The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  Maps

  Dedication

  To

  men and women

  who work hard

  and die

  slowly

  In Memoriam

  IN MEMORIAM

  Peter Quirke

  Alice MacIntyre

  Patrick O’Flaherty

  Michael “Uncle Mick” Slaney

  Roger Slaney

  Kevin Pike

  Epigraphs

  The difficulty is that the need is terrible and so unjust, and schemes of development take long to mature, and meanwhile a people are deteriorating and dying by inches.

  —LADY MARY JANE HOPE SIMPSON, JULY 25, 1935

  I’ve met a lot of old friends and there’s a lot of them dead and gone.

  —DAN RORY MACINTYRE, JANUARY 27, 1961

  All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story . . .

  —ISAK DINESEN, NOVEMBER 3, 1957

  Contents

  Cover

  Maps

  Title Page

  Dedication

  In Memoriam

  Epigraphs

  Conversations with the Dead I

  Prologue

  One: The Quake

  Two: The Wave

  Three: Legacy of Chaos

  Four: The Cooperation

  Five: Revolt

  Conversations with the Dead II

  Six: The Rescue

  Conversations with the Dead III

  Seven: Mr. Isaac’s (Extraordinary) Wake

  Eight: The Daughters of Radon

  Nine: Dying by Inches

  Ten: Memory

  Conversations with the Dead IV

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Also by Linden MacIntyre

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Conversations with the Dead I

  i.

  Here’s the beginning of a story. A conversation. It’s late 1968.

  We were talking about mining. My father had just given it up. Had a new surface job near home. I was visiting for a weekend. We were in a pub. It had a name that I forget, but it was called Billy Joe’s by everybody.

  —How’s that, the new job?

  —Good. I think I’ll get a dog.

  —A dog.

  —I work alone now, and a lot of night shift. A dog would be company.

  —Good idea.

  He talked a bit more about the dog and the new job, taking care of pumps for a water utility. And about the mining work he’d done since he was around sixteen. He coughed a lot.

  —How’s the health?

  He looked away, frowned.

  We shared a room once, in a camp. Northern Quebec. Somewhere between Senneterre and Chibougamau. I’d be awake half the night listening to him cough, breathing heavy when he wasn’t coughing.

  —Health is great. Had a complete checkup before I left the last job. A hundred percent.

  —Really?

  —It’s what the doctor said.

  I wanted to ask more about the physical. Who was the doctor? But another man arrived and sat down at our table. Peter MacKay. The Glendale MacKays. Someone he’d grown up with. Then the conversation was in Gaelic, spoken softly. I listened hard, struggling to follow.

  A friend of mine came by the table. A friend from school. Dennis. I joined him for the afternoon. I’d catch up with my father later. No problem. Resume the conversation. More about his health. About that doctor. Whenever.

  Next day, my father drove me to the airport.

  We didn’t speak much on the drive. And the way things turned out, we never spoke again.

  He was fifty years old when he died four months later.

  ii.

  Not so long ago, I had a dream.

  We seem to be compelled to make sense of dreams by giving them a shape and meaning, even when, probably, they’re only fragments of illusions.

  But some dreams have structure and their own memorable logic. The one I clearly remember happened to me on the morning of May 22, 2017. It was shortly before dawn. I know that because it woke me and I wasn’t able to go back to sleep. I got up and wrote it down.

  I was in a small room. And my father was in the room. It was as if he had been waiting for my arrival. He looked exactly as he had the last time I saw him. I saw him in the dream as I had seen him for the last time, alive, that day years ago, after Billy Joe’s.

  I said,

  —I have to ask you something.

  He nodded.

  —Do you remember August 1942?

  He smiled.

  —Why does it matter?

  —There was a fatality in the Iron Springs mine on August 19. I was wondering if you were there.

  —Yes, he said. A fatality. A man fell down the shaft. There were two who fell.

  —And one survived . . .

  —His leg snagged in the timber. That saved him.

  He shook his head and laughed a little.

  —So you were there.

  —No. I was away. Rennie Slaney told me all about it.

  Then I remembered: he married my mother in August 1942. Maybe that’s why he was away.

  I said,

  —I understand they laid the dead man out in the lunchroom.

  —Yes. I heard that too. There was nowhere else.

  —If you had been there . . .

  —It would have been my job.

  —You were underground captain.

  —I was.

  —You were only twenty-four years old in August 1942.

  He frowned, shrugged.

  —So?

  —That was young.

  —Not so young back then.

  iii.

  As will happen sometimes, a dream continues. A continuing conversation somewhere in the soul.

  —So why the sudden interest?

  —You had a lot of stories but never told them. Not to me.

  —I doubt if you’d have listened.

  —But we never talked much anyway when you were living. You weren’t around much. It was after you died, I realized that you were, in many ways, a bit of a mystery.

  —A mystery, eh?

  —An enigma.

  —If you say so. But would it have been any different if I were around more?

  —We’ll never know. You were, for long periods of time, an absence, an empty place at the end of the kitchen table.

  —Well, the table wasn’t empty, right? Nobody went hungry. I was away because I was working. But didn’t we room together later? In Newfoundland and Northern Quebec? Didn’t we talk then?

  —You were a shift boss. I was the lowest of the low. Underground labour. We were more like co-workers. We never talked about what really matters: who we are, what we think, what we need.

  —Some things are hard to talk about.

  —We joked, gossiped, laughed, played cribbage, drank beer, smoked cigarettes. But never really talked.

  —Fair enough. So talk.

  —I want to tell a story about why so many in your generation of miners died too young.

  The memorable shrug. His signature.

  —I want to talk about why you and so many like you put your lives and health at risk in places that were essentially unregulated; why, even when there was regulation, especially in the remote places, the safety of the workplace was usually at the discretion of mine owners.

  —It was called earning a living.

  —Risking life and health?

  —Life and health are always a matter of common sense, no matter who or where we are, or what we do.

  —But sometimes common sense collapses under the pressure of earning a living, especially when you’re young.


  —Which was why I got out when I did.

  —But still you died when you were relatively young.

  —There’s that. But fifty wasn’t so young for my crowd. It was pretty old, actually.

  —Because of how you worked?

  —Everything. How we lived in general.

  —So how does common sense stack up beside the realities of livelihood? Profit-making? Masculine bravado?

  He just shrugs. Again.

  —Has anything changed?

  —I doubt it.

  iv.

  But what I really need to know is how he will react to the story I am about to tell; how approximately fifteen hundred sensible miners working in a small, remote community risked their lives because they were unaware of the perils that surrounded them.

  How normal instincts of self-preservation were blunted by desperation. How entire communities were left impoverished and numb by an earthquake that was followed by a tsunami, and by the collapse of the fishery that had provided a livelihood for centuries.

  And how they became hard-rock miners, seduced by promises of shared prosperity from a mine promoter from New York.

  Things he knew but never spoke about when he was living: how more than three hundred of these unsuspecting men were doomed to die slowly, badly, because of conditions in their workplace; how hundreds of the others would live out their lives struggling to breathe, their mobility severely compromised.

  Many of these men worked with or for him in a little mining town called St. Lawrence, on the south coast of Newfoundland.

  And I want to know if he’d agree that what happened there is a story that has relevance today for vulnerable workers in many other places, in Asia and Africa and Latin America. That the story of what happened in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, is kind of universal, a continuing saga of abuse and exploitation by an industry that thrives in conditions of political disorder and economic desperation.

  Perhaps another conversation, for another dream, or a nightmare.

  So here’s the story. It’s about a place and people, and men who became hard-rock miners because of a barely imaginable convergence of events. It’s also about him.

  It started with an earthquake.

  It ended with a plague.

  Prologue

  TO circumnavigate an island in the North Atlantic is to achieve a unique perspective on some of the most striking scenery in North America—the plunging hillsides, the cliffs darkened by a sea that seems to pound them violently even when the winds are lazy—the sudden sense of solidarity and shared curiosity with adventurers who passed this way centuries ago. And yet, in the larger sweep of time, it was not so long ago at all, but a blink in the lifespan of a world that has been shaping this topography for more than two million years.

  As the earth’s temperature fell during what we now know as the last ice age (ten to eighty thousand years ago), water froze into glaciers that covered the top of the planet, including all of what is now called Canada. Oceans, created by a great continental rift that began more than one hundred million years before the glaciers, dropped fifty fathoms, exposing what we now see, looming and unapproachable, before our eyes. It occurs to the anxious modern mind that the process that required tens of thousands of years to freeze the top of the planet is now working in reverse, accelerated to the point where a thaw is discernible in the span of a single human lifetime.

  We are now warned that the seas are rising again. But twenty-five thousand years ago, the seas withdrew. Humans learned to fashion tools and weapons from metal instead of stone, to refine minerals for making heat and energy, food and light—a marriage of human creativity and the bounty of the elements. Timeless geophysical events would set the stage for apocalyptic destruction, but also shape the opportunities for our deliverance. The nutritious soil sprang green with vegetation. People evolved, thrived and spread, adapted, reproduced and struggled to repurpose rock and soil and trees and other species for food and shelter. In time, humanity was intimate with the surface of the planet, or most of it. At home on top of nearly all the oceans.

  But what lay deep beneath the surfaces of land and sea would, until modern times, remain mysterious, and even now, except where wealth was an incentive, a matter of indifference to all but those with arcane interests—the scientists and the dreamers.

  And yet, it is easy to imagine the land we see, travel, live upon, stripped of its familiar vegetation and reproduced beneath the oceans. The highlands and lowlands, the cliffs and valleys, the mountains and fjords and canyons and vast plains that account for more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface—a world that remains mostly inaccessible to mortals. But we are able to know it and see it in our mind’s eye because it is merely a bald continuation of what we see around us.

  FOR North Americans, the nearest and most familiar and accessible part of that hidden world is the Atlantic continental shelf, a submerged landmass that projects outwards from the shoreline, relatively shallow, until it begins to slope down through the continental rise, yielding to the vast Sohm Abyssal Plain, a hilly expanse, in places several miles below the surface of the ocean.

  As the slope descends, it is split and criss-crossed by steep trenches and canyons, which both deliver and collect sediment from the land and from the ocean bottom, where the sea is shallower. One such trench, the Laurentian Channel, extends from the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Saguenay Rivers, delivering sediment from erosion and glaciation to the underwater edge of where the continent once ended.

  During the height of the ice age, the east coast of what is now called North America extended more than a hundred miles farther than at present. A larger, wilder Hudson River carved an immense channel, not unlike the Colorado River did the Grand Canyon, across the continental slope before the waters rose again.

  The submerged valleys and the canyons there became collection systems for detritus—silt, stone, sand—accumulated over a span of time that can only be approximated. Time that is inconceivable to ordinary mortals except as abstract ages, epochs, eras. Time measured in the millions of years, never mind millennia.

  And then, in the vastness of nature, as in human experience, there comes a moment, calculated in mere seconds, when everything will change and we are dwarfed and mortified by our incompetence and impotence. And such a moment came at 5:02, Newfoundland Standard Time, on the afternoon of November 18, 1929.

  DEEP below the north wall of the Laurentian Channel, a vast slab of the planet’s brittle shell, along what scientists call a strike-slip fault, jerked violently.1 The earth’s crust, a series of solid plates, floats on a thick fluid mantle almost two thousand miles deep. It’s mostly stable because the plates are usually stuck together, but now and then, they slip, let go, creating the sudden jolt of energy we call an earthquake.2 Most of the time, the result is noticeable only to people who read seismographs. But the slippage off the coast of Newfoundland in November 1929 created an unmistakable surge of energy, unleashing a disaster that would unfold in real time and unexpected ways for decades.

  There were actually three slips in a period of twenty-seven seconds: a major lurch on a fault line running to the northeast, followed by two lesser jerks along nearby fractures. And then a momentary stillness while the pent-up seismic energy shot out in waves that caused a violent shifting of the silt and sludge clinging to the sides of those sub-sea ravines and canyons. And suddenly, a submarine landslide was tumbling down the southern edge of the continental shelf, gathering speed and sludge and water, racing down the continental rise and, flushed finally from the canyons and the valleys, fanning outwards onto the vastness of the underwater plain for hundreds of miles.3

  The full scientific account of what happened that day presents a spectacle we can only imagine—and even then, of dimensions that stagger the mind of the non-scientist. The impact of the disruption deep in the earth’s crust shook up an area of the continental slope about the size of Israel; it sent the equivalent of a mountain range of mud and sludge tumbling to
the ocean floor.4 The avalanche, moving at more than sixty miles an hour, soaked up water as it slipped downwards, gradually turning into a heavy, soupy underwater wave that would continue moving for more than thirteen hours, redistributing what had been shaken loose over the unseen world below the ocean.

  But it was what was happening along the way that would capture the attention of scientists and engineers for decades. All telegraph communication between North America and Europe in 1929 passed through cables that criss-crossed the continental shelf and slope and the adjacent deep-sea basin.5 The earthquake’s epicentre was in the middle of this dense network. Six cables lying at depths of between 150 and 1,800 fathoms were snapped immediately. The breaks continued in a sequence that could be precisely timed by onshore communications stations until the relentless current severed the last one thirteen hours and seventeen minutes after the initial shock. There were, in total, twenty-eight breaks in the twelve affected cables on the slope and in the ocean basin. It would take almost a year to repair the underwater damage.

  On the nearby land, unsuspecting families were about to experience an onslaught that would mark them for a lifetime.

  One

  The Quake

  1.

  ST. LAWRENCE, NEWFOUNDLAND

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1929

  17:00 ( NST)

  THE day had been a blessing, a relief after a stormy weekend, with all the inevitable predictions of a long and gloomy winter. Until shortly before five that afternoon, the sun was shining. There was a chilly breeze.

  According to Cecelia Fewer, the telegraph operator in St. Lawrence, the weekend storm had knocked out communications with St. John’s. But for the ten thousand people living on the far end of the Burin Peninsula, the silence didn’t matter much.

  St. John’s was a distant world, in many ways irrelevant, except when it came to pricing fish, which were the economic staple for everyone who lived in the remote, sparsely populated island nation, Newfoundland. There was no road between the capital and the southern peninsula called the Burin. France was closer than St. John’s—the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were just twenty miles away. The people there were fiercely French. But they mingled, married, did business—officially and unofficially—with the nearby Newfoundlanders.