Fear & Loathing in Sudbury

This miserable trade show could not have come at a worse time. Let's not forget that the only reason this sad, little city exists is because someone found nickel in the miles of endless rock up here. Yes, nickel...and I'll give you a whole bag of nickels if you can tell me three things in your house that contain nickel. No, that lame jokes you're thinking of right now doesn't count. Don't say it. I already did.

But back to this nickel business. I work in the mining industry and I don't even know what it's for. But let's not bore ourselves with the facts here. We all use this wretched metal in some way or another and it gets pulled out of the ground in this city at an extraordinary rate. From the unwanted fragments of trivia I've picked up, it seems they've been pulling this stuff out of the rock - not ground, mind you...there is no ground here...just rock - for more than 125 years.

125 years is a long time. I haven't done anything that lasted 125 years and I doubt you have either. And now that the playing field has been leveled, let's all admit together that even though we don't really give a rat's sass about nickel, if someone's been digging it out of the rock for 125 years, it must be worth something, right? Someone's buying this rotten metal and using for all kinds of good things and they've been doing a darn good job of it too for at least 125 years. Why else would they be digging through miles of endless rock?

Now all of that has been going on for at least 125 years when I show up on the scene. I tear into town doing 70 mph in my rented Toyota hoping a couple of days in this place will set my world on fire. Boy, was I wrong.

At that moment, the only thing on fire were my legs from the intensely boring four-hour drive. While the scenery is quite stunning, it's also stunningly repetitive. For example, the view along any northern highway is as follows - pine tree, rock, rock, pine tree, rock, pine tree, pine tree, random lake, pine tree, rock aaaaaaand you get the the idea. It goes on forever.

On a good day, you might see a deer. If so, slow down the car and let the thing get well on its way. They truly are wild, regal, majestic animals but they do struggle with basic calculations involving velocity, mass and direction. Hitting one is a lot less exciting and a lot less satisfying than you would think.

It was a little past 10pm so I found my hotel and promptly checked in. Thinking I should stretch my legs, I headed out for a brisk walk around the neighbourhood. Two minutes later I was back inside cursing the cold and wondering how people considered this to be normal for late April. For the life of me, I can't think of why else anyone in their right mind would survive a winter of endless snow and -20 weather and then think...."Hey, that was fun. Let's do that again."

Being thankful I was born last century, I switched the heat on and set the needle to 80 degrees for good measure. 'Better safe than sorry' I figured as I thought I'd see what was on the TV. Hockey. Click. Hockey again. Click. Hockey in French. I give up and leave it on the French channel. Thankfully, neither the hockey nor French is able to engage my brain and I finally drift off to sleep.

The next morning, the trade show got off to a late start. Precisely 14 hours after arriving, I opened the booth and made the final preparations. Sixty painful minutes ticked by and I shared some nervous jokes with the guys next to me.

"Who goes shopping in the morning anyways?" someone hollered out from a few booths down. The voice carries a proud Quebec accent which draws some responses in French. We all laughed even if we didn't understand. There wasn't much else to do anyways.

After two hours, I had talked to one person. Three hours in and the ratio had not improved. By four, the eerie quiet had turned into a steady hum of curiosity, whispers, bad jokes and worse story telling. Salesmen drift from booth to booth and do their best to do whatever it is salesmen do.

I did my best to look busy and avoid all those unnecessarily painful and awkward moments but this one rascal finally cornered me. I'd been doing pretty well to stay out of site but a misplaced glance caught his eye and the next thing I knew, he was headed right for me.

"How are you!?" he bellowed 50 decibels louder than necessary.

Several minutes of tepid conversation trickled by as we would share a few words and then nervously look around as if we expected the gold bearing horde to come crashing through the gates at any time. Finally, after convincing each other that our businesses were "actually doing quite well despite the recession", he wandered off to kill a few more painful minutes with some other unfortunate chap.

The above scenario played itself over and over again until I finally spied a fellow from a competitor. Recently, I'd done a bit of investigation into this particular company and had the lowdown on their company. Suffice it to say, they were not in good shape.

"Hey, hey!" he enthusiastically greeted me.

'This should be fun' I thought to myself as we exchanged courtesy conversation lines.

"How's business?" I asked with complete innocence.

"We're alright" he lied through his recently bleached teeth and I knew I had him. I told him we'd been affected by the recession but were still doing well. I didn't care if he knew I was lying as long as he thought he had me convinced.

He did and didn't waste any time reassuring me. This guy could talk and seemed to thoroughly enjoy the sound of his voice. At least one of us did. I let him go on because I figured if one of us was having fun, at least one of us was.

The conversation finally dragged itself to death and we were counting the times we could look out from our booth and not make eye contact. It was painfully slow. Yet, a light sorta clicked on in my head. Maybe this wasn't all for nothing.

I bid him adieu and watched him stroll down the aisle taking his time to look at each booth even though he'd already seen them a dozen times. Yeah, this trade show was bad - a far cry from the nearly celebratory affair held 7 months ago in Las Vegas.

But this was Sudbury - a famous city with a long, prosperous history of 125 years of mining history. A city built on an artesian spring of nickel that would never run dry. A city that, as of today, does not have a single mine in operation.

No money. Overstock. Unsure economy. All given as reasons but the news was still the same. All major mining operation in Sudbury would be indefinitely suspended. Something was definitely wrong and now everyone knew it.

The fear was here. A tangent, sticky fear that hung in the air like an invisible fog. It crept into our words and ideas and asked questions we didn't want to hear. Men whose careers and lives hung in the balance were being forced to think about things they never thought possible.

It was an ugly fear. The kind of fear that can only be brought about by men who find themselves too close to the ledge without an exit plan. Men who got bumped to the edges by an outside force far more powerful than them. Men who were not free.