Coal Black Heart Read Online Free Page A

remotely brave myself.
    Unlike the bulky guys who were huddled around the flaming, hollowed-out oil drums one January day eight years after theWestray disaster, blockading the Lingan power generating station just outside of Sydney to protest the closure of one of Cape Breton’s two remaining coal mines. A few of the workingmen’s hands lacked thumbs and index fingers. Even the non-smokers among them hacked and coughed, their lungs flayed by decades of inhaling coal dust. Most of them were in their forties. But all coal miners look older than they are. “Ancient ahead of our time,” one of them said. “Our bodies ruined by the mines just like our fathers’ and grandfathers’ before us.”
    Fighting to be heard above gale-force winds, I yelled a question about the treatment they were getting from the federal government, which was closing down their mine, and the importance of telling readers their side of the story. Somebody laughed mirthlessly. One miner couldn’t meet my eyes, as if embarrassed to be in the presence of someone making a living in such an unmanly way. The flames made their faces look timeless, tribal, somewhat dangerous. “For what it’s worth,” I finally said, “I’ve got a cousin in the mines: Kenneth Demont.”
    A pause.
    “Well, Kenny Demont’s cousin,” a voice from the dark said, “you know much about coal mining?”
    “Not as much as I should.”
    Rugged Angus Davidson, forty-one years old, the third generation of his family to work the coal face, stepped into the light where I could see him. “Maybe it’s about time you learned,” he said.
    I couldn’t have agreed more. Even if it meant connecting that moment with another, hundreds of millions of years before humans climbed out of the trees. It happened in a place called Pangaea. Which, I guess, is where we will start.

CHAPTER ONE
No Vestige of a Beginning
    J ohn Calder—who has a doctorate of geology in his pocket and a tiny silver hoop in his left ear—sees things way differently than you or I. Let me illustrate. Late morning on a mild fall day; the year is 2007, which means the airwaves bulge with hos and booty, George Bush and Paris Hilton, get-rich-quick and hours-long erections. The icecaps are melting. Governments everywhere seem mean and dim. Yet there stands Calder—greying hipster hair, blue mackinaw, green army pants, distressed hiking shoes—on a beach that is canted on an angle of a couple of degrees into the waters of Chignecto Bay, putting everything in its proper perspective.
    When Calder looks at a section of cliff, he doesn’t just see rocks. He considers the looping bands of land—the messy stuff that looks to an untutored eye like a dragon’s spine, interspersed with featureless layers that even I recognize as sandstone—and sees entire continents shifting, grinding together and colliding. He glimpses chains of mountains erupting skyward and then covering unimaginable chunks of the earth. He sees the world pulling apart and superoceansrushing in. When Calder looks at a rock on the beach with a couple of squiggles on it—or at least that’s how it looks to me—it triggers in his temporal lobe images of plants shaped like feather dusters stretching high into the prehistoric sky. Or it bombards his brain with visions of six-foot-long insects, mandibles snapping like nunchuks, struggling through the primordial muck. When he walks over coal, I imagine, his liver starts to quiver.
    I’m here because I want him to teleport me back, oh let’s see, about 300 million years. Because only by understanding what happened then on this piece of geography can I grasp everything that followed. The best place to see the epochal story of how coal came to be formed in Nova Scotia is at the cliffs of Joggins, a next-to-nothing of a place that stares across Chignecto Bay at southern New Brunswick. Luckily I’ve got the perfect guide. Calder, a respected geologist with Nova Scotia’s department of natural resources,