The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  THE strike ended quietly in February 1976. But there was barely time for celebration before the beginning of a new cycle of bad news.

  It started with rumours, possibly a residue from a dire financial picture presented by the company during the long contract dispute. The rumours eventually crystalized as speculation. Alcan was looking for an opportunity to leave.

  It was hard to believe. The company was spending money on a new shaft for a state-of-the-art mine to replace the old Director on Salt Cove Brook. Miners on the project described plans for lining the shaft with concrete instead of timber. It was a $10 million project. The company was already into it for nearly $5 million. Was that something that suggested an imminent departure?

  But in the alchemy of corporate decision-making, money—large sums of money—rarely gets in the way of pragmatism, whether it’s a breathtaking payout to unload an unsuccessful boss or a write-off of an ill-considered investment.

  In June 1976, Alcan was also dealing with another strike, this time at a smelter in Quebec. With idle smelters, there was no need for fluorspar, and it looked as though those smelters would be cold for quite some time. Newfluor promptly laid off half its mining workforce in St. Lawrence.

  The Quebec strike dragged on into November that year. The paralysis seemed to give Alcan a lot of time for future planning. It was becoming apparent, at least in Montreal, that Newfoundland no longer figured in the company’s future.

  In early 1977, Alcan was openly expressing pessimism about the mines in Newfoundland. The company was now getting high-quality fluorspar more cheaply from Mexico. The rumours were revived—that in Montreal, dire decisions had been made. But this time the rumours happened to be true. In July, the company announced that mining in St. Lawrence would cease in February 1978.

  The government of Newfoundland tried persuasion and offers of assistance to keep the mines from closing. Alcan insisted it was losing too much money. There could be no recovery. When the government noted that in the first half of 1977, the company had turned an overall profit of $85.2 million, it didn’t matter.

  Newfoundland then turned to hardball—a threat to expropriate all Alcan’s assets in St. Lawrence. But before the government could follow through, Alcan dismantled, sold and shipped out every asset that could possibly be moved.

  Before November 18, 1929, the economic mainstay of St. Lawrence had been the fishery. In less than an hour, a natural event that people still refer to as a tidal wave wiped out that economy. It took a little longer to wipe out the industry that replaced it. But as of February 1978, St. Lawrence was a mining town no more.

  IN 1983, a British company, Minworth PLC, lured by promises of handouts from the provincial and federal governments, and anticipating a recovery in world fluorspar markets, announced plans to revive the mines in St. Lawrence. They would develop new open-pit operations and sink two new shafts on the rich Blue Beach property.

  Between 1980 and 1983, thirty more former miners had died in St. Lawrence, most in middle age and most from cancer. But when the new company started hiring, four hundred people lined up to apply for one hundred jobs.

  The first shipment of fluorspar in nearly ten years left St. Lawrence in 1987, but it was rejected by the customer.14 Future shipments were sporadic. Almost from day one, the company struggled financially. History was beginning to repeat herself—the financial problems were reflected in the workplace, where health and safety were being sacrificed in the panic to improve productivity. Provincial regulators now had legislative muscle, but when it came to enforcement, there wasn’t really much they could do other than, as Dr. John Martin would later write, to “persuade and cajole . . . to no avail.”15

  In 1991, the new company went bankrupt. This time the government, having put up cash and loan guarantees, had a lien against the property, mine and buildings, which they promptly sold to the hopeful Greater Lamaline Development Association for a dollar.

  AFTER more than thirty years, physical evidence of the mines at Iron Springs, Black Duck, Blue Beach, Salt Cove Brook and half a dozen other operations would have been difficult to find. Where there had been roads and buildings, headframes and stockpiles, the daily rumble of explosions underground, there was now stunted spruce, thorn bushes, weeds, rutted recreation trails and silence.

  And then, in 2011, the mining saga of St. Lawrence resumed afresh. A new company arrived in town—Canada Fluorspar Inc. The newcomers announced a plan for new production on the old Tarefare and Blue Beach veins. They hoped that they’d be up and running in about two years.

  The plan was delayed by environmental studies, financing arrangements, political negotiations. But overall, there was optimism that this was serious. In May 2014, a San Francisco–based hedge fund, Golden Gate Capital, bought up Canada Fluorspar shares and renewed the planning for new mining in St. Lawrence.

  Then the focus changed—geologists had rediscovered a rich new vein called Grebe’s Nest. There would be a large open-pit mine developed there. The government of Canada pitched in a $5 million repayable contribution. Newfoundland put up a loan of $17 million.

  As development began in 2017, the company was promising a ten-year operation with an annual payroll of $10 million. There would be 350 to 400 construction jobs for two years, and eventually, 200 full-time jobs. The operation would also generate 525 spin-off jobs.

  The town and surrounding communities were enthusiastic. The only evidence of trouble was a brief demonstration at the proposed mine site in March 2017, by St. Lawrence residents protesting rumours that the workforce would include people who didn’t live in their town.

  Apart from this unwelcome interruption, the news that mining was resuming after a pause of more than twenty-five years was met with general relief and celebration. Mining had brought grief to the area, but it had also brought prosperity. It is, as Rupert Wiseman, the Alcan manager, had bluntly told the royal commission, always a trade-off. In the end, “it’s not ore unless you can get it out at a profit.”

  FUTURE choices and decisions will be informed by memory. The memory of bad luck, bad faith, bad management and bad governance should serve the future well. But the future, like the past, will also be determined by necessity.

  Everything changes but necessity.

  As was the case in the thirties, the economy of Newfoundland is still fundamentally dependent on one staple. It’s no longer fish. Now it’s oil. Jobs are hard to come by. Politicians still vie for power by promising industrial expansion. The collective power of working people is weakened fundamentally by anti-union sentiment all over North America. Distant capitalists still exercise extraordinary power over vulnerable lives in remote places most of them have never heard of, don’t care about, privately consider to be “shitholes.”

  Vestiges of 1933 still linger.

  Perhaps the future is secured somewhat by the fact that Newfoundland has a long memory and many physical reminders of the ever-lurking presence of catastrophe, the consequences of a sudden spasm in the earth’s crust or a foreign war or a whimsical decision by someone with a scheme for personal enrichment.

  Not far from Burin, on the road to Port au Bras, there’s a monument to the victims of the tsunami—an elegant reminder of the perilous fragility and unpredictability of life. And at Chamber Cove, between St. Lawrence and Lawn, where on a stormy winter morning in 1942, two US warships foundered, there’s a granite cross to remind posterity that in spite of all the worst impulses of humankind, there is an enduring instinct that, from time to time, produces gallantry and generosity, the virtues that enable people to survive.

  St. Lawrence has a small museum and a historical society dedicated to perpetuating the memory of suffering, and perhaps equally important, the story of a communal determination to survive and grow. But just across the road from the museum, beside what was once a trail to Black Duck mine, there are more than two hundred monuments—reminders that the cost of industry can sometimes run unreasonably high—the tombstones marking graves of miners who di
ed hard and slow and prematurely.

  Not far west of St. Cecilia cemetery, there are new roads and buildings now, new equipment, new miners opening the earth, exposing all the pretty rocks again, ancient minerals that generate prosperity and economic optimism.

  And in between these two dramatic spectacles, a little town where people pray that, this time, the economic benefits will justify the inevitable human costs.

  Conversations with the Dead IV

  ix.

  He came to visit once, when I was at the university. He caught me by surprise. I was seventeen. Maybe his appearance was unwelcome. Being seventeen, away from home, who wants to see a parent? Even if it was only forty miles away from home, it was another world. I didn’t need reminding of where I came from. Or maybe it was something deeper, meaner.

  He emerged from a scrim of falling snow—thick, wet, heavy snow that plummets and accumulates quickly. He was wearing shapeless work pants, heavy workboots, a plaid wool woodsman’s jacket, a ball cap. He looked painfully out of place. I can now imagine he was shy. He seemed pale, but he was always pale, from being underground so much.

  He just happened to be in town. Wandered up to the campus.

  —Always hankered to go through college.

  —Well, here you are.

  Both smiling uncomfortably.

  We were near my residence. It was a modest little building, more like a barracks. Sancian House, they called it. In fact, I think it was slapped together near the end of the Second World War for an influx of returning veterans with a hankering for higher education. Like many temporary wartime structures, it became temporarily permanent.

  —Would you like to see where I live?

  —Since I’m here.

  Later on, when we shared accommodations in a couple of mining establishments, I came to realize that my residence at least was part of the university that would have seemed familiar to him. It was like a bunkhouse.

  I had three roommates. One of them was an ascetic little guy who was from Detroit. His name was George. George Keene. I never forgot him after that day.

  He was in the room when I arrived, my father trailing behind, taking stock of everything. I’d been hoping that the room would be empty. But George was there.

  He was a strange character. Unusually gentle in how he spoke and looked. He wore thick glasses. Seemed to be going prematurely bald. Today he’d be called nerdy. But he was unfailingly decent, unassuming. And he was warm and seemed genuinely impressed meeting my father, who, it seemed to me, was about as foreign to a fellow from Detroit as anyone could be. And definitely out of place in a university.

  They chatted for a little while as I waited for it to be over. And then it was. I showed him out and he disappeared back into the silent falling snow.

  Afterwards, George wanted to know more. And I didn’t know how to explain that I really didn’t know my father very well. He always seemed to be away as I was growing up. He always had to go away to find work.

  George said that he could understand that. And then he hit me with a question that left me speechless.

  —Are you a little bit ashamed of him?

  And when I didn’t answer, he just kept talking. To me, he sounded like a priest. One of the better priests. The university, St. Francis Xavier, was run by priests.

  —Well, you shouldn’t be ashamed. But if you are, it’s okay. It can take a long time to really know somebody. Even a parent. It isn’t easy to see people as they really are. And so, if they seem like simple people, well, that’s just how we see them. But people are always more than what we see.

  It was a long time ago, but that’s the gist of what he said.

  He seemed to be waiting for me to respond—to authorize this, I suppose, impertinence. But I couldn’t because I somehow knew that what he’d said was true.

  And then George said—and I remember this exactly:

  —Someday you’ll realize how lucky you are to have a dad like that.

  A couple of weeks after that, I had a letter from my father. He was in St. Lawrence, working in a mine. He didn’t say which one. I still have the letter. There were two letters, actually.

  I’d long ago forgotten that I had them. They just turned up when I was researching the St. Lawrence story. Like he knew and wanted to help. Like he wanted to put his two cents’ worth in. That I should know he was working in St. Lawrence then, back in 1961, because it wouldn’t have meant much to me at the age of seventeen, a college man. But maybe now.

  On the day I found the letters, I was in a fallow research stage. Everything seemed stale and uninspiring. The two letters came like whispers from another world.

  He was saying: I was there. I knew what everybody knew, when it was too late, when knowing only added to the fear.

  He wrote about the weather. It was fine. The pay was good—$2.19 an hour. He was working what I think they called a split shift. Four hours on, from four in the afternoon till eight in the evening. Then four more, from four in the morning until eight.

  I suppose I realized that he was doing it for me, helping out with the costs of higher education. But I didn’t want to dwell on that. Not then, anyway.

  Some men he knew, miners, had been drowned when a car went off the road. The driver of the car was his roommate. He was at the funerals.

  He would visit my godmother, Loretta Walsh, to play cards. She had made a fruitcake for me. Would send it. Refused to let him try it first.

  Near the end of the first letter, he commented, I’ve met a lot of old friends, and there’s a lot of them dead and gone.

  To me, at seventeen, it would have been an unremarkable observation. He was forty-two then. They were all old. Dead and gone was to be expected of people in their forties.

  In his second letter, he said, I feel myself puffing out with radiation from all I hear about it. It doesn’t add to peace of mind to hear so much about it.

  Radiation?

  Of course, the miners were only finding out about the radiation in 1961. It was a long time after that before the world found out, and longer still before anyone beyond the town would care.

  x.

  I was in St. Lawrence in the mid-eighties. I was a journalist then, there on business. It was really my first visit. Iron Springs mine was my first home, but I had no memory of living there.

  I visited my godmother. She told me about her brother Alonzo, who was my father’s pal and, because of that, became my godfather. And how Alonzo and his two brothers, Fred and Jack, got sick working in the mine and died young.

  She told me where to look for Alonzo’s grave. I found his headstone. He died in 1969. The same year as my father. And I looked up Rennie Slaney because they were all friends. And I was amazed to see that Rennie had also died in 1969. Alonzo was a little older than my father when he died. He was fifty-one. Rennie was older than both of them.

  I had a ways to go then before I’d hit fifty-one. But maybe because I was at that point in my forties, it suddenly seemed terribly young for someone to be dead and gone.

  Then I went to the hospital. The US Memorial Hospital, paid for by the American people. A thank you to St. Lawrence and Lawn for saving so many Americans from a terrible shipwreck in 1942. There was a plaque.

  I introduced myself to the hospital director, Dr. Hollywood. I used to think it was a nickname. But it was for real. Dr. Brian Hollywood. An Irishman.

  When I told him that my father used to work at Iron Springs mine, he said he wanted me to meet someone.

  It was a patient. He was skeletal and weak. He’d been a miner at Iron Springs, and he was dying of lung cancer. Had maybe only days to live. When the doctor introduced me to him, the man just stared off into space for a while, and then he said,

  —That’s an uncommon name around here.

  And he looked at me with a strange intensity.

  —I knew only one other fellow with that name. It was quite a while ago. He was a boss. MacIntyre, his name was.

  —That would have been my
father, I told him.

  He seemed pleased.

  —He was a good boss.

  I could tell that talking made him tired. Dr. Hollywood was hovering. I remembered, This man is dying. I should go. But then he asked,

  —And how is he now, Danny MacIntyre?

  I hesitated. Searching for a lighter way to say something that is heavy. An easy way of saying something hard. Standing next to death makes the mention of it awkward.

  He was smiling, waiting for my answer, remembering someone alive and young and strong and friendly—the way he was himself once, this dying man. And maybe for just a moment, he could feel that way again by reliving it through memory, a brief lifetime when, in the midst of all the drudgery, there were jokes and card games, beer and joy, and celebration of what they were and what they had. When they were all hard young men but looking out for one another. A time when there was a future full of possibilities.

  And suddenly I didn’t have the words to tell the truth.

  —He’s good, I said.

  Afterwards, I realized I didn’t have the man’s name. I didn’t write it down. But there were so many names by then. So many people he might have been.

  Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.

  —HANNAH ARENDT

  Acknowledgements

  THIS book wouldn’t have been possible without the dedication of many Newfoundlanders in pursuing, recording and preserving the personal stories of their fellow islanders, whether through formal scholarship of large political events or personal attention to the plain-spoken memories of people periodically caught up in moments of unusual significance and drama.

  I am especially indebted to Peter Neary, for Newfoundland in the North Atlantic World, 1929–1949 and White Tie and Decorations: Sir John and Lady Hope Simpson in Newfoundland, 1934–1936; Patrick O’Flaherty, for his exhaustive Lost Country: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland, 1843–1933; Cassie Brown, for Standing into Danger: The True Story of a Wartime Disaster, her admirable account of the disastrous grounding of US Navy ships on Newfoundland’s south coast in February 1942; Dr. John R. Martin, for The Fluorspar Mines of Newfoundland: Their History and the Epidemic of Radiation Lung Cancer; Dr. Richard (Rick) Rennie, for The Dirt: Industrial Disease and Conflict at St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, his plain-spoken account of the exploitation and denial that yielded so much tragedy and grief in his hometown, and for his 489-page doctoral thesis, “‘And There’s Nothing Goes Wrong’: Industry, Labour, and Health and Safety at the Fluorspar Mines, St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, 1933–1978.”