by Gregg Olsen
“I’ll probably end up marrying you,” he said, looking into her lovely green eyes, “or someone like you.”
In January 1954, Wava Chambers lied about her age and married the boy she’d wanted since the day they met. She was seventeen. He was nineteen and a Sunshine mucker. Their first years together were a succession of jobs with the mines, a paving company, or the railroad, interspersed with the births of two sons and two daughters. The Beehners were close, a family dedicated to sports and children’s activities. Both parents bowled on leagues. Wava had a decent arm and pitched for a Wallace softball team. The kids played football, baseball, and basketball, and performed in the school band. Every Friday, the whole lot of them went for a swim at the Y. It was the life Wava had always imagined.
She was sure Don was alive, because no one from Sunshine had told her otherwise. The switchboard operator refused to confirm anything. Bob Launhardt, who had been friendly enough with Beehner over the years to know that his wife and kids deserved better, said nothing. He could find no words.
Thirty-six
AFTERNOON, MAY 3
Sunshine Mine Yard
MARVIN CHASE, WHO’D BEEN PUSHED INTO THE ROLE OF PR spokesman, needed some muscle. He had discarded his suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, now soiled with grease and sweat. His pockets were filled with pens and a pair of sunglasses. He called Bunker Hill’s president for help with crowd control. Lee Haynes, twenty-four, was the solution. The former computer programmer and apprentice mechanic was a Vietnam veteran, and the lieutenant for Wallace-based Company A, 321st Engineering Battalion.
“Lee, we’ve got a mess up here and I need help,” Chase said, when the pair met in the yard. “We’ve got families who won’t go home because of loved ones that we don’t know a thing about.”
Chase hoped the sight of men in uniform would help bring order, and maybe even a little comfort. He was hopeful the need would be short term.
“But no one knows how long this rescue will take.”
Chase was also very concerned about the media. Distraught family members were saying that all the cameras and questions were adding to their mounting grief. Chase asked Haynes to separate the newspeople from the families.
It’s us against them, Haynes thought.
Within a couple of hours, fourteen men—miners, loggers, but, most important, soldiers—were in green fatigues and ensconced by the creek. Motivating the bunch was easy. Haynes promised a beer at the end of the day. To get them to move faster, he promised two beers. The men of Company A were wound up. They could roll up some reporter and toss him in the creek like a beach ball, then celebrate at the Big Creek Store.
Chase limited access even more with a lie, saying that federal safety inspectors required them to keep the area clear. A reporter complained that the barrier kept him from material for an article.
“Look,” Haynes said, clearly irritated, “you’ll get information when we tell you. You won’t be left out. But you’ll stay right over here, and that’s it.”
This is a disaster, he thought, not a contest over who gets the story.
Haynes knew about being a hard-ass, because he was the son of one. His father, Toughie Haynes, had been one of those miners who gambled and drank away his Friday paycheck by Sunday morning. He made good money, but it was his money. His wife had to fight for school clothes for the kids, and when food ran out, she served oatmeal for Sunday dinner. When Lee needed eyeglasses, his father scoffed. He only relented when he lost his driver’s license to a stack of DWIs and he needed his boy to drive him around.
Lee Haynes also kept his focus on one of the missing in particular. Richard Lynch had moved in with the Hayneses to finish his senior year at Kellogg when his folks moved to Post Falls. Haynes and Lynch had enlisted in the Army together. They were brothers in all ways but blood. Lynch was also connected to others of the swelling vigil. Peggy Delange, the Wallace bank employee who was waiting for her dad, foreman Gene Johnson, was his sister-in-law.
Roger Findley, the cager who had been rescued by Launhardt’s crew, pulled himself together and reported to Silver Summit in Osburn to pack supplies. He wanted to do what he could to get his big brother, Lyle, out of the mine. But as the morning of the second day wore on, Findley discovered that no matter how much he wanted to go into the mine to go after Lyle, he just couldn’t make himself do it. He didn’t know it then, but he’d been underground for the last time.
Big Creek resident Jack Harris signed on to relay messages to surface crews bringing down foam and wood for bulkhead building. The shaft repairman worried about the viability of the plan to advance fresh air by bulkheading. Building temporary bulkheads with plastic-coated burlap, wood, and polyurethane foam was tedious, and Sunshine consumed the supplies like the bottomless pit that its workers knew it was. Sunshine and Silver Summit shared the same bad country: an underground passage with more cracks and splintered fissures than a dried-out pond. Harris doubted there could ever be enough foam to seal off all air leaks. He wondered how long it would take to reach the men trapped inside.
NORMAN FEE’S MOTHER, ELIZABETH, DROVE SEVENTY MILES AN hour whether she was going five blocks or fifty miles. A stretched-out plume of cigarette smoke followed the high school Latin and Spanish teacher as she drove her son’s blue convertible, a ’67 ocean-blue Malibu, with the top down. She had a sense of humor and an undeniable air of eccentricity. She was Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame without the foot-long cigarette holder. Army reservist Lee Haynes saw Mrs. Fee maneuver through the crowd in the yard. He averted his eyes, fearing that direct contact would lead to conversation—a conversation he was unprepared to have. Her son, twenty-eight-year-old Norman Fee, was missing. Bill Mitchell and others from Fee’s level had made it out, and their last sight of the grizzlyman hadn’t been pretty.
Haynes had hated high school, but he’d loved Mrs. Fee. She’d even made Latin tolerable.
When his father, a school principal, had died the year before, it was Norman who’d stayed with his grieving mother. She was fragile, and his presence in her house on Third Street in Wallace was just what she needed. Mother and son took a monthlong tour of Europe in June the same year. It was, she told everybody, the best time of her life—after the saddest.
Elizabeth Fee caught up with Haynes.
“I don’t want anyone else telling me about Norman,” she said. “I don’t want some cop or some preacher. I want you to tell me. I need to hear it from you.”
Lieutenant Haynes was in the back of the classroom, hiding his eyes and hoping the teacher wouldn’t call on him.
“Mrs. Fee, what do I know about saying something like that?”
“I want you to tell me.”
The woman who’d taught Haynes Latin by the sheer force of her quirky personality was going to get the worst news of her life—from him. He told Sunshine’s personnel office of her request. It was logged on a card and stapled to Norman Fee’s personnel file. Similar cards were made for all of the missing men.
Later, Rob Chase, the mine manager’s seventeen-year-old son, also caught the schoolteacher’s frightened stare from behind her cat’s-eye glasses. Mrs. Fee was unraveling, and Chase hurried to her side. As she chain-smoked, she said that her worries were rooted in an incident in her childhood. Her father had been a mine manager in Montana.
“There was a bad fire there,” she said, her voice beginning to break apart. “The hoist came up with the men on it all in flames. They were all burning.”
The story horrified the teenager.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “That can’t happen here. We’ll get your son out,” thinking, God, how I hope that is true.
Norman Fee’s mother faced the portal. With each breath, a prayer.
AFTERNOON, MAY 3
Woodland Park
HOPE SELDOM WINS OVER TRUTH. ON WEDNESDAY, ONE OF THE Beehner brothers drove Don’s red-and-white VW bus from Big Creek and parked it by the house. He hauled out a pair of dirty diggers and some o
ther clothes and carried them inside. Nothing else had made the family’s tragedy seem more real than the return of the VW. Wava Beehner’s parents came from their home in Moon Gulch. It was true. Don was dead. Her younger brother took the children out for a ride in his brand-new Dodge—allowing each one a chance behind the wheel. Even twelve-year-old Matt took a spin. It was the only thing their uncle could think of to take their minds off their shock—if only for a split second. Later, Wava joined her brother-in-law and wife for a drink. Don’s handsome face held steady in her thoughts. She remembered how he’d run all over town in heavy boots to build himself up when he was a teenager, how he’d rabbit-holed money everywhere in the house. He was everybody’s best friend. He was the only man she’d ever love. While cigarette smoke swirled in the barroom air, Wava Beehner cried until her throat ached.
TIME UNKNOWN, MAY 3
Safety Zone
RON FLORY AND TOM WILKINSON HADN’T EATEN ANYTHING SINCE lunch on Tuesday, and according to Flory’s watch, that was some thirty-five hours ago. Water from the water line filled them up, but only to a point. They were hungry and lethargic. They needed food. Both knew that there was only one place on 4800 where they could find any—their own dinner buckets. Safe in their air pocket, they didn’t know how bad the air was down the drift at the station. Hunger and hope drove them to take the chance. Maybe they’d find a way to get out.
Not forgetting that Wilkinson had already lost consciousness once, they agreed that at the first sign of dizziness they’d pull back and give up. They removed their T-shirts, wetted them down, and covered their mouths and noses. Wilkinson’s lamp was their source of light as they walked toward the station. As they drew closer, they could see the men. Most were in a bundle by the motors. One was alone on the station. The images were seared onto their brains, but to discern who was who was beyond either man’s ability. The dead had swollen in the heat, their clothing stretched to splitting. Their faces were so distorted that Flory couldn’t have identified them if he’d had a list of names from which to work. A rush of adrenaline propelling them, they grabbed their own buckets and hurried back to their pocket. Inside the buckets they had a few bites of a leftover sandwich and a cookie. The taste of food only made their hunger grow.
They sat in the dark, in their good air, acutely aware of what it felt like to be alone—how the sound of their own voices was all they’d heard since their seven co-workers dropped dead. Dying like that was wrong. It wasn’t a miner’s death. A miner usually died in an accident, sometimes the result of a chain reaction he’d started himself. Flory and Wilkinson had taken their chances, goddamn stupid and big chances, many times. Sometimes they might knock at a slab or delay timbering a little bit longer than was safe. One of their regular and most dangerous endeavors was to use the charge of their cap lamps to ignite powder when they had to chunk up a large rock that couldn’t go down the chute. They’d put powder on it, run wire off it, climb up the stope, and set it off. No one watching for safety. Just the two men blowing up stuff. Once when Wilkinson was drilling, a three-ton slab had crashed down right behind him. Instead of stopping and surveying the scene for other problems on the back of the stope, he simply glanced over and kept on drilling.
NEAR MIDNIGHT, MAY 3
Kellogg
THE PHONE RANG IN SUNSHINE CLERK BETTY LARSEN’S KELLOGG home late Wednesday. It was well past her bedtime. On the line was personnel director Jim Farris, and he sounded frazzled. He told Larsen to come in and comb through the files for physical characteristics that could be used in the identification process. She knew that some such data was there, because she’d recalled times when signing up a new hire she’d ask if they had any scars or tattoos. Every guy who’d ever mined had at least one scar. Some were quite memorable. One man had a jagged white-and-pink one from a stab wound to his stomach.
“From my wife,” he said, somewhat embarrassed. “But I had it coming.”
Larsen spent the early-morning hours with manila folders holding the bits and pieces of Sunshine careers: notes from shifters admonishing a man for dumping shift one too many times; write-ups about poor safety practices; judgments from the local credit companies that showed how miner after miner had gotten himself into a financial jam; and, of course, work histories that documented the trajectories of lives that went from mine to mine on the never-ending search for big bucks. The records, however, were not particularly helpful. A few files acknowledged a scar, a tattoo, a birthmark, or other distinguishing characteristics, but specifics were elusive. Not where and not what. Height and weight information was frequently omitted, too. The hiring-mill mentality of mining’s best years had doctors examining new hires as quickly as possible. Half wouldn’t work but a week or two anyway.
Families provided some missing details. Richard Bewley’s family reported he had a tattoo that read “30–40” (they didn’t know he’d had it surgically removed two years earlier); Louis Goos wore a ring made of Black Hills gold; Glen Rossiter was the only miner with a handlebar mustache; Ron Wilson was missing the ring finger on his left hand; and Mark Russell had beautiful curly blond hair. Darrell Stephens’s family said the nineteen-year-old’s left leg was an inch and half shorter than his right.
Tom Wilkinson’s best friend, Johnny Davis, was one of the few who wore a “Butte hat,” a hardhat with a visor like a baseball cap. District miners thought Butte-style hats were a joke. Water from overhead could trickle down a man’s neck if he was wearing one of those dumb hats. Why Davis wore one, no one knew. He was a Mullan boy, for God’s sake.
Thirty-six bodies had been counted by the end of the day, with only eleven identified. That left fifty-seven missing. Bob Launhardt told the rescue team that unless the men had found a place to dig in and keep out the smoke—and had done so quickly—there was little chance of survival. Curiously, he told his father-in-law another story. Bill Noyen wrote in his diary that night: “Bob . . . said the officials definitely believe there is a good chance they’ll find most of the missing people alive.”
Thirty-seven
TIME UNKNOWN, MAY 4
4800 Level
THE DIVIDING WALL OF SMOKE ADJACENT TO THE SAFETY ZONE on 4800 stirred. Thirty to forty feet from where Flory and Wilkinson had first sought refuge, along the rib of the main drift of the 4800, a crosscut led to a raise down to 5000. A dimming signal light hung on the opposite side of the junction. They collected some three-by-twelve-inch-by-six-foot lagging and made miner’s bed boards, set against the ribs at a comfortable angle facing the crosscut. Wilkinson used his powder knife to slice a section from one of the enormous rolls of burlap used underground to stabilize sandfill by acting as a colander of sorts, after the slurry of water and sand had been piped into mined-out stopes. He and Flory doubled, then quadrupled the loose-woven fabric to fashion a makeshift mattress.
It appeared that the smoke poured down 10-Shaft, across 4800 station, and down the drift, before hesitating and then continuing its route into the crosscut. Both survivors knew that as long as the smoke kept moving away, they’d be safe. Neither man thought much about toxic gases that could be hanging at different depths down the drift. All they understood was that the smoke had killed the others on 4800.
The flow of fresh air coming from the borehole created an invisible barrier, pushing the bad air away. Neither knew it, of course, but it was Harvey Dionne’s quick thinking and Kenny Wilbur’s unbridled nerve that had uncorked the flow by removing the lagging cover on 3700.
“As long as the smoke stays where it’s at, we’ll be all right,” Flory said.
Wilkinson hung a paper towel as an airflow indicator on a fan line across the drift. The paper stayed suspended at a thirty-degree angle toward the crosscut.
MORNING, MAY 4
Sunshine Rescue Command Center
BY THURSDAY MORNING, BOB LAUNHARDT’S INITIAL SUGGESTION of advancing the good air by sealing bulkheads and cross-drifts wasn’t working. Despite the deluge of help from mines all over the country and Canada, Suns
hine had more leaks than could be fixed. Launhardt was caught in the middle. He wanted the men to get to the lower levels, but if they didn’t seal the leaks, they’d put themselves at great risk. Crews working from Silver Summit’s 3100 level started a suction fan to draw the smoke away from the Jewell side, but it, too, failed to do the job. More sealing was needed. In the command center, someone suggested procuring a supply of inflatable rubber life rafts and using them as makeshift barriers to hasten the process. The idea was dismissed as impractical. Someone remembered how truckers used collapsible bags to protect their freight. In fact, the four-by-eight-foot oversized pillows had even been used to stop a backed-up sewer system from flooding a Minnesota town. A phone call later, a jet loaded with a supply was on its way from a Goodyear plant in Georgia to Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane.
And although Launhardt couldn’t really conceive of it at the time, trapped as he was in grief and concern for the missing, he was becoming a target of criticism, especially in the death of Don Beehner. Someone needed to be blamed. One moment reran in a fuzzy replay. It had happened so fast that the mine’s safety engineer wasn’t completely clear on just how it was that Don Beehner had ended up passing his helmet to Schulz. Launhardt had been on the opposite side of the track from Hawkins and Beehner. Hawkins was sort of working on his hands and knees while Launhardt leaned over to help Schulz. It was possible that Hawkins hadn’t seen what Beehner was doing before it was too late. Ten seconds, maybe twenty, and he was in the piss ditch.
The scene haunted him. How could that happen? How could a trained man take such a foolish risk? Launhardt sought details about what Beehner had been doing before he’d joined the ad hoc rescue crew. He learned that Beehner had been on the 3700 when the fire broke out. He’d gone directly to 10-Shaft, where he’d assisted several men with their self-rescuers. On his way up the shaft to 3100, a miner had slumped in the cage, and Beehner had pulled his self-rescuer from his mouth.