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November/December 1999 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Cape Breton coal Whale-eating bears

In 1976, in a humid Beijing summer, the Men of the Deeps swarmed up the wide steps of the Forbidden City. Somewhere inside that vast and mysterious complex Chairman Mao lay dying, though nobody knew it then. Cape Breton’s famous coal—miners’ chorus was making the first tour of mainland China by a Canadian cultural group, and officially — because no journalists were allowed — I was just another member of the chorus.

Down deep in a coal mine, underneath the ground
Where a ray of sunshine
never can be found digging dusky diamonds all the seasons round.

When the Phalen mine in New Waterford, N.S., closed in September, hundreds of miners, including Wayne Rose, 40, who has worked underground for 22 years, were out of a job but too young to collect a pension. His sons, Tyler (top) and Christopher, wonder what the future holds for them.

The Men of the Deeps had been formed 10 years earlier as a Centennial project, a means of preserving the memory of Cape Breton’s dying coal mines by singing their songs. Since then, OPEC had quadrupled the price of oil, the federal government was frantic to reduce Eastern Canada’s dependency on oil imports, and coal had roared back to life. I see the miners still in memory, entering the Forbidden City, striding along the Great Wall, singing in the Chinese coal towns of Tangshan and Fushun. They wear white T—shirts with a bold black legend on the back. COAL, it says, NO FUEL LIKE AN OLD FUEL.

I picked up the miners’ songs by standing among the first tenors, mouthing the words and listening carefully as the others sang close by my ear — men like Johnny MacLeod, an easygoing, wiry little man of 47. Most of them were middle—aged, because the mines had hired no new miners for years. MacLeod had been "down the pit" since 1952, when he was 23. He had wanted to be a miner even earlier, but the mines weren’t hiring then, so — like thousands of others before and after — he had left Cape Breton for Ontario. He got a job with the Acme Screw and Gear Company, and the first three of his seven children were born in Toronto.

Before mining techniques changed in the late 1980s, miners risked serious injury from collapsing roofs by drilling holes for explosives in the stone ceilings of coal tunnels

"Ah, but the ache is there when you’re away," he says. "You ache for your neighbours and your friends and your family. I wouldn’t want to go back to Toronto and do the job that I was doing there, standing in the same place at the nuts and bolts machines all day long. No, no, no." In the mine you were a team of men working together, he says, doing different tasks, responsible for your own work, proud of what you did. "There’d be times when you’d be waiting for something to happen, and you’d be talking, telling stories, playing tarabish, you know."

Tarabish is a Cape Breton card game probably imported from the Middle East by Lebanese immigrants; the Men of the Deeps played it in the airliners, in the Peking Hotel, in coal—fired Chinese trains, on the tops of guitar cases in buses crossing the North China Plain. The miners were addicted not only to tarabish, but also to jokes, teasing, pranks and gossip. When they talked about life in the mines, they sometimes sounded like members of a particularly enjoyable social club.

Today, when talk turns to the mines, the tone is often bitter. Coal’s glowing future has turned to ashes; the federal government has closed one of only two mines in operation in Cape Breton and plans to sell the other, throwing hundreds of miners out of work and conceivably even ending the long story of the coal mines under the sea. There is a sense of betrayal among families like MacLeod’s, who have seen three generations drawn inevitably into the pits.

MacLeod’s ancestors were carried into Cape Breton on the great wave of Scottish immigration that washed across the island in the 19th century. They settled on Foot Cape, not far from the coastal town of Inverness. It was not farming country, however. By the time Johnny was born, in 1930, the family had already moved into Inverness, and his father had become a coal miner.

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