The Cardinal Divide

by Stephen Legault

  The Toyota laboured over the Yellowhead Pass and slipped into Alberta. The anticipated push and pull of his home province hit him. He was ready for it. At least he thought he was. Three years ago he swore he would never be back. He was on the run then from the ruins of his Ottawa life. His stopover in Alberta was a spur-of-the-moment decision; in a dilapidated state of mind he felt an urge to be in the comforting hills of his family’s ranch. But he found no comfort there. His visit culminated in nothing short of calamity. That tragedy sent him skidding across British Columbia to come to rest on the wide Fraser River delta, in Vancouver, and he’d never looked back.

  Until now.

  As he crossed the Great Divide and drove down the long back slope of the continent, he was coming as close to home as he had been in a while. Panic gripped him by the throat. As he neared the town of Jasper, his breath quickened and his heart seemed to skip a beat. Keep it together, Cole, he thought. He gripped the wheel and struggled to focus his eyes. You haven’t been in Alberta an hour and you’re falling apart.

  He stopped in the town of Jasper to stretch his legs and steady his nerves. From a phone booth he called Peggy McSorlie to tell her he’d be in Oracle that night. They arranged a 10AM meeting at her house the next day, and he took directions to get to her spread a half hour outside of town.

  Seeking some comfort in human company, he made a call to a friend he knew from his days at the Canadian Conservation Association. The phone rang three times and then he heard the familiar voice: “Jim Jones.”

  “Jim, Cole Blackwater here. How are you?”

  “I’m well, Cole. Been a long time. Long time.”

  “It has. Say, I’m in town. How about a quick drink?”

  “Sure thing. Why don’t you come by the place, Cole?”

  “OK, but I can’t stay too long. I’m on my way to Oracle tonight.”

  “No trouble, Cole. Oracle’s not more than an hour’s drive. I’ll have you on your way safe and sound.”

  “Fine, fine. Where you at?”

  Jim gave him directions and Cole navigated through Jasper’s back streets to the address.

  Jim Jones met him at the door. The house was a cedar Pana-bode with a few additions since its original construction three decades before. The home was set in a yard strewn with monolithic boulders, piles of aggregate stone, slabs of limestone, and clusters of round and water-polished river rock in various states of arrangement. Some of the larger rocks had been ordered in clusters and erected as monuments, while others were simply piled, awaiting attention. There was no lawn. Instead, crushed gravel filled the spaces between the arrangements. The effect was pleasing, despite being a work in progress. It felt like a combination of Japanese Zen garden, quarry, and construction site.

  “Doing a little landscaping?” Cole asked, walking up the pathway that wove through the stone.

  Jim Jones was a geologist, though he’d spent most of his sixty years doing other things. But his passion for stone was obvious in his front yard.

  “Just a little,” Jones smiled, extending a large, rough hand with a few bandaged fingers for Cole to shake. “Good to see you, Cole,” he said.

  “Good to see you, Jim. What’s it been? Five, six years?”

  “About that, I’d say. I was in Ottawa when they reviewed the National Parks Act. That was an epoch ago now, it seems.”

  Cole stepped into the house. It was warm and smelled pleasingly of wood smoke. “Hang your coat behind the door there, Cole, or just toss it wherever you like. What will you have?”

  “What have you got?”

  “Most everything a road-weary body could want, I’d guess.”

  “A nice cold beer would be great,” Cole said, mouth watering.

  “Kokanee do you?”

  “Fine.”

  They settled into the living room with their beer. Jim sat in an Ikea reclining chair in front of the wood stove. Cole walked around the room, beer in hand, drinking deeply and looking at the artwork on the walls and the books stacked on the shelves.

  “So, Cole, are you still with the CCA?”

  Cole smiled. He assumed that his departure from Ottawa was common knowledge in the enviro world. He was simultaneously pleased and disappointed that someone, even someone living near the edge of the universe as Jim Jones did, didn’t hang on his every parry and thrust. Finally he said, “No. Not for more than three years.”

  “They quit you or you quit them?”

  Cole took a drink of his beer. “Good question. I guess a little of both.”

  Jim’s eyes twinkled. “Sounds like they quit you.”

  Cole kept his back to Jim, reading the spines of books in a floor-to-ceiling bookcase built into the wall. “I’d say I had a little help in my decision to go.”

  “Its no matter one way or another,” said Jim, taking a sip of beer. “I’ve never had a job so good that I couldn’t quit or get fired from it. Hell, I’ve been fired from half a dozen jobs, and quit far more ’n that. All that really matters is that you keep some pride and dignity and in the end, walk away, not run or get your ass booted out of town.”

  “Suppose so,” said Cole, his lips on the beer bottle’s mouth. His metaphorical ass still sore, he meditated on that while taking another deep pull of his beer.

  “So what are you doing these days?” Jones asked.

  “Freelance stuff,” said Cole, happy to turn the conversion to the present, regardless of how dismal it seemed to him. “Consulting. Strategy. Communications.”

  “Hired gun, hey?”

  “Suppose you could say that.”

  “So what brings you to Oracle, as if I can’t guess?”

  “I’m doing a little job for the Eastern Slopes folks.”

  “The McLeod River Mine down below the Cardinal Divide?”

  “You got it.”

  “That’s a fucking nightmare if I ever heard of one. And I’ve heard of a lot of them,” said Jones, shaking his head and pulling at the label on his beer.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “About the mine, or the bunch of folks trying to stop it?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Well, if you ask me, and I guess you just did,” he smiled, “I’d say they were both a damned mess.”

  Cole sat down across from Jim on a long, worn couch. He looked at the man, inviting him to continue.

  “The mine is being planned as your typical open-pit coal job. It’s going to be just south of the headwaters of the McLeod River.”

  “That’s right along the southern ridge of the Cardinal Divide, isn’t it?” interrupted Blackwater.

  “’Tis. The plan calls for them to dig straight back along the southwestern side of the divide toward the park boundary. Build an all-weather haul road over the divide, and then a railway line north to move the coal out to Oracle. The mine is going to be nearly twenty kilometres long,” said Jones, shaking his head.

  “Holy cow,” said Blackwater under his breath, and Jones laughed.

  “The rest of us just say holy fuck,” chuckled Jones.

  “I used to,” said Cole, wistfully. “I loved to curse. I could make a sailor blush,” he said, finishing his beer. “But it’s a bad influence on my daughter, Sarah, so I try to substitute.”

  Jones nodded his agreement. “Good thinking. Anyway, the McLeod River job isn’t all that much different than previous incarnations of nearby operations. You remember. Overburden into the valley below, killing bull trout and harlequin duck habitat, and a twenty-kilometre long hole in the ground that grizzly bears, cougars, and wolves won’t be able to navigate around. Even if they did, they’d likely get plastered on the haul road by those monster dump trucks, or cut up on the rail line.”

  “Effectively cutting off another north-south migration route for wildlife,” said Cole.

  “That’s right, and all the genetic diversity that goes with it. The mountain parks are already islands, with the animals trapped on them, unable to migrate into the surrounding country t
o breed, seek food, find shelter, or take refuge from fires, floods, and other natural disasters. What that means is that the populations of these critters are getting inbred. No diversity means no resilience to weather the storms of life. This isn’t going to help.”

  “Sounds like a nail in the coffin, at least on Jasper’s eastern slopes. Now I understand the urgency in Peggy McSorlie’s call.”

  They sat in silence a moment.

  “Another for the road?” Jim Jones asked.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” said Blackwater, deep in thought.

  Jones stood to get the beers, and Cole followed him through the house.

  “Where’s Betty?” he asked absentmindedly.

  Jones fished a couple of bottles from the fridge and opened them on an opener affixed to the kitchen doorframe.

  “She’s at her mother’s in Ontario.”

  “Everything OK?”

  “With the mother? Yeah. But Betty and I are on the rocks, if you’ll excuse the pun.”

  Cole nodded solemnly.

  They touched bottles and drank again, standing in the kitchen. There were no obvious signs of domestic disarray: no pile of dishes, no half-eaten box of pizza on the counter. “You seem to be getting along,” said Cole.

  “I’m getting by. Would prefer that I didn’t have to.”

  “Is it permanent?”

  “Who knows?”

  They nodded together, drinking.

  “So you must know Wild Rose, out of Calgary. They’re doing the EA.”

  Cole smiled.

  “You know them?”

  “Yeah,” said Cole, nodding, his chin touching his chest. “I know them. I know one of the principals from a while back. We did some work together a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away. Jeremy Moon is a good man, but he’s got some pretty rotten clients.”

  “Well, you can add Athabasca Coal to that list now.”

  “How far along are they on the environmental assessment?”

  “Nearly done. As of last week they were just looking for someone to put the magic to the report. You know, the buzz words like mitigation, ecological footprint, carrying capacity. That sort of thing. Take a fucked-up project like this and make it seem like the whole landscape will flourish after the pit has been reclaimed. Add a few bighorn sheep grazing on the slopes of the mine so that the American big-game hunters have something to shoot at. Grizzly bears be damned.”

  “Sounds like they got it all worked out,” said Cole.

  “Maybe, but I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid.”

  “You sound familiar with the project,” Cole wondered.

  “They asked me to review it. Add the magic,” Jim grinned.

  “I got a note from Wild Rose last week too. Sounds like you said no.”

  “Sure did. What did you say?”

  “I said yes. To Peggy McSorlie.”

  They touched bottles again and finished their second beer.

  “Still, there might be something to keeping the door open with Wild Rose,” said Cole, looking out the kitchen window at the rock garden beyond. “I think I’ll call Jeremy tomorrow and see what I can learn.”

  Jim Jones was looking down at the kitchen floor. “You know, Cole. There’s something funny about the project.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, they bring in this new hot-shot mine manager. He’s been on the job for six months and suddenly they shift their whole focus from Mountain Park, where they tried to dig years ago, you remember? To the other side of the Divide, where nobody has done much preliminary work. I mean, there are hardly any core samples to show that coal exists there in the first place. Now they have the full-court press on, trying to set a speed record for completing an environmental assessment. They want to start work on the haul road this summer! They want tracks laid down for the rail line for the fall. It all seems so damn fast.”

  Cole was silent.

  “And Cardinal Divide, I mean, the place is synonymous with trouble. People have been fighting over it for thirty years. In the last ten years we’ve made some progress, getting some protection for it. Now these guys want to skirt the little provincial park and dig a huge, and I mean huge, hole in the side of it. It seems like a recipe for disaster for the company. Are they looking for a fight? Doesn’t make any sense to me.

  “Anyway,” said Jim, “it just seems a little strange. And asking me to review the assessment? And you? What’s up with that?”

  “That’s more and more common. Find a known entity in the environmental movement to get some fingerprints on the report before it goes public, so they can say that the enviros are in support of the project.”

  “Slimy bastards.”

  “Yup.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help, Cole?”

  Cole thought a moment. “There might be. I’m going to be a known player by Tuesday evening. It might be that a call to Wild Rose from me won’t go over all that well. Maybe you could call them and say you’re having second thoughts, and that you just want to have a look at what they’ve got, you know, time lines, preliminary reports, et cetera, to reassess if you should take the job.”

  “Could do. I didn’t slam the door too hard on them.”

  “Then just give me a call on my cell if anything seems funny.” Cole handed Jim his card.

  “Cole, we can’t lose this one, you know,” said Jim as they stood on the road by Cole’s pickup.

  “Jim, I don’t plan on losing,” he said, looking his friend in the eye. “Hey listen, you said that they were both a mess. What did you mean?”

  Jones shuffled a little. “Well, I guess that’s a pretty harsh indictment of the little band of eco-warriors that Peggy McSorlie has assembled. I don’t know. It’s just that there isn’t much bench strength there. Peggy is really the brains of the outfit. She’s got this guy working with her named Dale van Stempvort.”

  “Van Stempvort?”

  “A loose cannon. No other way of saying it: the man is trouble. He moved to the region, I don’t know, ten years ago or so, and nobody really knows much about him, like where he came from or why he chose Oracle, but since he got there, funny business has been afoot.”

  “What do you mean, Jim?”

  Standing on the road, Jones peeled the label from his empty bottle of beer. “Funny business. Like the local forestry company plans to log one of its cut blocks, and they get a note saying that the trees have been spiked. Sure enough, they go out with metal detectors and there they are, six-inch long nails in the trees. Too high to hurt the faller, but a little land mine for the mill. And that was just the start of it. There were explosives.”

  “I remember hearing about that. It made the national news. That was Dale?”

  “Nobody knows for sure, but it’s pretty strange that two gas wells got blown up within a few kilometres of his place. And Dale was in the paper a lot those days talking about the impacts of sour gas on his livestock. Still births, birth defects. He said some pretty vicious things to the media.”

  Cole shook his head.

  Jim put the bottle down. “Need a traveller, Cole?” he asked.

  “Better not,” said Cole.

  “Suit yourself,” said Jones, looking up at the mountains. “Nobody has ever been charged with any of that stuff, but Dale has never denied that he had anything to do with it. It’s odd that Peggy would let him in on this Cardinal Divide campaign. The guy is a wing nut.”

  I haven’t even made it to Oracle yet, Cole thought, and already I want to turn around and head back home. It’s one thing to fight a lost cause. It’s another altogether to fight a lost cause and do damage control at the same time.

  “I better hit the road, Jim,” said Cole, looking at his watch.

  “Well, give my best to Peggy, and let me know if there’s anything else I can do. Happy to be errand boy.”

  “Thanks, Jim, and thanks for the beers. Just what the doctor ordered.”

  It was after 9 PM when Cole Blackwater turned his pickup east
on Highway 16 and drove toward Oracle. He kept his speed down through the park, conscious of the herds of bighorn sheep that lurked along the shoulder of the highway east of the town.

  Heading east on Highway 16, the Rocky Mountains came to an abrupt end. The eastern slope thrust fault that had jostled the great slabs of limestone skyward also created a clean break between the rugged mountains to the west and the undulating foothills to the east. It took Cole less than an hour to reach Oracle. Cresting a small rise, the town was laid out below him along the banks of the Portsmith River, named for one of the first mining families in the region, a minor tributary of the Athabasca River. In the last wisps of daylight, Cole could see the town squared neatly along its streets and avenues, grid style. The highway cut across it to the north of the old downtown. There he could see the lights from gas stations and the Motel 6. On the north side of the highway ran the railway tracks, and then, below, in a deep dale, the river. Above the old main street and its neat lattice, on a small knoll, perched the new subdivisions, looking out toward the Rocky Mountains. Oracle, Alberta. Population 3,700 including dogs, guessed Cole. Home for the next two weeks.

  Cole drove slowly down the highway, turned down Main Street, and looked for 2nd Avenue, which would lead him to his hotel, his bed, and sleep. It had been a long day, and the days ahead would be just as long. Maybe longer.

  He found the street and turned to the south. The Rim Rock Motel and Suites was set back from the road, with a large parking lot in front filled nearly to capacity with pickup trucks. And not your rinky-dink Toyota SR5s. Ford F250 Diesels and Dodge Ram 2500s and Chevy Sierras bulked up the lot. Next to his Toyota, a cherry-red Dodge stood a good foot taller.