“It is August now, towards the end, and the weather can no longer be trusted.”
The gentle rhythm in MacLeod’s sentence is responsible for its being a favourite of mine. Such an ordinary opening to such a startlingly subversive –and topical—story.
With the findings of the IPCC report and the resounding reminder that we must urgently respond to the climate crisis and ecocidal patterns, I am struck by the fact that this story, which the author began writing almost fifty years ago, exposes so many of the issues percolating beneath this crisis.
But more about that in The Underneath, below; for now, consider his Cape Breton beach. It’s private, likely unknown by the authorities who patrol wild spaces for drunkenness and misbehaviour, and lacks a roadway.
On “Closing Down”
The men enjoy this sense of being suspended in time and place on this beach. When the season ends, they will resume their work below ground, as miners, overseas—but the storm which hails the end of the season has not yet arrived.
“The golden little beach upon which we lie curves in a crescent for approximately three-quarters of a mile and then terminates at either end in looming cliffs. The north cliff is called Cameron’s Point after the family that once owned the land, but the south cliff has no name. Both cliffs protect the beach, slowing the winds from both north and south and preserving its tranquility.”
(This shape reminds me of the way the bottle is described in the preceding story, “The Road to Rankin’s Point”: cliff-beach-cliff and glass-shard-glass And maybe that’s not a coincidence, because not only is this story also associated with the cycle of life, but there is also talk of accidents, shattering and dying.)
Summer is viewed as a reprieve and a haven, both for the men having been able to return home for this specific summer, and also in a broader sense, so that our narrator recalls the happier days in his marriage as summer. Now there is a gulf between wife and husband:
“Her kitchen and her laundry room and her entire house gleam with porcelain and enamel and an ordered cleanliness that I can no longer comprehend. Little about me or about my work is clean or orderly and I am always mildly amazed to find the earnings of the violence and dirt in which I make my living converted into such meticulous brightness.”
This isn’t the first time MacLeod has focused on the miners (“The Vastness of the Dark” and “The Return” also stand out in this way) but this story affords a different perspective because the men must travel great distances to earn for their families.
Their cheques provide the avocado-coloured appliances in this story but here there is also a broader concern, open acknowledgement that the real profits land in the cities and the head offices of corporations there. Despite the men’s gruelling labour and ill health and sacrifices.
“I have always wished that my children could see me at my work. That they might journey down with me in the dripping cage to the shaft’s bottom or walk the eerie tunnels of the drifts that end in walls of staring stone. And that they might see how articulate we are in the accomplishment of what we do.”
The Underneath
Rather than focus on this story’s syntax and figurative language, I’m intrigued by the thematic layering. The way that the miners are shown to work underground, out of sight, yes—but, even more impressively, the way that their employers—the mining companies’ and corporations—are even further from view (out of sight, even).
(Check your library, check your bookshop: look for books about the mining industry, see if you can locate the work of journalists who have successfully observed and written about the corruption in this industry, like the work being done on fishing, fashion, petroleum, and other consumables.)
Extractivism is first introduced to the story in terms of the work that these men cannot do, the root of their incentive to look to another kind of work in its absence—fishing.
“Out on the flatness of the sea we can see the fishermen going about their work. They do not make much money any more and few of them take it seriously. They say that the grounds have been over-fished by the huge factory fleets from Russia, Spain and Portugal. And it is true that on the still warm nights we can see the lights of such floating factories shining brightly off the coast. They appear as strange, moveable, brilliant cities and when they are far out their blazing lights seem to mingle with those of the stars.”
This is written nearly fifty years ago, and people are talking about over-fishing today like it’s a fresh concern. (The first book I remember reading about this was Mark Kurlansky’s 1998 Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. But I doubt that was the first writer exposing this behaviour, only the first I noticed.) MacLeod’s miners are pulling from vaults of stone because there’s no more treasure to be plundered in the sea:
“We were in Haiti with Duvalier in 1960 and in Chile before Allende and in the Congo before it became associated with Zaire. In Bolivia and Guatemala and in Mexico and in a Jamaica that the tourists never see. Each segment of the world aspires to the treasure, real or imagined, that lies encased in its vaults of stone, and those who would find such booty are readily admitted and handsomely paid, be they employed by dictator or budding democracy or capitalists expanding their holdings and their wealth.” (The photo to the right is of a mine in Chile.)
The emotional core of this story resides in the lives of the men on the beach, in particular our narrator’s life and the gap between his lived experience and his wife’s: “The lightness of white and yellow curtains rustling crisply in the breeze.”
But the narrative resonates because its roots are elsewhere. In memory, in experience. In memories and experiences he would rather forget. Which he describes near the end of the story when he is thinking about a song, but readers understand that he’s really trying to forget the darker parts.
“I do not particularly welcome it or want it, and indeed I had almost forgotten it. Yet it enters now, regardless of my wants or wishes, much as one might see out of the corner of the eye an old acquaintance one has no wish to see at all. It comes again, unbidden and unexpected and imperfectly remembered.”
This half-awareness reminds me of the way MacLeod described memory in “The Road to Rankin’s Point”, another story with some vivid, sharp scenes. Within-reach and out-of-reach, these memories are as accessible and inaccessible as the cheques and the companies that issue the cheques for these men’s labour.
“In times and places of such uneasiness, shaft crews such as ours often receive little or no actual money, only slips of paper to show our earnings, which are deposited in the metropolitan banks of New York or Toronto or London and from which our families are issued monthly cheques.”
These men touch the Earth, but they cannot touch their cheques. A split, a severance that continues today. While Indigenous Land Defenders toil to defend their homelands. While environmental activists are murdered so that companies can continue to profit and we can sit in our kitchens while the curtains rustle in the breeze and our appliances hum.
Class issues and kinship: I knew there were key concepts in MacLeod’s stories. I had forgotten (or overlooked, or devalued) the political power that resides here.
For the better part of two years, I am rereading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, from start to stop, just as I’ve done with Alice Munro’s and Mavis Gallant’s short stories previously. If you love short stories or if you would like to be a short-story lover, several of these authors’ stories are among my favourites, and would make an excellent introduction to the finest of the form. If you have other favourite story writers, please feel free to contribute those to the conversation too.
Western Australia is like one of MacLeod’s islands or seaside communities writ large with every other activity being abandoned for the riches of mining. On Monday I was on the Burrup Peninsula which encapsulates everything that is wrong – a major Aboriginal sacred site, with artwork 40,000 years old, being razed to provide the infrastructure to onshore (do you mind if I use onshore as a verb?) natural gas, not needed, and releasing vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere.
Like Lisa, I remember the protests 50 years ago, when I was at uni, and the unheeded predictions of rising sea levels from global warming.
Interesting, that MacLeod has a political side, though how he could not living so close to the what from here seems to be the total wipe out of the cod fisheries (In the Indian Ocean so much is gone that we are now trawling the depths for coelacanths).
Gah, that sounds horrific. I just listened to an interesting podcast (I think it was this episode of “How to Save a Planet” but the summary doesn’t focus on the parts that stood out for me) about how the conversations around natural gas have been primarily driven by the industry’s spokespeople (even to the point where they have created seemingly distinct groups that present themselves as simply talking about energy solutions but they are not disinterested parties). I used to long for a gas stove (to cope with electrical power outages) but I sure don’t want one now. And not simply for climate-crisis reasons.
Yes, it seems obvious, I suppose, that he would have a political position, having observed so much change in his lifetime, but the tendency seems to be to overlook how the writers of generations past were active politically, yaknow, without social media and the interwebs.
This was another beautiful and sharp- edged story. I was struck by the pride the narrator took in his work and the work of his coworkers. Because what they do takes skill just to stay alive. Yet he hopes his children will be softer and do things in offices. It’s almost like he’s torn. He tried to get a degree and it didn’t take for him. Anyway, this was a great story and I’m glad I read it! I think I may continue on and read the rest of the collection.
Do you love the first sentence, too, or is it just me? I say it to myself periodically on these late August days.
I’m glad you are enjoying or appreciating the richness of these stories. I love how he holds two contrasting ideas in these characters, wholly and credibly and simultaneously.
If you are drawn to read on, by all means! But the next story is a lovely winter holiday story. (Though only partly why I scheduled a break…because there’s always a LOT of new stuff to read and write about in the autumn!)
I like your point about the layering – the miners being underground and out of sight, and the money men being even further out of sight. So much of the environmental destruction takes place out of sight (at least for now, and at least those of us privileged to live in places not directly affected by mining, logging, etc.) And yet it’s there, all the time, making the world less and less liveable, day by day, year by year. I wonder if one day soon we’ll look back on this time as our own secluded beach, a brief summer before the weather turned.
Beautiful way to express that. I wonder this season if it could be the last that I enjoy strawberries and peaches, as the fires burn, and as the farmers who supply about half of what goes on our plates every day in the growing season had to irrigate by hand because of the lack of rain. (It’s not their farm that produces the fruit, but we had very few berries from one of the other growers we purchase from–they do have an irrigation system but still lost the majority of their berries due to conditions.) Lately I have been sorting through the layers of luxury in my mind.
One of the things that surprises me is the way the environmental movements of the seventies collapsed. I was a young mother then, we (that is, my family and all my friends and the community more broadly) were not only concerned about all these things but actively doing what we could. There was a strong sense of personal responsibility: we did not buy goods with excess packaging and we wrote to companies that produced it. We did not buy processed foods, we made our own. We were stingy with paper because of the trees. We were rigorous about not wasting electricity or driving cars when it was unnecessary. I knew people who went everywhere by bike and would not travel by plane because of emissions. (LOL I could not afford to fly anywhere so there was no virtue in my abstinence! But now, whenever I fly, I buy carbon offsets.)
And then, little by little, people lapsed. I remember being shocked when I went into an upmarket shop selling Japanese goods and saw the amount of paper and packaging. It was an art form I was told, and part of their culture, as if this gave them a Leave Pass to be so incredibly wasteful. And buyers didn’t care, that’s what shocked me more than anything.
Yes! We have forgotten our history, in this regard among others. I remember having construction paper pieces doled out, at home and school for crafts, having to use every exposed area of paper in a notebook, and being scolded for wasting it if I did not. Those media campaigns about turning out lights when you leave a room. The ads about the oil industry. “Wasteful” was a word with weight in some circles.
Perhaps, although it mightn’t’ve seemed so at the time, that was the beginning of the shift of the status quo, with many still aware of but even more importantly recognizing the “value” of some of the habits of the previous generation (which was of an age to have lived through the depression years) and still retaining those habits but many others reacting against those ideas and opting to consume and dispose and repeat.
Naomi raised this point, too, I think, on one of the “slavery project” summaries, about how there was some media focus on indentured laborers in the ’90s (particularly in regards to clothing/fashion and particularly in regards to China), but now this information about the production camps there seems new.