Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  So, five hundred feet down. White. That’s just hello. You are not, technically, even at work yet. Once you step off the elevator, you climb onto a mantrip, a small train car. You don’t sit so much as lie on that thing, a crawling convertible, as you lean way back on it so as to avoid scraping your head on the ceiling as you whiz on in through a cool, damp tunnel, mud, slush, clunk, clunk, rattle, hiss. You travel a mile in, two miles in, sometimes as far as six or seven miles in and away from the elevator shaft where you first dropped down. It depends on where they’re digging coal. The guys, of course, are used to this, an everyday commute. Some of them break into their lunch buckets, Scotty sharing M&M’s, Hook downing a Mountain Dew. They keep their lights off, conserving battery power, but the mantrip has a headlight, so you can watch the underworld whiz by, all of it crusty white, eerily frosty. Everything is crooked, bent, leaning; there are posts jammed in here and there to keep the top up, rusted reinforcement bolts jutting out, power cables hanging; the net effect is an endless crawl of abandonment and prayer. Just keep the damn thing from caving in. There is nothing aesthetic about a coal mine. There is no design, no geometry, no melody. A coal mine greets you with only one sentiment, then hammers it: This is not a place for people, this is not a place for people, this is not a place for people.

  So, five hundred feet down, a couple of miles in. You are under somebody’s house, or a grocery store, or, in this case, the Wendy’s up there on Route 22. The guys joke about yelling up for a burger, maybe some chili. You roll off the mantrip and stand up. The ceiling is five feet high, and so you can’t, actually, stand up. You look around and everyone is walking around like the freaks in Being John Malkovich.

  “Okay, they should make it higher,” I said to Foot the first time I experienced this. I wanted to call a congressman or something. This was ridiculous. There are people in here! Everyone’s doing a duck walk, hands clasped behind their backs to give the body balance as they lean over and waddle. You work your whole ten-hour shift like that, duck-walking through the darkness, nothing but a pinpoint of light shining from your hat to tell you which rat tunnel is which. A rat. You feel like a rat.

  I could not get used to the height. Every time I went down, I asked, “Is this lower than last time? Are we in a lower spot?”

  “Same spot,” Foot said, explaining that there was nothing to be done about the height. “A coal seam is a coal seam.”

  A coal seam is a coal seam, and this one was five feet high, and so that was how high the mine was. The height got decided a long time ago, like 300 million years ago, way before dinosaurs, when the coal seam was a ribbon of dead plants, slime. It sat there, buried sludge, covered up over millions of years. It turned to peat, lignite, then subbituminous, bituminous, or anthracite coal, depending on how many millions of years it had a chance to sit there and store energy and depending on the geologic forces surrounding it. A coal seam is an act of nature. If you want the coal, you just mine the coal. You don’t mine above it or below it. Take any higher and you’re mining rock, mixing rock in with the coal, a messy product that will have to get “washed.” Take any lower and you’re doing the same, plus probably hitting water and making yourself a mud hole, and Billy will have to go get the fucking sump pumps. You just take the coal. And shut up, because Foot could tell you about plenty of mines where the seam is thirty-six inches, thirty-two inches. Pap could tell you about working on his stomach—his stomach—down in Saginaw “scratch-your-back” mine.

  There is good news. Every once in a while you find the good news, or hear about the good news: A glory hole! Come on over. A glory hole is a place where the “top” has opened up, forming a dome. Heaven. You can stand. Thank the Lord! Guys hang out in glory holes, Scotty stretching, Sparky rolling his neck around. Standing in a glory hole, you can feel your spine thank you even as you work on denying the fact that a glory hole is, technically, a cave-in, a place where the top fell down, maybe yesterday or maybe the day before.

  The “top” is certainly the main topic of conversation in a coal mine. Bad top. Hey, that top over there is bad. Aw, this is some bad top here. Look out. Okay, that’s coming down. Move. The top is falling. “Go on over to C entry at ten-plus-thirty and you’ll see where the fucking top collapsed.”

  It’s not always this bad. The top conditions in two and a half south, where the E rotation was mining, were especially crappy. Every coal miner I talked to had, in his history, at least one story of a cave-in. “Yeah, he got covered up” is a way coal miners refer to fathers and brothers and sons who got buried alive.

  Air is probably the second most common topic of conversation in a coal mine. With every fresh cut of coal, the earth leaks explosive methane. You need to get that out of there. Guys up at the face are constantly getting off their machines to control and direct the airflow: tacking up tarps, taking them down, checking their methane detectors in an effort to keep fresh air sweeping across the face of the mine.

  A coal miner is busy. A coal miner doesn’t have time to sit around and ponder all of this: methane, bad top, no light, no standing, no bathroom, no water fountain, no phone, no radio, no windows, five hundred feet down, a couple of miles in. If I found that I could, in fact, mentally handle being inside a coal mine, it was only because I knew I was leaving. No matter how many times I went under, I would always be a tourist. I could ooh and I could ahh and I could leave. But Smitty and Kevin and Ragu couldn’t, and Pap wouldn’t. The Cadiz mine operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  The “face crew” works up at the face of the mine, operating the cacophony of machinery. At the head of the line you have Rick, the miner operator chewing off the coal with the hucka-chucka-hucka-chucka continuous miner machine and its rolling drums of teeth. Behind him, two roof bolters, Pap and Charlie, with their mighty orange hydraulic jack machine that holds the top up with one arm, then slams four- or six-foot rods into that top, reinforcing it. Behind them zoom three buggy runners—Scotty, Ragu, Smitty—each capturing the coal and hauling it to conveyor belts. Behind them, the scoop man, Kevin, who pulls up in his scoop machine to capture the loose coal. Then Rick moves in with the miner again, making another cut, and the cycle repeats.

  All of these men and all of these machines keep in constant motion, chewing, hauling, bolting, scooping, in what becomes a kind of dance. It’s a factory that keeps going forward, sixty feet per shift, deeper into the mine and farther from the power center, the base of the operation. Every two weeks or so, you have to pack up the power center, move the whole factory forward.

  Now, Billy Cermak, when he went down the first time, six years ago, to see if he could mentally handle it, he was elated. It wasn’t so bad! It was . . . white! Kind of pleasant that way, really. Not all doom and gloom. And other than the height issue, it was just learning equipment—farm boys make the best miners, because farm boys know equipment—it wasn’t bad at all. I can handle it! He started work the next week, a rising star from the moment he got there. He was put right up at the face, a roof bolter, and soon enough he shot up to crew chief. A boss. Smitty, Scotty, Pap, Rick, Chris, Kevin, Hook, Duke, Ragu, Sparky, Charlie—eleven workers under Billy’s direction. The E rotation.

  Billy was a gentleman. He wore cologne. If there’s an upwardly mobile coal miner, it’s Billy. He tries. He believes. He even shows up at the company picnics. Even his house, brand-new, with a big, bright porch and cats running around, says “winner.” An eighteen-foot Playtime motorboat in the driveway, a shiny Dodge, and a Suburban. His house sits across from his dad’s place, over from his brother’s. The original family farm, intact. Billy has two boys now, and can’t you just picture little Brody and Gage riding four-wheelers real soon? They have three miniature horses. Next year, an in-ground pool. For Billy, this whole thing is like the most unbelievable dream come true, even though he swore he’d never be a fourth-generation coal miner.

  “The only thing I think about is the danger p
art of it,” his wife, Tynae, said one day when we were all sitting in the living room, watching Brody tumble.

  “It’s not that bad,” Billy said to her. “I mean, the danger isn’t even a thought for me anymore.”

  “I know,” she said, even though you could tell she didn’t.

  “Anything that happens is just a freak accident.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s the only stuff that happens is freak accidents.”

  “I know.”

  Then she turned her attention to a Smurfs cartoon Brody had settled on, and nobody said anything.

  A few days later, when I was in the mine, up on section, Billy said, “Look, I don’t talk about the bad stuff in front of my wife, okay?”

  Billy was there the day Albert got crushed. Billy was only two months into his happily-ever-after, just two months into learning that he could mentally handle it. An explosion. The power out. And the section foreman called, “We’re gonna need some help!” It was over at the bottom of the slope, where supply cars travel from outside down into the mine, carrying tons of equipment. The cars had let loose, fallen through the air at maybe sixty miles an hour—one car, two cars, three loaded cars did a free fall on top of Albert, killing him instantly. Chip was the one who found him. Billy and Boomer helped dig. They found half of Albert. About half. Then they looked around for the rest. They wrapped what they found in blankets and dragged it on out.

  —

  UP AT THE JOY SPOT, where the strippers were said to strip anytime, even nine o’clock in the morning if you wanted them to, a bunch of the E rotation guys were putting back a truly outstanding quantity of Coors Light while inviting me to consider the positive side of a coal miner’s life. We sat engulfed by the blare of Metallica on the jukebox, beneath a sign advertising the day’s featured shot: Jäger bombs, $4.50. On the positive side of coal mining, they said, there was the weather. Seriously, year-round, a steady average of 55 degrees underground. No rain. They sang the praises of working for Hopedale Mining, believing themselves to be the envy of area coal miners because of the five-and-three schedule (five days on, three days off; some mines are as high as six and one) and because it’s a nonunion mine, meaning a lot less crap to deal with. The guys thought their pay, an average of $21.15 an hour for face rate, was excellent.

  Sparky: “The paycheck is the reason we’re there.”

  Hook: “You get your check and first thing is, I’ll go straight down to Dillonvale. We got seven bars in one mile. Ain’t nothing but opportunity right there.”

  Kevin: “Usually, I’ll just buy twelve beers, and I’ll go ride around and look at deer. I take my wife, my kid, hell, we usually see about seventy, eighty deer a night. It’s all dirt roads; I ain’t never passed a cop yet.”

  Rick: “Jackass, how many DUIs have you had?”

  Kevin: “Two. But it wasn’t looking for deer; it was for doing stupid shit, like doing burnouts in front of the bar and fucking going to the city drunk at three in the morning. Stupid shit. I don’t do that now. I stick to dirt roads.”

  Sparky: “We’re applauding.”

  Duke: “What does this have to do with mining coal? Tell her the good parts of mining coal.”

  Hook: “Okay, here’s what it is: Everybody is there for the same reason. You mine coal, you get money, you go home.”

  Duke: “That’s what it is. It’s simple. Coal is your goal.”

  They ordered another round. They talked coal. They talked about how Rick, who runs the miner machine, was in charge. He wasn’t the boss, but he was in charge and everyone knew it. Whoever runs the miner machine runs the show.

  Duke: “He’s got one priority, and that’s penetrating. That’s your job if you’re on that miner. You’re penetrating. And if you’ve got three shitbag buggy runners behind you loading off you and you gotta wait for them, you’re not penetrating. And if you got shitbag bolters supposed to bolt these cuts behind you, then it’s even worse. Then if you got a scoop man that cries all the time, it’s real bad.”

  Sparky: “It’s the dependency you have on each other. That’s what it is.”

  Hook: “That’s it.”

  They talked coal, ordered another round. They wondered why they just talk coal all the time.

  Kevin: “If you’re down there, you’re trying to make everything all right for the next guy. Like, Pap brings me a sandwich every day, a bull coon sandwich. It’s Amish salami or Amish ham. A lot of the guys bring extra food in case you get trapped. I always eat everything I bring, but Pap has something left. A bull coon sandwich. But come after lunchtime, Pap knows I’m ready to kill him. I tell him, ‘You old fucking bastard.’ You know. Everybody gets along in the beginning of the day. But anything after lunch, you’re ready to fucking kill.”

  Hook: “If anybody wants to kill you, Kev, it’s because you just busted something again.”

  Kevin: “That ain’t true.”

  Sparky: “It’s true.”

  Kevin: “Will you tell me, Rick, do I not do my job to the best of my ability?”

  Rick: “No, you’re a good scoop man. You scoop good.”

  Kevin: “Am I not the best scoop man you have ever had?”

  Rick: “I told you, you scoop good.”

  Kevin: “See? I don’t care what you mechanics think. If a machine is meant to fucking break and it’s gonna break, well, guess what? You’re looking at the fucking guy that’s gonna break it. That’s the way I’ve been my whole life.”

  Duke: “My priority is, I produce. When I worked the miner machine that’s what I cared about. I produce. I don’t care what the fuck else is going on or where anybody is, I produce.”

  Kevin: “But see, I do. I care. I do care. I care because that man cares. And that man cares. That man wants it rock-dusted, you bet your fucking ass if I got the opportunity and I can scoop it and rock-dust it, then I will scoop it and rock-dust it.”

  Hook: “It’s the same as any family, bottom line.”

  Duke: “Bottom line. Because these fuckholes, every one that goes down there each and every day, depends on the next fuckhole. Bottom line.”

  Rick: “Bottom line is, he loves him and he loves him and he loves him and he loves him just like I love him.”

  Kevin: “You might hate them, but you love them.”

  Sparky: “Bottom line.”

  Hook: “That’s it right there.”

  Kevin: “I’ll tell you what I do a fucking good job at. I keep the fucking deadbeat fucking mechanics off their asses.”

  Rick: “A little rough there, Kevin, a little rough.”

  Kevin was not, in my estimation, any rougher than any of the others, but the deeper we got into drunkspeak, man love and man hate and bottom lines and fuckholes, Kevin was the one singled out. Rick slipped him a note. “I will not say the f word,” it read. He told Kevin to put it in his pocket.

  Kevin: “I have a four-year-old kid I don’t say it in front of.”

  Rick: “All right. Well, you got a lady here.”

  Kevin: “I’m sorry.”

  Rick: “All right.”

  Kevin: “Now you think I’m a shitbag.”

  Rick: “No, I don’t.”

  Kevin: “I know, Rick. I ain’t good now, huh? You gave me a compliment and now you’re taking it back.”

  Rick: “I’m not taking it back.”

  Kevin wanted to go home. Sparky said he’d drive him to his place, where he could just go ahead and pass out. Kevin refused. It was nearly midnight, and the guys had to be back at the mine by six.

  Kevin: “I got a wife and a kid to get home to. I got two DUIs, and I’m a shitbag.”

  Sparky: “Seriously, you’ll stay at my place. I’ll even pack your lunch for tomorrow.”

  Kevin: “I got to go home with my family. That’s
why I’m going home, because I’m a shitbag.”

  With that, he took off. No one said much. No one even felt like bothering with the strippers.

  Rick: “I thought we were gonna tell her the good parts about coal mining.”

  Hook: “We more or less covered most of it, wouldn’t you say?”

  —

  EVERYONE I TALKED TO in the coal mine had a reason for being there that had nothing to do with coal, even if the reason was beer. Coal was currency, just as it is for the coal consumer, only in the case of the coal miner it is literally so. Coal is a good provider, but coal isn’t free. Coal is dirty and dangerous—for the coal miner getting it out of the ground and for the planet burning it. Same deal. No kidding, no fooling, nothing subtle, nothing virtual. Coal doesn’t play with you. The thing you can say about coal is, coal is honest.

  “They say if you truly find a job you love, then you’ll never work a day in your life,” Foot told me, and he wasn’t talking about coal mining. Fifty-two head of beef cattle, a brand-new Massey Ferguson 390 tractor, a Krone KR 125 baler, and a Case IH 995 tractor with a loader on it—that’s why he mined coal: to afford his farms, two of them, 280 acres in all. He was hoping to buy a third, because he had three kids and it only seemed right to leave each kid a farm. “There ain’t nothing I like more than to smell that fresh-cut hay, throw that hay, rake that hay,” he said. Sometimes neighbors offer to help him; they’ll say, ‘You work down in that mine all night and then you’re out on that damn farm.’ And I just tell them, ‘If I was sitting here on the bank with a fishing pole in my hand, fishing, would you come to take it out of my hand?’ ‘Well, no.’ And I say, ‘Well, this is my fishing.’ You know. This is my fishing.”