Coal Black Heart Read Online Free

with a thing about the subterranean life, thoseunimaginable passageways and cities where thousands of men led parallel lives inside the earth. I also got hooked on the story because it seems to encapsulate everything about Nova Scotia: its geology, settlement and economic development, along with its social history, place in the world and aspirations for the future. It’s a story that’s connected to the great events of the world, but at the same time remains an extraordinarily human journey. The chronicle of coal in Nova Scotia is the story of how a simple black rock irrevocably changed a society and its people. It’s a narrative of outrage, but also a drama filled with heroism, loss, the cruel but hypnotic spectacle of time and the inexorable force of economic progress. As much as anything, it’s a story that ends with a question: what happened to these people after their land was eviscerated and emptied out?
    Not everyone sees them the way I do. “Grim” is a word often used to describe coal miners and coal-mining towns, particularly in the thirty years since the industry began its inevitable decline in these parts. It’s not a word they necessarily use to describe themselves—even if few of them would wish a job in the pits on their sons. Weirdly, at least in the view of the rest of the world, they talk mostly in positive terms: of the camaraderie of soldiers, professional athletes and other men who have shared intense, dangerous work; of the professionalism that comes from doing a difficult job well. There is a swell of pride evident even in the voices of broken old men when they say, “I am a Cape Breton miner,” a “Springhill miner” or a “Pictou County collier.”
    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