The Cardinal Divide (10 page)

Their stalemate was interrupted by Peggy McSorlie's voice from the stoop of the house. “Time to get started again, folks.”

The two men regarded each other. Then Dale said, “Peggy hired you to help us, and I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. I know you've won some battles. You got the scars to prove
it,” Dale grinned. “But at the end of the day, this is our fight. It's my fight. Win or lose, you get paid, and go back to Vancouver, and move on to the next client. But we're stuck here. We've got to stay. It's our backyard. I aim to do what I have to do to win.”

Cole smiled at the man. “I'll do everything I can to help you,” he said, putting his hand on the big man's shoulder and guiding him toward the door. “Let's get back at it,” he said congenially. It was truly dangerous to have a man like Dale van Stempvort involved on this campaign. Dale van Stempvort seemed to Cole to be a man whose hatred made him capable of almost anything.

A telephone rang. Where was he? In the unfamiliar darkness he probed for clues. No streetlights, no sirens, no car horns. Not Vancouver. He peered around the room. Rim Rock Motel. Oracle, Alberta. The phone – he fumbled for it, knocked it off the bedside stand onto the floor. It rang yet. He bent over, sheets twisted around his legs, reached for the receiver, and pressed it to his face.

“Hello,” he said finally, groggily, into the mouthpiece.

“Cole?”

“This is Cole Blackwater.”

“Oh hi, Cole, it's Peggy McSorlie. Did I wake you? I'm sorry, it's just that – ”

“It's
OK
, Peggy,” interrupted Cole, “I'm sure that the day is already well underway,” he mumbled. He looked at the clock on the bedstand, where the phone had once stood. It was 8:30
AM
. He closed his eyes.

“Anyway, I'm sorry to call so early, but we've got a problem.”

Second day on the job, he thought, and we already have a problem. “What is it?”

“Well, it's Dale.”

“What has he done?” said Cole, rising up on an elbow.

“I think you had better read the Red Deer newspaper and then call me back, Cole.”

“You can't tell me over the phone what it is?”

“I can, but I think you'll want to read it anyway.”

“How bad?”

“Pretty bad.”

Cole grumbled something under his breath. Then, “
OK
, I'll pick up the paper and call you back.”

He hung up the phone.

He walked stiffly to the shower and, without turning the light on in the bathroom, stepped in and turned the water on as hot as he could stand. He put one hand against the tiled wall under the shower head and let the other hand hang at his side. The hot water blasted over his head, neck, and shoulders and ran down his back and chest. He stood that way for five minutes, letting the water revive him.

He had left Peggy McSorlie's around 7
PM
the previous night, picked up a sandwich and sixpack in town, and came straight
back to the Rim Rock Motel. While his laptop slowly downloaded his email (dialup, no wireless for the Rim Rock) he washed and changed into clean clothes and quickly read the day's headlines on
The Globe and Mail
's web site. He drank a beer, sorted his email, responded to a few messages, and then took a look at his notes from the day. He ate his sandwich, drank two more beers, and by 10
PM
had typed his notes and ordered his thoughts, mentally and on paper.

He watched
The National
on television, drank his last two beers, and then, finding no solace in Peter Mansbridge's dulcet tones, ventured downstairs to The Quarry for a nightcap. The bar was as crowded and noisy as the night before, as comforting as a home away from home. After his perfunctory scan of the joint, he bellied up to the bar and drank two Jamesons, neat, while chatting with George Cody about the Canucks' chances, and whether or not Calgary and Edmonton were playoff contenders.

It was an educational conversation. He learned that George
had
played football, but only in university, and at his own admission, he wasn't very good. He had been a running back. “Big,” he had said, “but not very fast.” Not fast enough to go pro.

Cole learned that George had met Deborah while working in Fort McMurray, before the tar sands boom, and the two had migrated further west, bound for
BC
, when they had stopped in Oracle and learned that the Rim Rock and its adjacent bar were for sale, the owner in some kind of financial trouble. They scrapped together money they had saved, bought it, and stayed.

Then Cole had a chance to try out his own story, telling George that he was a freelance business writer interested in the Buffalo Anthracite Mine, and the new project they're working on at the McLeod River. Cole had studied George's reaction: the big man had nodded, rubbed his moustache and said that “project might work, if that new hot shot they've got running the show out there gets his head out of his ass and looks out for the mine and the community, not just the company, or his own self. If that new project doesn't pan out, we'll have to change the name of this place.”

Cole had raised an eyebrow in inquiry.

“Call it the Watering Hole or the Trout Pond, not The Quarry. For the tourists. If that mine closes, we're going to have to hope
that the tourists heading to Jasper find this joint appealing, or Deb and I will be on the road again.”

By the time Cole returned to his room it was 2
AM
and he was comfortably drunk. He slept deeply but not for long enough. The hot shower was slowly easing the previous night's poison from his body and brain. A coffee would help.

He stepped from the shower, towelled off, and dressed in the bedroom. He opened the curtains and winced at the daylight. Alberta is bright, he remembered. He had been on the coast long enough to grow accustomed to weeks without seeing the sun.

He swallowed two Advils with a slug of water (breakfast of champions) and stepped into the day. He walked to the front office to find a newspaper. Deborah greeted him warmly.

“Good morning,” she said, beaming.

“You always behind that desk?” Cole asked, mustering a smile.

“Almost,” she said, and she winked at him. He hoped it was a sharing-the-joke kind of wink. Or just a charming but innocent habit. Not a come-up-and-see-me-sometime kind of wink.

He cleared his throat. “Have you got today's paper?”

“Well, the local rag doesn't come out 'til Thursday,” she said. “But the Red Deer paper's daily. There are a few on the table there.” She pointed to the coffee table by the fireplace.

“Can I take one?” he asked.

“Be my guest,” she smiled.

He grabbed a paper and beat a hasty retreat. He walked the four blocks to the highway and made his way to the Tim Hortons to read the news and coffee up. The place was quiet. By nine most of Oracle's working class was already at the mill, at the mine, or in the woods. He sat at a table by the window, drank his coffee, and flipped through the paper.

There it was. “Greens gear up to fight new mine,” read the headline.

Cole sipped his coffee and scanned the story.

A coalition of local activists, small business owners, and scientists is preparing to go head to head with Athabasca Coal, the proponent of the McLeod River Mine, located south and west of the town of Oracle.

The group hopes to stop in its tracks plans for a new open-pit mine that will extract 30 million tonnes of coking coal in the region, saying that the mine will destroy wildlife habitat and put Jasper National Park at risk.

That's good, thought Cole. They got the small business owners and scientists angle in, so it's not just a bunch of berry-suckers doing the whining.

But local Mine Manager Mike Barnes says that the company has every intention of protecting fish and wildlife in the region, and says that the new mine will actually enhance local populations of wildlife in the long run.

Barnes says that the open pits will be reclaimed so that after the mine closes in thirty years, there will be a series of lakes that will be stocked with trout, and the slopes levelled and seeded for sheep habitat.

Barnes adds that the local economy, in a slump since a previous mine project was scuttled nearly a decade ago, needs this project to stay afloat. “We're talking about our kids' future,” says Barnes, who has been the Manager at Athabasca Coal's existing Buffalo Anthracite Mine for six months.

Not so good, thought Cole. This guy Barnes knows his stuff. He got a line in the paper about economy and kids practically in the same sentence. The story went on:

But local activist Dale van Stempvort ...

Rats, thought Cole.

...says that the mine is a “disgrace and an abomination,” and that activists are developing a plan to stop it. When asked what they had planned, van Stempvort said that no plan had been finalized yet, but that he was “willing to do anything necessary to keep the mine out of Cardinal Divide.”

Cole stopped reading. He put down the paper and looked out the window. His job just got a lot harder.

He dialled Peggy McSorlie's number on his cellphone and listened to it ring. She answered the phone.

“I've read it,” he said without saying hello. “I told you,” he said angrily.

“I know you did. What can we do?”

“Nothing, I guess,” he sighed. “I think we're just going to have to carry on with our plan of yesterday.”

“
OK
,” agreed McSorlie.

“But it's like he wasn't even there. Wasn't even listening when we talked about keeping a lid on this for a while. What did he do, call the reporter from his truck as he was leaving? He would have had to make the print deadline.”

Peggy was silent a moment. “I'm sorry, Cole.”

“No, I'm the one who should be sorry. I should have come down a little harder on him.”

“It wouldn't have helped.”

“Likely not,” he said, less angrily. “
OK,
well, on with the show.”

“You're still going to call Mike Barnes and ask to see him?”

“More reason now than ever. In fact, in some ways, this fits well with my cover story.”

“And what about Dale? Should I call him?”

Cole thought a moment. “No, let me. I can lean on him a little without risking a long-term relationship.”

They said goodbye and hung up.

Cole sipped his coffee. Then he checked his Palm Pilot for the mine office number and dialled it, taking a deep breath as he did.

“Buffalo Anthracite Mine. Sophie speaking.”

“Mike Barnes, please.”

“Just a moment.” Cole waited while the call was transferred.

“Mike Barnes' office. Tracey speaking,” said a woman with a cool voice.

“This is Cole Blackwater calling,” he said. “I'd like to make an appointment with Mr. Barnes.”

“Will he know what it's about, sir?”

“I don't think so. I'm a business writer and I'm interested in doing a story on Mr. Barnes and the McLeod River project.”

“
OK
, let me see.” After a minute she returned. “Mr. Barnes is
in meetings all morning, sir. Would you like to talk with Mr. Henderson, our Assistant Mine Manager instead?”

“No thanks,” said Cole, “and I'm not in that much of a rush. I was hoping for an hour or so of Mr. Barnes' time, face to face.”

Cole made a mental note to see if Henderson's position on things was just the same.

“Well, he could see you at the end of the day today,” she said.

“That would be fine,” replied Cole. “What time?”

“Five?”

“That would be great.”

“
OK
, I'll leave your name at security. They'll give you directions to the administration building. You know how to get to the mine site?”

He said he didn't, and she told him.

He hung up. That was easier than he'd expected. No questions about which magazine, no questions about his credentials. But then, why should there be? There was no reason for the mine to suspect that the local activists had brought him in as a hired gun to help them stop the new mine. Not yet, he reasoned.

He sipped his coffee, now nearly cold. He looked up Dale van Stempvort's number in his Palm. How would he handle this call? Clearly van Stempvort had violated the group's wish for confidentiality, and only a few hours after assuring Blackwater that he would do no such thing. Cole looked at the number. This call required more caffeine. He went to the counter and ordered another coffee and another doughnut. He sat back down and wondered what might motivate van Stempvort.

In his years as an activist, Cole Blackwater had rarely worked on a file where someone like Dale van Stempvort didn't show up as a fly in the ointment. People's motives for working to protect the environment were complex. While nearly everyone who volunteered to protect places like the Cardinal Divide did it for noble reasons – protect nature, leave a legacy, care for wildlife – some people's motives had nothing to do with the environment at all. The environmental movement was by nature an outsider's game. And outsiders came in all shapes and sizes.

Along with the everyday people who simply cared about nature, Cole Blackwater believed that the movement did attract its share of people who were disenfranchised by society, who were
mentally ill, or who simply felt that the way to get attention was to stand out by speaking out. More often than not these people took drastic positions, looking for media attention, or created conflicts within environmental groups, choosing infighting over working to solve the real problems. Had these people lived in the nineteenth century, they would have circled the wagons and shot
in
.