Article Database - Coal Branch Reflection

It is cloudy, wet, and cold when I reach Cadomin on Friday, July 30. I'm glad I brought my parka. Here, on the margin between the foothills and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains (elevation: 1,500 metres, more or less) mid-summer snowfalls are not unheard of.

I drive past hundreds of recreational vehicles parked along makeshift streets and around informal family compounds. Hand-lettered signs identified families, family members, and the Coal Branch communities where the travellers had once lived. Come rain, come snow, come shine (come what may) the guests of honour are here, and the fifth Coal Branch reunion will take place as scheduled.

This is my first reunion, but many here have participated in all four of the gatherings that have taken place since 1985. Former Coal Branch residents started meeting for dances, dinners and picnics in the late 1950s, usually in Edmonton where many had moved when Coal Branch mines shut down at the beginning of that decade. After 1959, a newly formed Coal Branch Club organized more or less annual social events for Coal Branchers, as they came to call themselves.

The Coal Branch Club organized the first reunion in 1985, hoping that an opportunity to revisit the mountains and foothills that had been an essential part of life on the Coal Branch would attract more participants from further afield. They were right: the third reunion, in 1995, drew 3,000 visitors¾an impressive turnout, given the fact that the combined population of all Coal Branch communities probably never exceeded 12,000. This year's attendance is a bit smaller, possibly due to the cold weather, almost certainly due to the passage of time. It has been almost fifty years since the first major closure, at Mountain Park (1951), almost 40 years since the largest single closure, at Mercoal (1959); even those who were children at the time are now approaching middle age. Those who worked in the mines and raised families in the communities are now in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Many are dead.

The next reunion is scheduled for 2005, the year of Alberta's centennial; I wonder how many original Coal Branchers will be alive and able to attend.

An original Coal Brancher is someone who lived or worked on the Coal Branch until the last of the original mines closed in 1962. I qualify by both criteria. My father found work as a boiler fireman in the powerhouse at the Foothills mine in 1948. I lived in Foothills until 1952, when I left to attend high school near Edmonton. But I returned for three summers to work as a "bull cook," cleaning the single men's bunkhouse and the washhouse where the miners changed into and out of their work clothes and showered after work.

The first people I meet on arrival are Terry (MacKay) Teibe and her sister, Nola Gietz, who lived in Mercoal until that mine closed in 1959. Though they were only eight and six when they left, along with their parents and two sisters, their roots are planted deeply and firmly in Coal Branch soil. Both live in Edmonton, but they say they feel happiest near their childhood home. "Whenever I see those mountains," says Nola, "I feel I've come home." Terry and Nola have use of a cottage in Cadomin and spend as much time as they can in their special place, sharing their childhood "home" with spouses and children who seem to appreciate the recreational opportunities of the place without feeling rooted there the way Terry and Nola do.

The homing instinct is strong among original Coal Branchers. Though this is my first reunion, I have returned often to fish; stalk the shy, elusive, fabulously tasty wild huckleberry; hike the back trails; or, often, just sit quietly and alone in the woods, listening to the wind in the treetops. There are other places in the Alberta foothills where such communion is possible, but only one¾the middle and upper reaches of the Lovett River¾that I think of as mine, as home. I have shared this special place with my children and a few very special people in my life, and I have asked them to scatter my ashes there when I die.

McLeod River in flood, Cadomin, Alberta. ca. 1950

I cherish my spiritual home on the Coal Branch for its solitude, its tranquility and the opportunities for transformation that I still seek and often find there. Others, like Agnes Brennan, cherish the sense of community that enriched Coal Branch life when the mines were still operating, and that has fuelled the desire of many Coal Branchers to keep in touch since the mines closed. Brennan served for many years as president of the Coal Branch Club and has helped organize all of the Coal Branch reunions.

The sense of community has several roots, most obviously in the shared trauma of the latter-day removals and clearances that followed the closing of the mines. Feelings of community are also nourished by the nature of mining itself. An anonymous Mountain Park Coal Brancher explains the relationship simply and eloquently in the souvenir book for the 1999 reunion:

Our memories tell us that the miners carried their mutual need to trust and be trusted out of the pits into communities that were ethnically and socially diverse. Coal Branchers came from many parts of Canada and Europe, and they mixed harmoniously in community activities and social events.

Sports (baseball and softball in summer, hockey and figure skating in winter) and other do-it-yourself entertainments were always popular. Movies were a rare luxury. Radio was primitive, fading in and out according to the season, time of day, weather and unpredictable idiosyncrasies of batteries and vacuum tubes. Television was unknown. Life, and the good things it might offer were-literally-what people made of them; better to have a thing rough and home-made than not to have it at all.

Coal Branch communities existed in a kind of splendid isolation. For much of the year, especially during winter and the spring rainy season, the only practical way to travel was by rail--three days a week, following a schedule that told more about when the train would not come than when it would.

We lived off the beaten path, at or near the end of the railway and a rough, rutted road. But it was not a dead end; rather, it was open and alive, a beginning. I remember climbing, on summer days, to a high point and looking out over a vast wilderness that I filled and explored in my mind, sometimes with fear but mostly with wonder and imagination. What lay within the horizon was every bit as magical, mysterious and compelling as what lay beyond.

Perhaps I make the old Coal Branch seem a lost paradise where people worked harder at getting along than at getting ahead. Not so Elio Menis, whose unsentimental perspective is refreshing: "I'll tell you why people come to these reunions," he responds to my question. "These people led a sheltered life here. They didn't have much, but they had everything they needed. They didn't have to compete. They didn't know how to compete. Then things changed when the mines closed. It wasn't easy. Suddenly they had to compete for everything. Coming to these reunions is like reliving old times." Elio's unsentimental perspective is softened by apparent affection for "these people," among whom he clearly includes himself; he has attended every reunion so far, and plans to return in 2005.

Preserving legacies is an emerging concern for Coal Branchers. This year's reunion concluded with the dedication of a memorial to the mines and communities of the Coal Branch: a large map of the area designed, financed, and installed by members of the Coal Branch Club. Located near the entrance to the original Cadomin mine, the memorial is simple and unpretentious, a fitting tribute to the Coal Branch tradition of making the best of what you have.

Earlier, the Mountain Park contingent had hosted a short memorial service at the Mountain Park cemetery, the only identifiable remnant of the original community, which now lies within the boundary of the proposed Cheviot open pit mine development. The proponents have promised to preserve the cemetery, but former residents hope the province will designate the landmark as an historic site, giving added assurance that the last identifiable remnant of the original community will survive.

Some (though not all) Mountain Park people actively oppose the controversial Cheviot proposal, hoping to protect for future generations a natural heritage that enriched their own lives. Currently stalled in the environmental approval process, the Cheviot mine represents a new set of challenges and dilemmas for Coal Branchers. The original mines may be long gone, except in the memory, but Coal Branchers know that mining is not and never has been an environmentally benign activity; it leaves scars on the landscape, and scars from the original mines are still visible. But things seem different now.

Resource development in the area did not cease when the original mines closed; it still goes on, at a scale and a pace that exceed anything that happened during the first 50 years. And both the scale and the pace of development are increasing rapidly.

Beyond their magnitude, the thing that separates current activities on the Coal Branch is a limestone quarry at Cadomin, open pit mines at Luscar and Coal Valley, petroleum exploration and development everywhere, clearcut logging throughout the area¾from the activities of the past is their impersonal character. The "resource workers" who now dominate the Coal Branch do not live there. Most live in Edson or Hinton and commute to work by bus. They do not make their homes, neither do they raise their children nor bury their dead, on the land where they work; that may not be their choice, nevertheless it is their reality. There is no sense of shared community and no opportunity for communion with the environment that supports their activities.

The original Coal Branch offered its miners and their families a way of life that, though inherently destructive, was dignified and redeemed by the effort and danger involved, by the human scale of the operations, and by the relationships that grew out of them. Today's industrial-scale operations offer a fortunate few a way to earn a living, nothing more; they take much and give little back. Efforts at "reclamation," when they occur, are more like environmental band-aids than means of renewal and regeneration.

Somewhere, somehow, out of my experiences on the Coal Branch and elsewhere, I acquired an ethic that enjoins me to live life in a way that leaves the people I meet and the places I settle better for my having known them. The corporate and government entities that run today's Coal Branch operate by a different ethic based on systematic extraction: take what you can as quickly as you can; give nothing back that you are not forced to return. The landscape is poorer for their presence. Its resources and the wealth they generate enrich far corners of the world, the country and the province; they do not come back to their origins unless to finance continued exploitation.

Sunday, on my way home from the reunion, I stop by the Lovett River campground, as I do whenever I am in the area. I encounter the Berniers, a family that once lived at Foothills. More than 40 strong, they are holding a private reunion to celebrate the life of Phil Bernier, the family patriarch, and to leave his ashes where he had loved to fish and hunt half a century and more ago. During a short conversation, I learn that the Coal Valley mine is planning to expand into hitherto untouched landscapes that they and I cherish.

In the following weeks, I realize that my relationship with the Coal Branch has become a race between my own mortality and impersonal (some would say, objective and inevitable) forces of change and economic development that will finally alter the landscape so completely that I will not be able to recognize or accept the result. It is a race I am not anxious to win and do not want to lose.

I know that the Coal Branch will live on, if it survives at all, as a footnote to Alberta's history. Economically, it was insignificant by current standards. Environmentally, it looks good only when compared to the way things are done now. Socially, the legacy is already weak, and getting weaker. Soon after the reunion, I met Agnes Brennan's son, Blair, and his three daughters. He has pleasant memories of childhood visits to the Coal Branch, and he knows it has special significance for his mother. But he hasn't been back since his daughters were born. He has been too busy living his own life, finding his own special places, storing up his own memories.

Agnes Brennan says, "Once a Coal Brancher, you are never not a Coal Brancher." I like that thought, and the way it is phrased; it offers identity, yet it embraces all possibilities and denies none. Maybe that is what places in the heart are for, and why we need them.