The Insatiable Maw
Page 1
© Mick Lowe 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-77186-037-6 pbk; 978-1-77186-044-4 epub; 978-1-77186-045-1 pdf; 978-1-77186-046-8 mobi/kindle
All illustrations including cover by Oryst Sawchuk
Cover by Folio infographie
Book design and epub by Folio infographie
Legal Deposit, 2nd quarter 2015
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Contents
PART ONE
The Insatiable Maw
1 The Return of Jake McCool
2 A Call in the Night
3 On the Bull Gang
4 Haywire
5 A Very Bad Day
PART TWO
Arms to Parley
6 Sudbury Goes to Queen’s Park
7 A Dinner at the Gilpin Commune
8 The Lunch Bucket
9 Busted
10 A Luncheon At the Albany
11 Constituency Work
12 A Chance Encounter
13 Lock, Stock and Barrel
PART THREE
Epilogue
14 All the Way to Sweden
15 “$2.95 & Bus Fare”
. . . Introducing
Afterword and Acknowledgements
Publisher’s Note – Follow-up to The Raids
For Homer Seguin, who kept the story alive.
Based on actual events.
PART ONE
The Insatiable Maw
1
The Return of Jake McCool
The rust-encrusted school bus braked to a screeching halt in the central yard of the Copper Cliff smelter complex. What at first appeared to be reddish rust rimming the wheel wells of the aging yellow bus would, upon closer inspection, turn out to be the fine, reddish powdery dust that clings to every surface here in ground zero of one of the world’s largest, and most noxious, base-metal smelters.
Jake McCool is about to climb warily down the steps of the bus, setting foot back on company property for the first time in fully five years. Hard to believe it has been that long since the freak mining accident that ended his mining career forever.
It had not been an easy time, what with his suspension from work underground, the result of strict doctor’s orders, and the years of arduous, even painful, physiotherapy sessions intended to strengthen his badly twisted back. The loss of his rich bonus earnings had proved ruinous, leading to a much-reduced lifestyle.
His beloved ’57 Chevy Biscayne—his first car—had been forfeited, and he and his girlfriend Jo Ann Winter had elected to join a “commune”—a co-op house, really—that his old friend Foley Gilpin had started up in a spacious old red-brick house near downtown Sudbury. His accident had had a grievous impact on Jo Ann, too. She had refused to leave Jake while he was still convalescing in hospital, choosing not to return to her studies at Ryerson Polytechnic in downtown Toronto.
The establishment of “The Gilpin Co-op” followed a suspicious fire that had nearly killed Foley and that had burned them out of the apartment that Jake had been sharing with Jo Ann and Gilpin.
After his mining accident Jake had been forced onto Worker’s Comp, which paid him only a fraction of his underground wages—minus the bonus, of course. The Ontario Workers’ Compensation Board had proved a hellish bureaucracy more concerned with getting Jake, and the thousands of Sudbury workers maimed and injured at Inco each year, off their payroll and back into the workforce than it was with any kind of meaningful rehabilitation or support for the injured workers in its care.
No matter how you sliced it, Jake had learned, there was a certain stigma attached to being “on Comp,” as if you were some kind of malingerer milking the system, when in fact most of his fellow claimants, like Jake himself, struggled with both chronic pain and low-level depression at the enforced idleness of being off the job, conditions that were not improved by a social status that ranked them only slightly above welfare recipients and left them in a perpetual state of rage against the all-powerful bureaucrats who ruled the WCB with absolute—and often arbitrary—authority. One year, for example, Jake and a number of his fellow Comp claimants found themselves cut off Compensation benefits altogether just before Christmas. Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can.
And so at this moment Jake is about to enter into a new kind of Hell, in his first day as a worker at the Copper Cliff nickel smelter.
“Fellas, this here’s the Number Three Dry, take your work clothes in, and change outta your street clothes.” The speaker is a small officious man in crisp new overalls wearing a white hard hat. He stands at the front of the bus between the driver and the door. He has to yell slightly to make himself heard all the way to the back of the bus.
Only then does Jake become aware of the noise outside, a low, ominous roar whose source is impossible to pinpoint—like the intense smell of sulphur, like the fine dry red powdery dust, it just is constant and all-pervasive.
Welcome to the insatiable maw of the Copper Cliff smelter.
All around him Jake’s fellow passengers are rising to their feet, identical plastic bags in hand, shuffling dutifully toward the front of the bus. Jake himself does not move. Inside the plastic bags, he knows, is the freshly-issued work clothing and safety gear assigned to each of the new hires, the price of which will be deducted from their first pay cheque. Jake is already dressed for work, attired in his miner’s garb—coveralls, hardhat, and safety boots. A stranger slides into the seat next to Jake.
“Just coming over from the mines?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Hard hat’s a dead giveaway.”
Jake felt the metal clip at the front of his hard hat, an appurtenance designed to mount a miner’s cap lamp.
“And a Mine Miller, too, I see. Put ‘er there, brother. I’m Randall McIvor.” The stranger had evidently studied Jake’s lunch pail, the Sudbury miner’s standard-issue aluminum lunch box, plastered with the stickers that told much about a man’s political pedigree—who he’d supported in the elections for Local Union President, as well as his allegiance during the recent epic inter-union battle between the Steelworkers and the Mine Mill. It was true, like his father and uncles before him, Jake was a Mine Mill supporter.
“Pleased to meet ya. I’m Jake McCool.”
The two men fell into the easy banter typical of two former miners, both secretly relieved to have met someone of their own kind on the first day of their respective assignments in this new and unfamiliar workplace. Left unsaid was the mutual realization that thei
r very presence here on the bus in the smelter yard was a considerable comedown. No hard rock miner worth his salt welcomed a transfer to a surface plant. There was no bonus pay, for one thing, and the mystique and camaraderie of a miner’s life was also lacking.
Still, they were gainfully employed and drawing a very respectable hourly wage in a heavy industry vital to the North American economy, a source of considerable pride on both counts.
“So whaddaya think of our new union?”
Jake shrugged. “Well, ’66 was a fuck-up, for sure. Not as bad as ’58 with the old Mine Mill, maybe, but still. . .” his voice trailed off.
McIvor nodded in agreement, and both men fell silent, each wrapped in his own reminiscence of the two legendary, but ultimately futile, strikes their unions had waged against the largest nickel producing company the world had ever seen. The fact was they had been badly whipped, though they had belonged to two different unions, and the reasons for their losses had varied widely. In 1958, their first strike ever, they had badly overestimated the impact their strike would have while underestimating the company’s resolve. Their union, already weakened by a decade-long running Cold War battle with the United Steelworkers Union, had run out of money for strike pay, and the proud Sudbury rank-and-file had simply been starved out, forced to return to work for the same offer the company had made before the suicidal strike began. The shame and bitterness at such resounding defeat festered, and the Mine Mill union was swept away in the recriminations that followed, voted out by the narrowest of margins after a prolonged period of raiding by the Steelworkers that became known locally simply as “The Raids,” a turbulent period of rancorous inter-union strife that had seen the Steelworkers voted in as the bargaining agents for the huge workforce of the International Nickel Company, but not at the Falconbridge Nickel Mines, Inco’s much smaller crosstown rival. The once-mighty Mine Mill Local 598 survived, but only just—as a rump and a mere shadow of its former self.
A new trade union colossus—Local 6500 of the United Steelworkers—had emerged from the ashes, its members eager for payback for the debacle of 1958. Long-simmering rank-and-file rage had bubbled over several times, usually in the form of wildcats—illegal walkouts at an individual plant or mine. But as the contract with Inco expired in 1966 a company-wide wildcat ensued, resulting in chaos and a state of anarchy on the picket lines. When a handful of liquored-up hot heads took potshots at the helicopters the company had hired to ferry managers in and out of the strikebound smelter, the action made for sensational news nation-wide. The rounds, fired from a high-powered hunting rifle, all missed, but the prospect of thousands of heavily-armed Sudbury miners—who knew how to blow things up, after all—running amok triggered an invasion by the Ontario Provincial Police, who were dispatched to Sudbury in squadrons. They soon filled every motel room in the city, and the strikers responded by slashing the tires of their patrol cars. The squadrons of OPP soon became whole platoons.
The picket lines were also beyond the union’s control, as one Local Union leader dispatched to the Frood Mine plant gate to restore order quickly discovered. Soon after his arrival he found himself staring death in the face when an angry picketer jumped into his car and began gunning it back and forth, vowing to run down any man who interfered with the picket line.
Homicide was averted when a lone picketer calmly stepped between the roaring vehicle and the union officer. But the damage was done. The company fired strikers wholesale as punishment for their participation in what was, in fact, an illegal strike. The union was forced to negotiate to win the employees back, foregoing other valuable union gains in the process. The resulting contract left much on the table, which did little to appease the widespread rank-and-file bitterness—toward both the union and the company—that was fast becoming bred in the bone.
“Wonder if we’ve learned anything since ’66?” Jake mused aloud.
This time it was McIvor’s turn to shrug. “I dunno—guess we’ll find out next year.” The impending round of bargaining was something they were all looking forward to. Nickel prices were sky high, thanks to the Vietnam War, in which the Americans were becoming ever more deeply embroiled. The U.S. had no nickel deposits of its own, but depended heavily on Sudbury as a source for this militarily vital commodity, which had fuelled a decade-long boom for the Canadian nickel capital. Neither of these facts was lost on the Sudbury rank-and-file, or on McCool and McIvor as they awaited the return of their fellow workers from the Number Three Dry.
At last, the new smelter hires clambered back onto the bus.
And the white hat, who had been impatiently tapping his clipboard with his ballpoint, once again rose to his feet. “Okay now, fellas, we’re gonna start you out with a basic tour of the Copper Cliff Smelter Complex.” He nodded to the driver, and the bus ground into gear.
“First stop,” yelled the tour guide, checking his wristwatch, “is the furnaces which are really the heart of the whole Smelter Complex!” The bus wended along a narrow, maze-like roadway between towering buildings with sides several stories high. Their curtain walls were clad in nondescript aging red brick. After travelling for some time within what Jake was beginning to realize was a truly vast industrial complex—a city within a city, really—the bus braked to another screeching halt. This time, as everyone trooped off the bus, Jake and Randall joined the mass exodus. They entered one of the brick buildings through an open door so large it resembled the entrance to an aircraft hangar.
The rotten egg reek of sulphur became as intense as Jake had ever experienced. The crew from the bus were enveloped in a cloud of the stuff so dense it made their eyes water.
Yet somehow their tour guide seemed oblivious to the gas, noise and stink that assaulted all their senses so unpleasantly in an almost nauseating rush. Instead, he beamed at them with an expression that conjured almost filial pride and affection.
“Okay, fellas, I see we’re just in time to witness something very, very special. It’s a sight you don’t see every day and that very few Canadians have ever seen, at all—the tapping of a furnace here at the Copper Cliff Smelter.” He gestured toward an imposing wall several stories tall lined with a bewildering array of pipes and hoses. Eventually a solitary figure, garbed in a long, reflective silver robe and wearing a spaceman-style helmet approached the wall. In addition to the helmet, his face was further protected by the kind of heavy visor Jake had seen welders use.
The heavily protected figure carried a long metal rod, which he began to poke into the wall. It seemed an impossible quest at first—one human being probing, and by hand, yet!—an apparently impregnable wall several times his own height. But he seemed to know what he was about, and finally an impossibly bright light gleamed through the smallest aperture in the wall. At this point a second figure emerged, running onto the scene, bearing a heavy metal shield nearly as tall as he was. He interposed himself between the probing worker with the long pole and the wall.
The initial figure, meanwhile, had continued to twist the end of his probe around the tiny breach he’d created, opening a fissure wide enough to allow a flow of liquid the likes of which Jake had never seen—or, at least, not up this close.
The spectacle of the molten liquid flowing like lava was breathtaking in its intensity—at once too hot and bright to look directly at, and yet too dazzling to ignore.
Jake was reminded of a night long ago, when he and his girlfriend Jo Ann had parked beneath the slag heaps that flanked the smelter to make out while watching the pouring of the slag, a standard weekend Sudbury ritual for amorous couples. “So is that the slag, then?” Jake addressed his question to their tour guide, who had positioned himself at Jake’s elbow for some reason.
“No, sir! That’s the good stuff—what we call matte.” White Hat pitched his voice below the smelter’s roar, so he could speak into Jake’s ear with something approaching a normal speaking level.
Jake nodded. Of course. The molten stuff was being carefully collected into some kind of ladle, he
could see that now, which would not seem to be the case with slag.
“The furnace separates the matte from the slag—the matte floats to the top and the heavier slag sinks to the bottom,” the White Hat explained. “An experienced furnace operator learns to distinguish one from the other while he’s tapping just by watching the flow. The matte is still only about six per cent pure, though. But that’s still much better than when it arrived from the mill as concentrate.”
Jake nodded again. This much he understood. The point of the entire procedure with its titanic technology and almost otherworldly alchemy was to remove impurities from the sulphur-laced muck he blasted out of the mine and to extrude only the purest metals—nickel, most of all, but also copper and cobalt, and even precious metals—gold, silver and platinum.
“All right, everyone. Let’s get back on the bus and go visit the next stage in the process—matte processing.”
Once they had resumed their seats, Mr. White Hat turned to face them once again. As subtly as he could he cleared his throat before speaking, which Jake took as the slightest sign that even he, the ever-crisp, ever-smiling White Hat was not quite as oblivious to the smelter fumes, gas and dust as he let on. Jake’s own nostrils, lungs and chest felt packed with the nasty stuff. The sounds of coughing and throat clearing could now be heard throughout the bus. “Okay, fellas next we’ll see where the smelter matte goes after it leaves the Furnace Department—to Matte Processing, and the converter aisles.”
Again the bus wound a bewildering course between grimy red-brick buildings, all of which looked the same to Jake. After a briefer passage it stopped, and they all shuffled dutifully off behind White Hat, still toting his clipboard. As they were about to enter another building he turned to face them. “This is where the smelter matte comes for further reduction to remove still more impurities—the converter aisle. The converter aisles of the Copper Cliff smelter are the longest converter aisles in the world, by the way.” He spoke with an unmistakable pride, and turned to lead them into the building.