The Cardinal Divide (14 page)

“Holy huge hole in the ground, Batman,” Cole said and whistled through his teeth.

Strangely, Cole's first thought was awe at humanity's might, its way with technology, its ability to manipulate nature to gain affluence and comfort. Open-pit mining was one of the most destructive things people did to the earth: it left nothing of the original landscape. No tree, no hill, no creek, no habitat for anything wild. Nothing. Though the mining companies argued that the pits could be reclaimed, Cole knew, standing next to this hole in the earth, that the mine had eaten these foothills forever.

Cole's second thought was even less hopeful: a corporate machine capable of undertaking such a massive project was deeply invested in continuing to dig and rip and consume. Cole Blackwater was up against a more formidable foe than he had bargained for. He definitely wasn't being paid enough. Briefly he wished he had stayed in Vancouver, where he could hit the Coach and Horses or the Cambie for a few brews, and count on his weekend with Sarah to cheer him up.

Cole was depressed. He felt very old and very tired, not to mention very small. And not in a comfortable, humble sort of way, but in an unimportant, trivial way. Anger welled up in him as his gaze drowned in the hole before him. His anger didn't diminish when he thought of his meeting with the hot-shot, Mike Barnes. Cole had to do something to calm himself before meeting with the mine manager. He straightened up and stretched his back.

He stepped back into the cab of the Toyota and turned the ignition over. Putting the truck in gear, he started down the gravel road. He fumbled through his
CD
s and found what he was looking for. Midnight Oil blared from the speakers:
And some have sailed from a distant shore. And the company takes what the company wants. And nothing's as precious, as a hole in the ground. Who's gonna save me? I pray that sense and reason brings us in. Who's gonna save me
? Cole howled along with the song, which made him feel a little better.

He passed the entrance to the mine and continued down the highway, the beat of the music absorbing the pulse of his anger. He had a couple of hours and he knew exactly what he had to do.

After fifteen minutes the truck began to labour up the Cardinal Divide, a north-south watershed divide whose waters flowed south into the South Saskatchewan River drainage, to the Atlantic via Hudson's Bay, north to the Athabasca River watershed, and finally to the Arctic. The wide road narrowed after it passed the mine itself, and soon trees pressed in on the narrow gravel track. The road snaked up the steep north slope of the Divide. In places Cole wondered if there was room for two of the monster pickup trucks to pass one another.

As it neared the top, the road levelled out, the trees thinned. Cole pulled over and shut down the engine of his truck. He stepped out into the cool, quiet spring air and took a calming breath. He grabbed a pair of binoculars from the glove box and headed east on a narrow trail up the crest of the divide. Legs burning, he emerged from the trees and was rewarded with an inspiring view of the landscape. Now he wished he had taken the stairs more often.

The flowing mats of grasses and early wildflowers calmed him further. Though it was too early in the spring for the full bouquet of wildflowers that would carpet the Divide in June and July, even now there were enough white pasque flowers, yellow glacier lilies, and purple forget-me-nots to cleanse his mind's palette of the anger.

He climbed upward and the trail petered out, but Cole no longer needed it. Intuitively his body knew the way: up, toward the precipice that fell away to the north, toward where he had come, toward the existing Buffalo Anthracite Mine. He gained that crest after another five minutes. His breath was ragged and he felt a disquieting ache in his calves. Sweet mother of pearl, he moaned to himself, you are one sorry, out of shape so-and-so. He thought of his brother Walter, a few years older than he, who still climbed the peaks and ridges of Waterton Lakes National Park as a back-country warden. That was one more reason not to head south after his stay in Oracle. He'd be too embarrassed to be seen in such pathetic condition.

Now the earth fell away in a different sort of panorama. Cole stepped to the edge of the ridge. To the south, alpine meadows sloped gently into Mountain Park below. To the west, the Divide rose up into the Front Range peaks a mile away. Directly below his vantage point, to the southwest, the McLeod River emerged
through the jagged mountains from Jasper National Park. All of this beauty was destined to be devoured if Cole and
ESC
o
G
were not successful. He took a deep breath and turned north. Here the earth dropped off sharply in a band of rocky cliffs more than one hundred feet tall. Below that sharp drop, the jumbled terrain sloped gradually in folds to the Mountain Park area a thousand feet below, and a kilometre distant.

On the gracefully arching promenade of Cardinal Divide, Cole heard the pure music of nature. The existing mine was far enough away to be inaudible. No cars or trucks passed on the road far below or up over the Divide. Birds called and sang; their names he couldn't recall. Insects buzzed and droned, and a colony of marmots far below went about their daily business with many piercing whistles. He heard the scream of a hawk high above. Cole took his binoculars in hand and trained them on the bird circling overhead. Cooper's Hawk? He could not be sure. He was a pathetic naturalist.

But he was a superb aesthete. He sat on sun-warmed rocks on the lip of the Divide and let his eyes sweep across this world that he loved while his feet dangled over the precipice. Something far below, to the north and west of the existing road, caught his eye and he trained his binoculars on a small meadow: grizzly. You could not mistake the gait, the muscular amble, the broad hump on the shoulder. Head down, the bear made its way through the meadow, plucking glacier lilies as it went. Midway across the clearing it stopped and looked back. Had it heard something? Smelled something? Then two small bundles of fur emerged from the forest's edge and bounded toward the big bear. Cubs of the year! Cole caught his breath. He had lived in grizzly country for nearly half his life and this was the first time he had seen cubs of the year. He watched through the glasses as the mother made a motion with her head, which Cole assumed was accompanied by a grunt or woof, and the cubs beat a path to her side. Then, together, they grazed across the clearing, and were gone again, swallowed by the forest.

He sat for another five minutes, binoculars trained, hoping the trio would emerge to graze again. But they didn't. He lowered the binoculars. What an opportunity for the city slicker he'd become. He thought of Dusty and Martin in their downtown Vancouver
office towers, hoping to convince him to come and work for the corporate world. He shook his head and laughed audibly.

His anger was both assuaged and inflamed by the sighting of the sow and cubs. What would happen if the McLeod River Mine was built? The skinny road below would be blasted wide and deep for the huge trucks that hauled ore from the mine to the mill. Cole knew that such a road, though a permeable barrier, would claim more than its share of wildlife over the course of a year. Grizzly bears would have to contend with the wheels of commerce as they roamed their wide territory. And the improved road would bring both legal hunters and poachers too. The bears, attracted to the wide shoulders of the road and their banquet of wildflowers, would become easy targets for those men, too lazy to step from their vehicles to hunt.

He looked up and down the long, curving spine of stone called the Cardinal Divide. Such an evocative name for so distinct a landscape. But it occurred to Cole, the memory of the grizzly bears still rich in his mind, that this wasn't the only divide to be found in Oracle, and it certainly wasn't the cardinal, or principal one. After only a few days of kicking around town, to Cole it seemed that the principle divide in Oracle was between those who looked ahead for the town's future, and those who looked back. People like Peggy looked forward, trying to imagine Oracle building a twenty-first century economy without really knowing what that might look like. David Smith looked back, pining for the boomtown economy of the nineteen fifties. That divide seemed as sharp to Cole Black-water as the rugged edge of the landform he was sitting on.

Now it seemed that there was one man whose presence in the community might seal its fate. Mike Barnes had stirred the pot since arriving in Oracle, evoking powerful emotions, hope and fear, in the tiny town. One man determining on which side of this cardinal divide the town would land.

Cole rose to his feet. It was time to face the enemy.

Cole got back to his truck, threw the binoculars on the passenger side floor, and drove back to the mine compound. The anger was still there. He felt it in his belly. He felt it as a quickening of his pulse and his breath. For the first time since taking the job last Friday, Cole felt a sense of purpose.

He arrived about an hour early. At the security booth by the
chain-link gates, a middle-aged man in a black uniform asked to see his driver's licence to prove his identity, a precaution that Cole Blackwater thought a little overzealous. This was, after all, a mine site, not 24 Sussex Drive or the House of Commons. Were they on to him? Was the guard actually calling the
RCMP
at this very moment to report him for impersonating a writer? Would it have been better to be straight up with Barnes and the others?

“There you go, Mr. Blackwater,” said the security guard, handing him his
ID
. “What time do you expect to be through?”

Cole looked at the man's name tag. It read “
JP
.”

“Not sure,
JP
,” answered Cole.

“It doesn't matter, really. I'll be here or on my rounds when you come by, so if it wouldn't be an inconvenience, would you mind signing out on your way past? The clipboard will be on the ledge here.” He pointed.

“I don't mind at all,” Cole said, relieved.

“You know where you're going?”

“No, I've never been here before.”

“Well, it's easy to get lost. Lots of buildings. Most empty these days, but easy to lose your way. Follow the signs for the main Transfer Station, and when you get there, turn left – that will be west – and follow that road past the old power plant to the biggest building on the site. That's the mill. There's a yard between the mill and the admin building. You can't miss it. It's about as far away from where we are now on the site without ending up the trees.” The guard smiled.

“Thanks,” said Blackwater.

“No trouble. Have a good evening.”

“You too.”

Cole rolled up his window and drove up the road. He wove his way between a number of buildings: maintenance sheds, garages, a fuelling station for the massive dump trucks he had seen hauling rock from the open-pit mine. Beyond an enclosed conveyor that was used to move ore from the transfer station to the mill, he found himself beside an enormous building with doors large enough to accommodate dump trucks loaded with ore. Here trucks unloaded their burden of rock laced with coal to be separated into waste and rough mineral coal, which would then be loaded onto train cars to be shipped to market.

Cole turned west and followed the guard's instructions. The main administration building was small compared to the grand scale of the other structures around it, and constructed of red brick with neat, rectangular windows that faced east, and simple double doors that opened onto a gravel parking lot. Half a dozen cars and trucks were parked there. The cars seemed out of place, since he'd seen nothing but trucks since leaving town. Maybe the cars were driven by female clerical staff or receptionists. After the thought he scolded himself for the sexist nature of his thinking. His ex would have lambasted him. Then he grinned. Pointy-headed accountants might drive the sedans, too.

Cole parked in the visitors' section, turned the engine off, and collected himself. He knew very little about Barnes. He had done a hasty Google search before leaving his hotel room. He had planned to do more research on the man before this meeting, but the events of the day had pre-empted that, and he was feeling unprepared.

Barnes was married. This much he knew. His wife and two school-aged children would be arriving in Oracle in the next few weeks, or so he had been told. Barnes had been in town for nearly six months without them. Why? Was the posting to Oracle so sudden? Was housing so hard to come by? Hell, in six months they could have built a home. Blackwater made a mental note to learn more about this man, if only to follow Sun Tzu's advice to “know thy enemy.”

Maybe Barnes had other reasons for not wanting his family to come to Oracle: marital reasons. Cole recalled George Cody's angry accusation and Deborah Cody's cool rebuttal.

Blackwater had learned that Barnes had married into the company business and was likely being groomed for senior management. He had worked at two different mines in Northern Ontario, Cole recalled, neither one a coal mine. Cole made a mental note to check on Barnes' track record. Maybe he would learn something that would reveal how the mine manager handled conflict. If Barnes was noted for being aggressive in his approach with those who opposed him, it might help Cole Blackwater to know in advance, so he could better prepare his clients' strategy.

Cole Blackwater had more questions than answers about Barnes as he stepped from the truck. He pulled a spiral-bound notebook
from his bag and walked up the steps to the office. He was nervous about the whole cover story. He knew he was on thin ice.

But then, he'd been on thin ice before. Thinner ice than this, he recalled.

Cole was distracted by this thought when the double doors in front of him burst open. He snapped his head up and saw a small, wiry man march toward him. He looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties, with close-cropped hair and a weather-beaten face. In a second they would collide if Cole didn't move or say something.