Wintersong. The Nickel Range Trilogy • Volume 3

by Mick Lowe

  In the minutes it had taken him to blow the transformer it has begun to thaw.

  PART THREE

  18

  The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot

  Straight and Heartening News

  from the Financial Page

  Throughout the 1970s the Sudbury District was undergoing a period of municipal amalgamation that would transform not only the form of local, municipal governance, but also the company’s control over it. Until then, Sudbury was a loose amalgam of outlying small, mainly company-owned towns surrounding the urban core, that is, Sudbury proper.

  The smaller towns, places like Coniston, Levack, Copper Cliff and Garson, were company-owned, lock, stock, and barrel. Holdovers from the nineteenth century pattern of mining development when miners’ “camps” would spring up adjacent to mining properties or company smelters. Originally little more than a ramshackle collection of tents and muddy streets, the “company towns” had, by the 1970s, morphed into small towns of modest workers’ housing—vinyl siding now covered the tarpaper—that boasted the usual urban amenities—running water and sewage systems. But the land they sat on, and the structures themselves, belonged to the company, or at least the company’s real estate arm, which had been incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary to oversee the collection of rents and other fees. The company also controlled the “elected” town council, the local merchants, and even the town police force, which was charged with investigating fatalities on company property, with results that can well be imagined. But by the 1970s the Company was ready to loosen its iron grip and feudal style of governance. It was expensive, for one thing, requiring a battery of property managers and overseers, and even urban planners, who did not contribute directly to the core business of extracting nickel, copper and precious metals.

  Coincidentally or not, the Company’s desire to move on happened to overlap with a provincially mandated order to amalgamate small Ontario towns into larger municipal units, and so Coniston, Levack and Garson were folded into larger, new municipalities, along with adjacent small towns. The resulting larger municipal structures were assigned new, bland, neologistic names like Nickel Centre, Lively, Valley East, and Walden, place names without either roots or history. There was, in theory at least, one salutary result from this spate of new combinations: the emergence of a new, much larger regional police force availed of the latest investigative technologies and techniques and free at last of the smothering mania for control by the local nickel mining giants, and it was this force that was mobilized to investigate the cause and source of the mysterious and sudden power blackout of the night before.

  And so, the very next morning, a small group of sombre men in dark suits, converged on the power transformer that Spook had exited only hours before. They wore galoshes below their long, dark overcoats that did not entirely conceal their fat bellies. The power blackout was a sensational overnight development in a metropolitan area of 160,000 hardwired into the drama of a labour dispute that had paralyzed its economic life over the course of the most severe winter anyone living could ever remember.

  Just as Spook had intended, it was widely assumed around town that this apparent act of sabotage was somehow strike related. There was a rich history of striking miners blowing things up, after all, dating from an earlier century when members of the old Western Federation of Miners in Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene country had driven a dynamite-laden train into the smelter of the Bunker Hill and Sullivan mining company, blowing up the smelter/concentrator to smithereens. (At the time (then) it was the world’s largest and said to be worth $250,000.)

  Closer to home, striking Steelworkers in the town of Timmins, a venerable gold mining camp a three-hour drive north of Sudbury, had dynamited the skeletal frame of a high voltage tower carrying power to their workplace in a show of displeasure at the slow pace of negotiations. But those lines had affected only their employer, and the sabotage had been carefully planned to take place far from town, where the power lines running from hydroelectric dams far to the north were remote and highly vulnerable, a long snowmobile ride outside of town.

  None of this was lost on the small band of men stamping about impatiently in the snow, awaiting the arrival of a Hydro crew to unlock the gate to the burned out transformer. Although it was still the middle of the night, it was not fully dark. Lowering clouds reflected an eerie orange glow that emanated from the southeast, accompanied by a constant noise from the same direction—a steady growling roar. The light was from the blazing floodlights in the yard of the Copper Cliff smelter, which burned all night long. The noise, which was clearly nearby, also never stopped. The overall effect, rather unsettling, was of some huge, malevolent thing, lurking unseen just over the horizon. The senses were further assaulted by the distinct mephitic odour of something gone off, like eggs rotting or swamp gas. The smelter, and its sulphur-blackened surrounds, had once been described as “The Land of Mordor” from the Lord of the Rings, a comparison that was not entirely inapt.

  There was an occasional murmur of discontent to be heard in the pre-dawn stillness from the small, impatiently milling throng.

  “So where the hell is he?”

  “Late again, as usual. Still running on Indian Time.”

  They turned to watch a vehicle approaching from the direction of town, a four-door, late model Chevy without hubcaps. One of their own.

  Although it had approached at some speed, the driver was now slow to emerge. At length a tall, dark figure shouldered open the driver’s side door. He, too, was wearing a long, shapeless dark overcoat and a fedora pulled down low over dark brown eyes.

  He touched the brim of his hat in greeting. “Boys.”

  They nodded in return. “Sir.” “Lieutenant.”

  Acting Lieutenant Curtis Southwind, of the Criminal Investigation Branch of the newly formed Sudbury Regional Police Department was now in the house, and clearly small talk was not his thing.

  “So whadda we got here?”

  A rookie volunteered an answer. “He approached from over there, sir, cut a hole through the fence here, and gained access.”

  The big man grunted by way of affirmation, surveying the clear tracks in the snow. Now tell us something we don’t know. There were two sets of tracks disappearing off into the distance, one presumably as the suspect had made his approach, the second as he had retraced his trail after completing his task.

  Southwind pointed in the direction of the disappearing tracks. “Constable, go see where he came from. And for fuck sake don’t step on any of those tracks.” He hated to part with that many words—especially with that last bit, which should have been painfully obvious—but with raw recruits fresh out of community college, he’d learned, you could never be too careful. Were they really still just the gang that couldn’t shoot straight?

  The Hydro crew arrived at last, just as the earliest hint of first light began to lighten the eastern sky. As the door through the fence was finally swung open, the men in the topcoats entered the enclosure. They all noticed at once a dark pooling stain in the snow next to the transformer. “Better be careful there,” warned one of the Hydro crewmen. “Transformer coolant. Laced with PCBs.” The cops gingerly stepped around the black stain. They had all heard about polychlorinated biphenyls, an additive to transformer coolant oil. The stuff was known to be highly carcinogenic. Not something you wanted to track home to the wife and kids.

  “He blew it down there.” The Hydro worker pointed at a small perforation in the transformer’s case just a few feet above the ground.

  Southwind, surprised to see how low the hole was, pursed his lips and replied with a characteristic grunt. “Pretty low down, hey?”

  The Hydro guy responded with a nod. “He wanted to make sure to drain all the coolant. Which he obviously did.”

  “Looks like our guy knew what he was doing.”

  The Hydro worker nodded again, “Oh yeah.”

  Not the kind of thing your average hard rock miner might know. The small size of
the perforation bothered Southwind, too. Not at all typical of a miner’s M.O. The old joke around town was about the time the hungry miner went fishing with a lure called a “CIL wobbler,” named after the company that manufactured the high explosives in use in Sudbury’s mines. The miner tapes together a few sticks of dynamite, lights the igniter cord, flips it over the gunwale, puts his feet up, and waits. The ensuing concussion kills every goddamned fish in the lake, and soon the miner is surrounded by more fish than he can eat, all floating motionless around him, belly up. That was the usual miner’s approach. And not for the last time he wonders if it has all been worth it—the terrible environmental destruction—the killing and maiming of so many men in the mines over the years? Just like the Zhaaganash to figure out how to harness technology to go places deep in the earth to release a snake there without first thinking through how to tame that snake. Maybe his elders were right and these children playing with fire lived on borrowed time, doomed by their own disrespectful foolishness to walk the earth for only a brief time before disappearing forever, leaving only the Anishnabek people in this place, balance and harmony once again restored.

  There was one on every picket line, and in every picket shack. And likely dozens in attendance at every strike-related membership meeting, when the turnouts numbered in the thousands, as opposed to the uneventful monthly membership meetings, when attendance dwindled to a few dozens, representing a rank-and-file membership of thousands.

  These were the rare few who had, for some reason, acquired the arcane gift of analyzing the company’s quarterly financial statements, published roughly two weeks after the conclusion of the previous quarter. The Ontario Division Inco first quarter financial results for 1979, which were released in mid-April of that year, made for some riveting reading material in the picket shacks, where these amateur sleuths, scattered throughout the company’s far-flung operations in the Sudbury Basin, now began to pore over the dense and esoteric Q1 financials, even as Curtis Southwind was poring over the Air Canada passenger manifests for incoming Sudbury travellers he had ordered a subordinate to obtain from the only airline providing passenger service to the Nickel Capital. The gruff, moody dark-skinned police lieutenant was even more ill tempered than usual as he played several hunches at once that led nowhere. He was searching for a male—he was certain of this much, given the oversized boot imprint left in the snowy tracks leading to and from the transformer station—and he was looking for an outsider with a highly unusual skill set not likely to be possessed by a local. His man might have driven into town, it was true, but Southwind’s gut told him this was unlikely.

  The picket line sleuthing, meanwhile, was yielding more concrete results that both astonished and greatly heartened the strikers. There were always a couple of givens in these matters: the company’s accountants and Public Affairs people would contrive to skew the numbers to present the bleakest possible picture during any bargaining year while burying any possible evidence of a strike’s impact to reassure jittery shareholders. But even here, the amateur analysts announced triumphantly to their fellow strikers, there was the first solid evidence that the company was, at last, beginning to bleed. It wasn’t easy, but they were just able to connect enough bread crumbs to reach a jubilant, inescapable conclusion: the strike was unsustainable, in the short term, from the Company’s point of view. They, the strikers, weren’t the only ones being bled white by a strike that was now nearly seven months long.

  Sudbury being Sudbury, word of this conclusion, despite the Company’s artful attempts to conceal the truth, was all over town before lunch. This included the Union Hall, where Jake observed Jordy Nelson on the broad grin. Jake had never seen the union leader looking so mellow. Nelson suddenly seemed years younger, as if the weight of years had been lifted off his shoulders. It was mid-April, the sun was shining over the old nickel mining camp that had been buried so long in a blizzard of hopeless despond, and the snow banks were just beginning to thaw in the sun’s still-timorous rays.

  Forgotten for the moment was the hard-earned knowledge that, in Northern Ontario, such early spring days were all too often as illusory as the mirage of an oasis in the sands of the Sahara.

  PART FOUR

  Late Spring

  19

  Spring Comes to the Lines

  But it was spring, and the fine weather held. It was not, to be sure, the full-on spring of more southerly climes, that beloved season that brought with it each day the return of more bird species, the sun-warmed earth beginning to bloom into flower.

  No, this was the typical spring of the more northerly regions of Turtle Island—sudden, abrupt, almost violent, as if someone had randomly thrown a switch—but it was no less welcome for all that.

  Out on the lines the strikers no longer stood huddled around smoky hardwood fires in old oil barrels, bare hands outstretched for warmth. The scrounges could, at last, rest easy as the daily need to replenish the jumbled piles of wooden pallets that stoked the fires on the dozens of lines were no longer being drawn down.

  And a new sight was now seen out on the lines—children. With hypothermia and frostbite no longer posing a risk, increasing numbers of fathers now elected to bring their children out to the lines in the belief that the experience might provide a more valuable lesson than a day’s missed school. It was an experience many sons and daughters would never forget, and it would resonate forty and fifty years hence. In this way the strike became a kind of intergenerational struggle, an inverted variant of New World original sin—the labour militancy of the fathers was visited on the sons and daughters.

  And, even as things were beginning to thaw on the picket lines, from far to the south in Toronto there came the first early signs of movement in the key log of the log jam in the deadlocked negotiations.

  Jordan Nelson was not altogether surprised when the call came, given the intelligence yielded in the Company’s first quarter financials. The government’s crack mediators had continued to chip away at the Company’s bargaining team in private, low key, but persistent meetings in Toronto. Now they were calling with a heads up: the time was approaching when it might be, in their view, at least expedient to have both sides in the dispute in the same city, if not in the same hotel, or even at the same table.

  Nelson, in turn, relayed the news to the members of his own bargaining committee, warning them it might be necessary to travel back to Toronto on short notice. There was great relief all around, not least because a little-noticed deadline had come and gone—the sixth month since the strike had begun. Ontario labour law specified that at this point in any labour dispute the employer could demand that its striking union put its last “final offer” to an acceptance vote of the membership—something no one on the bargaining committee wanted to see. In all probability support for the strike remained strong, but the pressures and stresses of living so long without a paycheque were building, too; nerves were frayed, and a kind of mass, spooked hysteria was highly probable once word got out, and it was bound to, of another nasty wrinkle in the “best and last final offer vote” provision: the employer was legally empowered to unilaterally terminate the employment of any and all of its employees without the usual “show cause” proscriptions other than the fact the employee had been off the job for six months. This deadline had passed in mid-March, and the company’s willingness to return to the bargaining table made it highly unlikely that it would now invoke the “last offer vote” clause to break the strike. The union bargaining committee members were acutely aware of this threat, and had discussed it among themselves privately on many occasions, though they’d been careful not to mention it in public or in the media to avoid the possibility of panicking the membership. As he made his calls to the individual members of his bargaining team Nelson felt the overwhelming, palpable sense of relief among them that one more potential crisis looming over them had been averted.

  20

  Return of the Boreal

  At first, Jake thought i
t was an illusion. He had first noticed the phenomenon the summer before, atop a highway rock cut north of town. He’d been driving out to visit his parents when he became aware of some scrubby brush—little more than weeds, really—poking up out of the rock.

  But now, here it was again, still there, and even a trifle taller than he’d remembered.

  By now it had been—what?—seven years since the completion of the Superstack, the colossal chimney designed to waft away the worst of the sulphur dioxide gasses from the Copper Cliff smelter where Jake himself worked when not on strike. Indeed, the titanic, community-wide struggle to force the Company to clean up its gassy effusions had been launched inside the Insatiable Maw of the Copper Cliff smelter, as had Jake’s own career as a union leader—he’d become a kind of poster boy for the resistance campaign inside the smelter—and the attendant publicity had catapulted him into public notice, in both the community-at-large and the Local Union alike.*