one book I want to set in Costa Rica, and another in Baja) that I believe are important. Climate change, bulk water exports, resort development, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, Utah’s canyonous desert. But, one book at a time....
The Darkening Archipelago
Cole Blackwater Mystery #2 by Stephen Legault
Chapter One
The rain began suddenly. From the west, skipping like a flat stone over the broad waters that separate Vancouver Island from the convoluted knot of smaller islands at the mouth of Knight Inlet, the storm raced toward the steep slopes of the Coast Mountains. When it reached them, it ricocheted up their slopes, and back and forth across the narrow passage at the mouth of the fjord. With the rain came wind. At first it moved the water into small waves, but within an hour it was pushing hard on the sea, churning it into ten-foot swells. The rain hit hard on the water, pounding it with machine gun bursts. The sky pressed downward. The tops of the densely forested mountains that rose straight up from the water disappeared, and a tattered blackness settled against the sea.
Archie Ravenwing felt the storm approaching before he saw it, before it soaked him through. He could feel it coming for most of the day. Maybe someone had done the weather dance last night, their blankets twisting as they rapidly moved back and forth to the chorus of voices, to the beating of drums. Maybe he should have paid closer attention to that morning’s marine weather forecast.
Ravenwing felt the storm in his hands. Twisted and corded like the ropes he had spent his sixty years working with, his joints always ached when a storm loomed. From November to March, and sometimes well into April, his hands always seemed to ache. There was no denying it – he was past his prime. But he still had work to do.
Ravenwing had set off from Port Lostcoast on the Inlet Dancer before dawn. Lostcoast was on the north shore of Parish Island where he had been born, and where he had spent most of his life. But he wasn’t fishing today. The salmon season wasn’t set to open for another two months, if it opened at all. For thousands of years people along the wild, ragged west coast of British Columbia had guided their boats into the heaving waters of the Pacific, harvesting the fish for food and ceremony. Among the tribes of the west coast, salmon was the most important animal in the world. Life turned on salmon seasons. But in the last twenty years, so much had changed. Ravenwing thought of this as he powered up the inlet that morning, intent on his destination but aware of the shifting day around him.
Salmon smolts had been running for nearly two weeks, and Ravenwing had spent every day on the water since they had started. These silvery darts had spent as much as three years living in the tiny headwater tributaries of Knight Inlet. Most of the salmon born there were eaten or died of natural causes. Only ten percent survived to grow large enough to migrate down river and out into the salty water at the mouth of the creeks, and then into the inlet itself.
The morning had been bright enough, with nothing more menacing than bunched up pillows of clouds hanging over the mountains of Vancouver Island, far to the west. But Ravenwing suspected that by day’s end there would be rain. He flexed his thick, burled hands as he lightly played the wheel of his thirty-two troller, heading east up the inlet.
By the time the day had started to warm, Ravenwing had arrived at Minstrel Island and the narrow mouth to Clio Channel, the ideal place for a couple of hours of dip net s
ampling before he turned his attention to the small bays and coves that marked the jigsaw puzzle shore. Archie shut down the Inlet Dancer’s powerful Cummins 130-horsepower inboard motor and let the silence of the morning wash over him. He stepped from the wheelhouse onto the aft deck of the boat with a thermos of coffee; he stretched and yawned. Thermos in hand, he deftly walked the high, narrow gunwale and sat down on the raised fish box, which doubled as a table. He unscrewed the cap of the thermos and caught the first scent of the hot, rich coffee, closing his eyes to savour the aroma. The smell of the coffee mingled with other scents. The tang of the ocean, salty and spiced with the yin and yang of life and decay, and the pungent fragrance of the woods, the thick Sitka spruce and red cedar forest rising up along the towering cliffs just a hundred metres off his port side. Archie Ravenwing smiled broadly as these fragrances perfumed the air he drew deeply into his lungs.
He poured the coffee into the thermos cap and blew on it gently, the steam rising up and disappearing on the breeze. Later, Archie guessed, that breeze would turn into a squall. But for the moment the morning was warm and gentle, and he savoured it. He sipped at his coffee and looked around him.
Born into the Lostcoast Band of the North Salish First Nation, Archie Ravenwing had been fishing, guiding, hunting, and exploring the coastal estuaries, inlets, reaches, and straits from as far away as Puget Sound in the south to the Queen Charlotte Islands in the north since he was old enough to stand. As he let his eyes roll over the massive sweep of land and water and sky before him that morning, he was happy that this reach of the Broughton Archipelago still seemed very much as it had for generations. The hills jutted steeply from the rich waters, their shoulders cloaked in spruce and fir. Beneath those giant trees, tangles of salmon berries and alders gripped the soil. Between them walked another totem species for the Lostcoast people – the grizzly bear.
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