Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  I’ve thought about why any of this research or any of these stories matter: Why should I care who powers my lights, why my steak tastes so good, how my flight gets to the ground? I just want my damn lights to work, my steaks to be tender, and to get from here to there safely and on time. Like anyone, I have more important things to do than concern myself with the guts of the operation. (There is, after all, a reason we put doors on our furnace rooms and cover our engines with shiny hoods.) I think about how my eyes have been opened, again and again, over the past few years researching this book, and about all the perfectly fine years I lived with them closed. Which is better?

  The image I come up with is that of the child who is never asked to set the table, whip the potatoes, or take out the trash. The child who wants a new toy and gets it, a new set of gloves, a hat. It comes to her because she asks for it, and so she asks for more. This goes on until expectation sets in, privilege and entitlement. Then the child discovers one day, eventually, and if she is lucky, that her parents work to provide her with food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, a comfortable life. She learns of the family’s larger function, that her desires are just a piece of the puzzle; the world is infinitely larger, richer, and worthy of her contribution, too.

  It happens all the time, I suppose, whether you are talking about a child’s role in a family, a citizen’s in a country, or if you consider just any old customer in a deli ordering ham. Pull the curtain back and show the action backstage, how it’s done and how much brain power and brawn and sacrifice goes into making the systems work, and it becomes remarkable and fabulous and awesome.

  UNDERWORLD

  Hopedale Mining

  Cadiz, Ohio

  He handed me a salt-and-vinegar potato chip. We were more than five hundred feet underground, sitting on a blanket of powdered limestone, up in section two and a half south. I asked him if there was anything he enjoyed about coal mining.

  He thought a moment. “I’m gonna say no,” he said.

  “Oh, come on,” I said.

  “You gotta stop shining your freakin’ light in my eye,” he said. “What did I tell you about that?”

  He told me that the one thing that was going to piss off Billy, Smitty, Pap, Ragu, and the rest of the guys in the crew was if I pointed my light directly in their eyes. It’s a common early mistake. The normal human urge is to look a person in the eye, and when your only visibility is from a hard hat shining a pinpoint of light through the darkness, naturally you’re going to aim that sucker right at the eyeball.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Go for the shoulder,” he said. “Or the chin.”

  I asked him how he got the nickname Foot.

  “The first day I went into the coal mine, a guy looked down and said, ‘Damn, how big are your feet?’ I said, ‘Fifteen.’ He said, ‘You’re a big-footed son of a bitch.’ And that was it. One guy had a huge head, so of course we called him Pumpkin. One guy had a big red birthmark on his face, so of course his name was Spot. They don’t cut you any slack. They’ll get right on you. A coal miner will get right on you.”

  I shined my light on his boots and he wagged them, like puppets.

  It was tough getting used to identifying people, in the darkness, just as feet, shoulders, chin, teeth. As for Foot, he was a truck of a man, forty-nine years old, a wide load in both girth and spirit. He had a messy mop of gray hair and a rugged, intelligent face that often wore one expression: You gotta be kidding me. He was proud of a lot of what he’d done with his life—his three kids, his stint as a county commissioner, his coal-mining expertise—but his heart, he said, belonged to his fifty-two head of beef cattle: Pork Chop, Frick and Frack, and, aw, Bonehead, with the amazing white eyelashes.

  He’d been in and out of coal mines since graduating from high school and had just been promoted to assistant safety director of the Hopedale Mining coal company in Cadiz, Ohio, a small operation in the eastern part of the state, just beyond the panhandle of West Virginia. Aboveground, the area looks a lot more New England—rolling farmland dotted with tall oaks, white church steeples, geranium pots hanging on front porches—than it does the tar-paper-shack Appalachia that people tend to associate with coal mining. Underground, I wasn’t permitted to go anywhere without Foot, even though I did. He got sick of me, and I got sick of him, and so he got even more sick of me in what became, over a four-month period, an easy friendship.

  “It’s kind of peaceful down here,” I said to him.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  We were not at the face, not “up on section,” where the bellow and whir and hucka-chucka-hucka-chucka of the toothy, goofy, phallic continuous miner machine was extracting coal and dumping it, load after load, onto buggies that zoomed like lunatic roaches through the darkness. We were over in B entry, or A entry, or perhaps room 3; I had no idea. I rarely knew where I was in that endless catacomb of tunnels, on and on and on, about fifteen square miles in all, where the quiet, when you found it, felt like an embrace. You could sit there. You could shut your light off, sit there in the perfectly dark silence. Nothing. Just—nothing.

  Until: Pop!

  Hisssss.

  A crackle like a fireplace.

  Hisssss.

  When you’re inside the earth, this is what it sounds like. The earth isn’t some stupid rock, isn’t inert, isn’t just a solid mass for people to stand on. The earth is always moving, constantly stretching and squawking and repositioning itself like anyone else trying to get comfortable.

  “Down here,” I said to Foot, “it’s like you’re away from all your problems. Do you think that’s part of the allure for you guys—that you escape your problems down here?”

  He looked at me, laughed. “This is our problem,” he said.

  —

  I LIVE ON TOP of a massive vein of medium-sulfur bituminous coal—the very famous Pittsburgh Number 8 Seam that extends from eastern Ohio to western Maryland, where coal has played a vital role in the economy and culture for over a century. The fact that it still does takes a lot of people by surprise. We still have coal mines? I got that question a lot when I told people that I was hanging out in a coal mine.

  In this way, I was slightly ahead of the learning curve: I knew coal mines existed. And not just in pockets of some America that never caught up, not as funky remnants of a bygone era, but as current places of work, day after day, guys with lunch buckets heading in and heading out, taking home sixty, seventy, eighty thousand dollars a year. To live where I live, in western Pennsylvania, is to occasionally get stuck behind a coal truck, to be vaguely cognizant of boxcars full of coal snaking in between the hills, to see a guy covered in coal dust up at the Toot-N-Scoot paying for an iced tea.

  Coal, if it disappeared from the nation’s consciousness, never went away. This is America, and this is our fossil fuel, a $27.6 billion industry that employs nearly eighty thousand miners in twenty-six states. We are sitting on 25 percent of the world’s supply—the Saudi Arabia of coal!—and lately we’ve been grabbing it in record amounts, gorging on the black rock the Bush administration once called “freedom fuel.”

  The question I had going in was almost ridiculous in nature: If coal is really this big, and all these people really exist, how is it that I know nothing about them?

  It took me months to even gain access to a coal mine: this is not an industry that welcomes publicity, perhaps because the publicity it gets is always so horrific. Coal mines make the news only when they explode, collapse, kill. It’s exciting! Tragedy! Fodder for a cable news frenzy. Look at these poor, stupid rednecks who work these awful jobs. Trapped! Suffocating! Buried alive!

  Repeatedly, the guys at the Hopedale Mining company asked that I not portray them as poor, stupid rednecks. This characterization, they said, would only display my own ignorance. They were shy at first, eager to impress, and, with little other appa
rent motivation, they welcomed me in. I followed one crew, the “E rotation”—Billy, Smitty, Scotty, Pap, Rick, Chris, Kevin, Hook, Duke, Ragu, Sparky, Charlie—who worked in the Cadiz portal, one of two the company owned. I followed them underground, home, to church, to the strip club where they drink and gossip and taunt and jab and worry about one another. I listened while they worried about Smitty, the loner of the group, who had just ordered himself a mail-order woman. Smitty had been talking to her on the Internet for more than a year; he was shipping her over from Russia and she was supposed to arrive, beautifully, on the first day of buck season. I listened while they mercilessly mocked Scotty, a disarmingly cheerful guy who often talked to himself, especially in the bathhouse, where the guys gathered after each shift to wash off the filth before reentering life aboveground. Scotty would be scrubbing away, smiling, telling himself all about this and all about that, and sometimes he’d come out with a laugh that would about bust your ear off. “What the hell is wrong with you, Scotty?” said Foot, who was showering next to Scotty when he recently did this.

  “I’m going to be in jail tomorrow for murder,” Scotty said to Foot.

  “For what?”

  “I’m gonna kill this son of a bitch I’m fighting, I’m gonna kill him!”

  “Yeah, well, don’t get too far ahead of yourself there, buddy,” Foot said. Fight Night XV at Wheeling Island Racetrack & Gaming Center would feature its first-ever junior-middleweight championship, pitting Scott “the Rock” Tullius against Todd Manning, and a lot of the guys from the mine were going.

  These were men who lived underground together for ten-hour shifts, five days at a stretch, often spending more time with one another than they did with their families, so they knew everything about one another. They knew all about Billy’s brand-new house and the barn siding he used to panel his basement, all about Chris’s kid getting his second bone-marrow transplant, all about Pap’s wife getting her damn knee replaced—and they knew there was no sense in asking Pap what the hell he was doing, a sixty-two-year-old man still mining coal. Pap should have retired long ago. Or he should have had a job outside. A lot of guys put in years underground with the hope of moving aboveground; Pap could have had almost any job he wanted outside. But he chose to stay under, working what was widely regarded as the worst job of all: roof bolting. He was the guy drilling six-foot rods up into the top of the mine as the coal got dug out and the earth complained, hissing its hissy methane fits and collapsing more or less on a regular basis.

  Of course I asked him why. Every which way I could think of, I asked Pap why he chose to stay under, but he, like so many of the miners I met, had a way of talking in circles. I asked Pap’s wife, Nancy, the woman he called “the old bag I live with,” why Pap still worked underground. She had no idea what I was talking about. “I don’t know nothing about nothing that goes on in that mine,” she said. (She did not mind being called an old bag and referred to Pap as “my Frankie” or, sometimes, “Lucifer.”) She, like so many of the people I visited, always gave me a care package to take home, a few chunks of Edam cheese and a pear. Pap gave me two bottles of homemade blackberry wine to take home to my husband. I never once mentioned that I had a husband, but everyone kept sending home presents for him. Family was the assumption. Family-to-family interaction was the natural order of communication.

  I spent months trying to position myself and my world around these people—people who seem stuck in a bygone era that isn’t bygone at all. If anyone is gone, it’s us, the consumer. We forgot, or we lost touch, or we grew up with our lives already sanitized. We live over here and they live over there, and we have almost no access to a way of life that we are so unwittingly dependent on. What disturbed me was nothing I found so much as the nature of the experiment itself: How is it that our own neighbors are the stuff of anthropology? If that says anything about us, it’s definitely not flattering.

  “Why do we even have coal mines?” said some blond-haired TV news lady in 2006, when twelve miners famously trapped in West Virginia’s Sago mine were first pronounced alive and then—whoops—dead. All of a sudden, the nation’s attention was on coal miners, zoo animals—specimens of humanity—while the coal miners looked back.

  Why do we even have coal mines? The miners I talked to remembered listening and laughing, having great fun with that one. “Whenever you plug your vibrator in and it doesn’t work, okay, that’s why we have coal mines!” one of them shouted at the TV. Okay, that might not have been the best example, seeing as your sex-toy industry is more or less dependent on batteries, which have nothing to do with coal. But the point is: power. Coal is power. “Yeah, turn the lights on, lady. That’s why you need coal mines. Where do you think electricity comes from?”

  Every time we flip on a light switch, we burn a lump of coal, each of us consuming about twenty pounds of those lumps a day. Fully half of our electricity comes from coal—and that’s nothing compared with China, which leads the world in both the production and the consumption of coal, accounting for a whopping 70 percent of that country’s total energy consumption. Coal is the fastest-growing energy source on the planet (much to the planet’s reported gasping dismay).

  And so, the coal miner. He shows up in country-music songs and poetry, a working-class hero. He works a job that has killed more than one hundred thousand since we started, over a century ago, sending people underground. It’s enough to make you shake your head, sigh a grateful sigh, and go on and bond with the guys over at ABC News waxing philosophical: “If there is such a thing as a mystique associated with a hard, dirty, and dangerous life, that mystique is attached to the miners who are such a part of the nation’s consciousness and soul.”

  That’s where we start. That’s where I started. I wanted the mystique. I wanted to discover that the guys who make their living underground do it because of some attachment to the earth, or to history, or to their own ancestry, or to further some fundamental masculine need for brotherhood, or—yes!—on behalf of the nation’s consciousness and soul.

  You talk like that in a coal mine, you’ll get your lunch bucket nailed shut. Seriously. That’s a beauty.

  —

  IF YOU WANT A JOB at the Hopedale Mining company, the first thing they do is bring you down for a tour to see if you can mentally handle it. You pretty much know instantly if you can take the confinement, the lack of light, the very real worry about the roof caving in or the air supply shutting off or something blowing up. And if you don’t know instantly, there’s a team of guys watching you to see if you twitch, shake, turn pale. Some guys say, “Yeah, never mind,” and ask to leave. One guy recently passed out.

  When Billy Cermak Jr. first went under, six years ago, he was trying to convince himself he was doing the right thing—I can do this, I can do this, I can do this—because coal mining was exactly the thing he swore he’d never do: he’d never allow the Cermaks to become fourth-generation coal miners. First his great-grandfather, recruited from what is now the Czech Republic by the coal companies; then his grandfather, who started working in the mines at age twelve and died of black lung; then Billy’s dad, working most of his life in the strip mines. That won’t be me, Billy grew up thinking. He would be a man of his generation, get himself a job somewhere at least air-conditioned. He’d become sick of the family farm, of a life so dependent on brawn. He went to college to study nursing, tried to pretend he didn’t hate it, kept thinking, It’s gotta get better, it’s gotta get better, but it never did. He graduated, but ended up leaving the air-conditioned world for jobs in construction, on pipelines, and on the railroads. Muscles. Might. Sweat. It just felt better. Soon he had a wife. He imagined sons on four-wheelers, boys raking hay. The farm. Leaving it only proved how much he loved it. And there he was, days at a time, off on that railroad. He just wanted to figure out a way to stay on the farm. And coal mining was right there in his backyard.

  So in walks Billy Cermak to the Cadiz port
al on Old Hopedale Road. I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. The building itself is blue corrugated steel with a big American flag hanging from a pole out front, struggling rhododendrons along the walkway, and a giant happy face painted on a fuel tank in the parking lot. The whir of the massive fan sucking bad air out of the mine is loud, obnoxious, and constant.

  Billy gets suited up: coveralls, steel-reinforced boots, hard hat, light, and on his belt a battery pack, methane detector, and W65 self-rescuer respirator—a breathing mask intended to filter out carbon monoxide for about an hour. If there’s an explosion or fire, you wrap that around your face until you can get yourself to an SCSR (self-contained self-rescue) apparatus, many of which are stationed throughout the mine, and which provide a full hour of actual oxygen. He’s given a metal tag with his name on it and told where to hang it on the peg board. In case of a collapse, they want to know whom to go looking for. He gets on the elevator, plunges five hundred feet down—fifty stories, just—down. The elevator opens up and everything is white. That’s the first weird thing. White?

  Everyone, I was told, gets jolted by the white. You try to make sense of it. “They just paint this opening part white to cheer everyone up?” I said to Foot the first time I saw it. He didn’t even dignify that guess with a response. “It’s, like, a joke?” I said. “Irony? A little humor to start your day before you move into black?” I figured we’d hit the black part of a coal mine as soon as we moved farther in. Foot looked at me in that way he came to look at me, a stillness, a flatness to his gaze, an expression that said, You just keep turning into more of an idiot. He said, “I think you’ll find there are no aesthetic choices, nor is there irony, in a coal mine.”

  The white is on account of “rock dust,” powdered limestone, a fire retardant that you throw on every exposed inch of coal—which, were it not rock-dusted, would be spontaneous combustion waiting to happen. One small explosion could trigger a series of explosions, on and on, fwoom, fwoom, fwoom, through the mine, but not if you’ve got it rock-dusted. Explosion is nothing to flirt with. I was not permitted even to use a tape recorder when we were at the face of the mine, where the coal was exposed and the methane was bleeding, nor could a photographer use a flash. The smallest spark could cause a blast.