The Cardinal Divide (15 page)

“Hey there,” he said.

The man stopped and looked up. “Who the hell are you?”

Funny way of greeting a stranger, thought Cole. “Cole Black-water,” he said, uncertain if a handshake was called for.

“What do you want?”

“I've got a meeting with Mike Barnes,” Cole said.

The man sneered. “College boy,” he spat.

Cole paused.

“Well, don't just stand there,” the man spat again. “Go on up and see his eminence.”

Cole forced a smile and walked past him to the doors.

“You that reporter?” he heard the man ask, over his shoulder.

Cole stopped, hand on the door. “Yep, that's me.”

“Right,” said the man, and headed down the stairs to his pickup.

Friendly fellow, thought Cole, feeling the panic around his meeting grow in his stomach.

Cole stepped into the administration building. There was a wood-panelled desk that held a computer and a telephone, but no receptionist. The walls were bare, the space inhospitable. A woman walked out of an office adjacent the entrance and strode toward him. She was attractive, dressed in black pants and a grey, form-fitting turtleneck over which she was donning a coat. She looked at Cole and said, “You must be his 5
PM
.”

“I'm Cole Blackwater, and I'm here to see Mr. Barnes, if that's what you mean,” he said with a weak smile.

“It's what I mean,” she said, smiling back. “I'm Tracey, Mr. Barnes' assistant. We talked on the phone. He's on the fourth floor. No elevator. Stairs are at either end of the hall.”

“Who was that angry little man who just left?” Cole asked as she passed him.

“Oh, that was Hank Henderson,” Tracey said, smiling. “Our assistant mine manager. He's all charm, isn't he?” she said. She smiled again as she exited. A whiff of her perfume was all that remained. She walked down the stairs to the black Toyota Celica in the lot.

Cole looked for the stairs and found them at the end of a hall past a row of empty offices. The staircase was wide, with polished wooden railings with brass fittings on either side. He climbed to the fourth floor, aware that his heart rate was higher than he'd like, and headed down the hall toward the centre of the building, looking for the mine manager's office. The fourth floor offices were mostly empty; their vacancy seemed stark and unsettling. In the centre of the building was a reception area. A man sat behind the desk and typed at a computer. He was mid-thirties, clean-shaven, with short, blonde hair styled in a modern cut that struck Cole as being distinctly out of place in Oracle, Alberta. His dark green shirt was open at the neck and he wore no coat. Small wire-rimmed glasses made him look both a little nerdy and intelligent.

Cole presented himself. “I'm here to see Mr. Barnes. I'm Cole Blackwater.”

The man swivelled his chair to face Cole. “So you are,” he said, and stood. “And you're looking at him. Glad to meet you.”

Cole shook the hand. It was dry and firm. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

“I was just checking some email. Note from my family. They're on their way here next week.”

“I'm sorry to interrupt.”

“No no, not at all. I was expecting you. Come, let's sit down in my office. Tracey just left for the day, so I was just using her computer. Mine is on the fritz. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get a computer fixed in Oracle. No big deal, really. I keep my appointments in my old fashioned Day-Timer, and can always bum Tracey's machine. He closed the email window but not before Cole spied a photo of Barnes with a beautiful woman and two picture-perfect children.

“Nice looking group,” Cole said.

“Sure are.”

“You must miss them.”

“I do,” said Barnes. “Come, let's sit down.” Barnes held the door to his office open. This room was very large, with windows that looked over the back of the compound and to the foothills beyond. There was a desk in one corner, a board table in the other, and in the centre of the room several leather chairs and couches were clustered around a low wooden table which held a pitcher and several glasses. The room was much more elegant than others he'd seen, its dark wood-panelled walls lit by the sunlight that even at this hour poured through a bank of windows.

Cole stepped into the room. Into the lion's den, he thought.

“I know you're not a reporter.” Mike Barnes spoke calmly as they sat down and faced one another.

Cole nodded, and slowly inhaled a long, slow breath to calm himself.

“It was a pretty stupid idea, actually,” said Barnes, watching carefully for Cole's reaction. “I had Tracey do a web search on your name when you called. I try to keep informed. It took a little digging. It seems you don't have your own home page. But she found a reference to your name on a First Nations website out on the coast. She called them and asked about you. She told them she was checking references. They were very effusive. You must be good at what you do. Aside from masquerading as a reporter, I mean.”

Cole smiled ruefully in appreciation of Barnes' thoroughness.

“My guess is that you're in town to work for the environmentalists, and that you'd like to get inside the mine to scope us, use something to stop us. Know thy enemy stuff. Am I right?”

Cole cleared his throat, and made to rise from his chair. “So, I guess I'll be going now.” He grinned.

“What for? Sit down. Let's talk.”

“Really?” said Cole cautiously, dropping back into his seat.

“Sure. The best way for us to solve our differences is to talk them through. No?”

Cole sat back down. He gestured to the pitcher on the table. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all, here, let me,” said Barnes and he poured Cole a tall glass of water. Cole sipped.

“It might come as a surprise to you to know that I don't think this community should be so dependent on mining. I guess we're likely in agreement on that.”

Cole choked on the sip of water in his mouth and nearly spat it across the table. What was Barnes going to say next, that he planned to take out a membership in
ESC
o
G
?

“I mean it. Oracle has been a one-horse town since it started. Sure, it's got the lumber mill, but how many people work out there? Fifty? Seventy-five tops. The Buffalo employs five hundred and in its heyday more like a thousand people worked in the mine. That was all fine and dandy in the nineteen fifties, but this is the twenty-first century, and Oracle can't rely on coal forever. Don't get me wrong.

I don't think the market for coal is going to dry up. On the contrary, I think it's going to continue to grow. China, India, Brazil ... these countries are the next wave of the industrial revolution. China alone will keep the market for metallurgical coal hot for the next fifty years. The problem isn't demand, though newer technology means we don't need as much coal to make steel as we did before. No, it's not demand that's going to kill us. It isn't even supply. There's lots of coal left, thought it's a little bit trickier to get at now. We've got to dig deeper, which costs more. No, the problem is competition.” Mike Barnes poured himself a glass of water and took a sip.

Cole sized up Barnes. He was a sturdy enough man, possibly cruiserweight, though Cole doubted he'd ever thrown a punch in his life. He was fit, tanned. He probably liked to mountain bike on his days off. His hands were strong but smooth and well taken care of. His strength was born from his morning workout, not from slaving in the mill as the rest of the men in Oracle had.

“Competition will be our downfall. The Buffalo Anthracite Mine simply can't complete against less expensive, more productive mines elsewhere in the world,” continued Barnes. “We simply can't compete with low production costs off shore.”

“Do you mean Indonesia and other developing economies?” asked Cole.

“Sure. There are plenty of countries where coal is mined and milled for a lower cost than in North America. We pay ourselves too well. We have high standards for workplace safety. And though you may not agree with this, we have tough environmental regulations. All of those factors put a huge onus on the company to spend money on up-front measures to minimize our impact, and on remediation and mitigation. It all adds up.”

“Back up a little,” Cole interrupted. “You
bet
I don't agree with you about high environmental standards. High maybe if you compare us to Peru or Burma.”

“It's all relative,” said Mike Barnes, smiling. “My point is, this mine will have a declining presence in the local economy.
Has
had a declining impact on the local economy for more than a decade. People just refuse to see it. Acknowledge it. Oracle needs to accept this and learn how other similar economies have diversified, and take measures now to ensure its future, or it can dry up and blow away.”

Every word out of Barnes' mouth sounded familiar. He could have been listening to Cole's conversation with Peggy McSorlie after the strategy session. He smiled.

“What is it?” asked Barnes.

“You're singing from the same song sheet as my employer. How strange is that?”

“Peggy McSorlie? Smart lady. People should listen to her.”

“Some do, some don't.”

“Problem with
ESC
o
G
is that they're fighting below their weight class. They think like kitchen-table locals. And the disreputable elements in the group don't exactly win them any friends in town. And if you think I don't have to listen to those disreputable sorts even in here,” he looked around the room, “you're mistaken. Anybody who asks for a meeting here gets one. Even Dale van Stempvort.”

Cole nodded, sipped his water, cleared his throat, and replied: “We both agree that Oracle needs to diversify its economy. Don't clearcut and send your trees overseas for someone else to make them into Ikea furniture. Set up secondary manufacturing right here. Every man who works at this mine or at the mill has a basement full of tools. Imagine the stuff they could build. Someone else can do the marketing. This creates new businesses in town, generates money for the local economy. Guys are afraid that if they give up mining and logging they'll be flipping burgers or telecommuting to Calgary or leaving home to slave in the oil sands. But a town like Oracle has options. A small-scale manufacturing economy values skills and rewards them with good-paying work. But big companies like Athabasca Coal get in the way.

“I agree,” said Barnes.

“You agree?”

“I do. We create a dependence on our employment for the people of this town. Everybody in Oracle, in some way, needs us to make a living. Am I right?”

“You're right, but there's more. You frighten people so they fight change.”

Barnes shrugged. “We don't do that on purpose. There's no sinister plot. We don't pass out leaflets that tell our employees to fear change.”

Cole leaned forward, “Actually, Mr. Barnes ...”

“It's Mike.”

“
OK
, Mike, I've seen that happen. Maybe not here, but in other company towns.”

Barnes shrugged again. “I won't argue with you. But people are afraid of change by nature. If you're making seventy or eighty thousand a year punching the clock at the mine, driving a nice truck to work, with a big house for your wife and kids, it's pretty hard to imagine yourself going into business for yourself and making four-poster beds to sell over the internet.”

Cole stood up and walked to the windows. He looked out over the mine site to the forested hills beyond. “Here's another thing,” said Cole, noticing how the evening light slanted across the spruce and fir forest. “Oracle wants to bill itself as the gateway to Jasper National Park instead of the gateway to a humongous hole in the ground.”

Mike Barnes allowed himself a smile. “Think, Cole. To get to their second homes in Canmore, Calgarians don't mind driving right past Exshaw where Lafarge and others have been levelling an entire mountain and grinding it up into cement. And the millions of tourists who visit Banff National Park drive right past that hole in the rock too. Canmore's growth isn't slowing one iota, despite the plume of cement factory exhaust and the massive scar on Grotto Mountain. Mining certainly hasn't hurt Canmore's prospects. Maybe it's even helped.”

Cole heard the words, but right now his attention was riveted to the hills, their shapes and shadows. “Yes, Mike, you're absolutely right. But there's bears in them there hills.” He pointed and Mike's gaze followed his fingers. “I happen to believe strongly that to have a diverse economy Oracle's got to keep some of the ecological pieces intact. It's got to be a place where grizzly bears are protected, not persecuted. That's part of the whole picture.”

“But it's not up to Athabasca Coal alone to protect them, Cole. This town has to want a future other than mining if this is going to work.”

“So why are you pushing so hard for the McLeod River project? There's a disconnect between what you're telling me and what you're doing.”

“At the end of the day, Cole, I've got a job to do. That job is to
ensure that through this operation, the best interests of Athabasca Cole are served.”

“So there is no middle ground?”

Mike Barnes stood, put his hands in his pockets, and walked to the windows. Cole wondered if Mike Barnes saw the same thing that he did. Was their view of the world so different?

“Cole, I'm not going to lie to you. We plan to push ahead with the McLeod River project. That's in the best interest of Athabasca Coal. We aim to have the road built this fall, and the rail line soon after. We intend to minimize our impacts on wildlife. Maybe your friends at
ESC
o
G
can give us some help with that. I'd promise to deal with any recommendations they make myself. But we're not going to pull the plug on this operation. I'm sorry, Cole.”