Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  In fact, the men do fall into a work rhythm, one that’s completely different from the routine in the mine before August 5. They unload supplies, medicines, and personal packages coming from the surface around the clock, and also maintain the communications link to the top and keep the lights going. Unloading the palomas brings all sorts of interesting things. Cowboy novels, pocket-size Bibles, and an MP3 player for one miner who has been complaining so much about everything, the other miners give it to him just so that he’ll keep quiet. But then some of the other miners complain about the one miner with an MP3 player, and soon they all have one. For group entertainment, a Samsung SP-H03 Pico portable projector arrives. It fits in the palm of a hand, and the men will soon use it to watch videos, movies, and live television images projected onto a white sheet. But best of all, the palomas are starting to bring real food. The daily intake supplied to the men has increased from 500 to 1,000 calories now, and soon it will be 1,500. And the men are getting real meals, prepared by a kitchen up on the surface, including rice, meatballs, bread, chicken, pasta, potatoes, and pears, all in small but delicious portions.

  After a few days in which the men heartily and thankfully devour this real food, the rescue team on the surface finds an uneaten pastry inside what should be an empty paloma sent back from the bottom. One of the men down below has returned that day’s dessert. This thing you gave us, an attached note says, it isn’t very good. Do you have anything else? The rejected dessert is an unequivocally good sign: The men are no longer so desperate they’ll eat anything you give them.

  * * *

  On August 30, a day before the men pray for peace at Level 90, the rescue teams begin drilling the first hole designed to bring the men out. The Strata 950 raise borer is a machine so large and elaborate, many different metaphors are required to describe it. At nearly three stories tall, its general structure is that of a monument, or a gazebo, with six stainless-steel pillars, each about two stories tall, holding up a large white metal roof that itself has four additional white columns protruding from the top. This edifice rests upon a floor of recently poured and freshly set concrete, and it houses a series of hydraulic levers and shafts designed to guide man-size drill bits into the earth. The Strata 950 will begin by excavating a 15-inch pilot hole, and once that’s completed, a second drill bit will widen it to 28 inches for the rescue cage. The first, smaller drill bit is composed of a series of interlocking beaded discs, and these begin to grind into the stone, creating a hole that is filled with 9.5 gallons of water per second to reduce friction. The Strata 950 crushes and sloshes its way downward into the diorite mountain as men in yellow overalls tend to it, working in teams to lift, turn, align, and lower a variety of heavy steel components, each man doing something different, as if they were working at a rock-crushing assembly line. The noise the machine makes, however, is similar in volume and pitch to that of a jet engine taxiing on a runway. The bit turns at the sedate but steady speed of about 20 rpm, working under the sun and then into the night, the site illuminated by white lamps that leave the work crews looking like extras in a sci-fi movie. The rescuers toil in a bubble of light, working to reach a group of no-longer-hungry but deeply irritated miner-astronauts waiting to be liberated, 2,100 feet below.

  * * *

  The NASA team of health experts and engineers arrives in Copiapó on the morning of September 1, after a two-day journey from Houston. On their drive from the city of Copiapó to the San José Mine, Dr. J. Michael Duncan takes in the dry and treeless landscape, and the colors and textures of geological features that look transplanted from Mars. He remembers that the Chileans are building a facility in this same desert, the Moon Mars Atacama Research Station, in which the harsh, waterless surroundings serve as a laboratory for studying the possibility of life on other planets. They enter the mine property and note immediately the frenetic activity at the site, the men and women in mining helmets and overalls. At the top of the hill, they see the massive Plan A drill at work. The NASA experts visit the site for several days, and on September 4 they are talking with the Chilean rescue officials in one of the small offices on the site when they hear loud cheering outside. They open the door and see people clapping and waving as a series of trucks pull through the gate: The first drill required for the two-stage Plan B has arrived.

  The Chilean officials ask the NASA visitors to talk to the miners. Many of the assorted dignitaries who’ve come to visit the mine have found themselves guided to the communications shack for a moment to address the men down below: from the novelist Isabel Allende to four members of the Uruguayan rugby team who survived a plane crash in the Andes. Albert Holland is handed a phone by a Chilean technician. “Hola,” Holland says, and then stops, because he doesn’t have much more Spanish than that, and he doesn’t understand the rush of Spanish that comes in reply from down below. “Just say ‘bien,’” one of the Chileans on the surface says, and Holland says “bien” and soon the conversation is over. The NASA representatives meet with the families, too, and are introduced as members of the American space team that’s come to lend their expertise to the rescue. Holland says that the rescuers are doing everything within their power to bring the men to the surface. A fireplug woman of about fifty with sunburned skin steps forward; she’s introduced to the NASA men as the “mayor” of Camp Esperanza. María Segovia has listened to Holland’s speech and is moved, and the woman from Antofagasta who sells pastries at the beach gives the space expert from Houston a heartfelt embrace. “I’ll adopt him right now,” she says.

  After sunset falls, the NASA men take in the spectacle of the night sky. This is a desert where astronomers have come for decades because they feel closer to space here than any other place on Earth. “The Milky Way stretched in a great arc from a set of silhouetted hills behind us all the way across the sky to the hills in front of us,” Holland says later. “It was like standing under a brilliant bowl. The desert, the night, and the stars were completely silent … Brilliant, ageless, and still.” Beneath the infinite canopy of the cosmos, Holland observes, there is “the feverish, human intensity” of the mine and its teams of rescuers working to lift thirty-three knuckleheads out of the mountain.

  * * *

  Down below, thirty-three trapped men who cannot yet cast their eyes on the Milky Way spend hours trapped in the stillness and the heat that comes from the center of the Earth. They cannot yet hear the Plan A drill, and the quiet is broken by the occasional moans of men who are not yet fully themselves in body and mind. They may no longer be hungry, but now that they’re drinking clean water from the surface, and a lot of it, a few cannot pee. They are bloating up, and as they squeeze their full, aching, and stubborn bladders they direct their complaints to their medical volunteer, Yonni Barrios, who takes to the phone and talks to the surface. The medical team from the Ministry of Health listens to Yonni, and then asks him: Have you ever inserted a catheter before? The best treatment for urine retention, they tell him, is to take a tube, insert it in the patient’s penis until you reach the bladder, and drain the contents. Yonni is sent down the catheter and gloves necessary to perform this operation. “If you tell me how to do this, I’ll give it a try,” he tells the doctors, even though it goes without saying that having to insert a tube into his coworkers’ penises was not something he expected to find himself doing when he showed up for work on August 5. Fortunately, before he can perform this uncomfortable and embarrassing procedure, the doctors tell him: Wait, we’ll send down some medicine first. Yonni, meanwhile, tries a home remedy: hot compresses, which he prepares by taking a few water bottles and heating them up by placing them in the exhaust pipe of one of the pickup trucks and starting the engine. “It was just hot enough to heat the bottle without melting the plastic,” he explains. Yonni gives these hot water bottles to Víctor Segovia, whose suffering from urine retention is the worst, and helps him place the warm bottles between his overalls and his pelvis. After a few hours of this treatment, Víctor is able to produce a trickle of urin
e. Yonni reports this to the surface, and they ask him to send a sample to the top for analysis.

  Next, Yonni puts on his gloves to treat the most serious, endemic medical problem the men face: the spread of fungus over their bodies. Before the rescuers reached them, only a few men suffered from this skin ailment, but now that they’ve been able to bathe, they’ve lost the layer of dirt and grit that was protecting them against the fungus that’s literally raining down upon them. The continual flow of wastewater produced by the machines drilling on the surface, combined with the mine’s routinely oppressive heat and humidity, has transformed the caverns in which they are living into a kind of fungus factory. The mud is beginning to rot and, when the breeze shifts in the mine, Yonni can smell the putrefaction. “It smelled like when you go to a river and pull up the black mud at the bottom.” He can see fungi growing and spreading on the roof of the corridors and of the Refuge. “It was like these thin little hairs falling from the ceiling,” he says. Hyphae, these filaments are called. “They would fall, as if it were raining. They were shiny, and they would glow when you put a light on them. They were like little transparent hairs.” The fungus falls on the men when they’re sleeping, shirtless against the heat, and when they’re awake it covers their new inflatable cots and begins growing there, too. Angry red circles begin to cover their bodies. Yonni puts on gloves and studies how the fungus is invading the backs and arms and chests of his coworkers. Each sore is a few millimeters in diameter, with pus in the middle, and as time goes on they seem to penetrate deeper into the skin, despite Yonni’s patient and constant treatment with creams. Yonni worries that the red pustules will soon grow infected, and he can imagine the fungus digging its way even deeper into the skin, spreading an infection that he’d be powerless to stop in this damp and fetid cavern. Yonni worries that if they are stuck here until December, this fungus could begin to devour them all from the inside and kill half of them off. They’d die and then be eaten by this living thing that thrives on moisture and darkness and the miners’ own ever-paler flesh.

  14

  COWBOYS

  Why not just leave right now? Why wait until Christmas for these government rescuers to come and get us? The question arises again and again in these first days of September. The thunder blasts and the wailing of the mountain have not stopped, and for many of the men the intermittent sound is fueling a deep psychological torment. They tremble in the dark as they try to sleep, and they don’t feel like themselves, even now that they’re fed. On August 5 the mountain sent explosions of rock and rolling boulders down the mine’s passageways to kill them, and each new underground quake or tremor they feel is a reminder that it might try again to kill them. The unending aural and seismic torture inflicted by the massive mountain in which they are trapped is slowly eating away at their sense that they’ll ever be truly happy and free men.

  Yonni Barrios says they can find their way out through the chimneys or the cavern of the Pit. “Since Yonni thinks he’s a badass [se cree capo] he’s planning on escaping through the chimneys even though he knows they are blocked. And the ones that are not blocked have no ladders,” Víctor Segovia notes in his diary on September 6. Yonni goes on about this so long, he convinces Mario Sepúlveda and older miners like Esteban Rojas that it might actually work. “Yonni is scared and desperate and is dragging innocent people with him,” Segovia writes in his diary. “I think that all who follow him are headed straight to their deaths.” Listening to the men talk with increasing detail about escaping leads Luis Urzúa to call to the top and request the telephone intervention of the one man on the surface all the miners trust completely: Pablo Ramirez, the night-shift supervisor who tried to rescue them in the hours after the collapse. From the surface, Ramirez speaks to the group to “clear up any doubts” about the possibility of escape. All exits linked to the Ramp are completely blocked, he tells them, and up at Level 540 the mine is still collapsing, producing rockfalls that could kill either the men or the rescuers trying to reach them should the men get stuck in their ascent. With that, all talk of escape ends, for the moment.

  Today, during their thirty-fourth day underground, as during their first night trapped, Luis Urzúa believes he has managed to keep the men under his supervision from killing themselves. But Víctor Segovia and many others are still frustrated with him. “We’re baking down here, and always arguing, but when the people on the surface talk to our boss, he always tells them that everything is okay.” Urzúa is an outsider, a shift supervisor with only a few months at the San José, and before the collapse he didn’t even know most of the men, Segovia writes, and he’s clearly siding with the mechanics (another group of outsiders, in the eyes of the northerners who’ve worked in the mine the longest). The mechanics, for their part, are so frustrated with the old-timers and young “clan” that sleeps in and near the Refuge that they’ve stopped recharging the batteries to their lamps. “Now we are without any light,” Segovia writes.

  The only thing Urzúa can do to mollify his anxious men is to pass on what’s he’s learned from Sougarret and the others about the rescue efforts. People and drills and equipment are coming from the United States, Austria, Italy, and, of course, from the biggest mines in Chile. Then, on September 7, Urzúa learns that the Plan B team has reached 123 meters in the first stage of its two-stage drilling plan, surpassing the depth of the Plan A drill after just two days. If the Plan B team can keep going at this pace, it’s likely the rescue capsule will lift them out of their hell long before Christmas. This information helps calm the men considerably. Another potential revolt has been averted, but Urzúa has plenty more things to worry about it. The shift supervisor is constantly being called to the phone, to talk with all sorts of people who have little, if anything, to do with the rescue. One day it’s the ambassador of Palestine in Chile on the line; another day, it’s the ambassador of Israel. Urzúa talks to assorted leaders of the Catholic Church, and with their Christian rivals, the Evangelicals. Yes, all these dignitaries are calling to express their solidarity, to give the thirty-three trapped men a sense of how Chile and the world are behind them. Urzúa is a generous and grateful man, and never complains about being treated like a caged celebrity forced to speak to anyone his surface handlers see fit to bring to the phone, even though he’d be well within his rights to do so. Urzúa isn’t a man to pick a fight, either, not with so much responsibility already on his shoulders. He’s the miners’ liaison to the psychologists, the engineers, the doctors, and, most important, to Sougarret and the minister of mining and the president. Finally, he realizes: “I had to start delegating more.” He puts Samuel Avalos, aka CD, in charge of the thermometers and the hoses that have begun to pump a bit of fresh air into the mine. (Avalos notes that when the air isn’t working, and during certain phases of drilling, the temperature rises to as high as 50° Celsius [122° Fahrenheit] and the humidity reaches 95 percent). When a fiber-optic line is lowered down the shaft, Urzúa gets two of the younger and more tech-savvy men to make the necessary connections and to be the new communications team: Ariel Ticona, twenty-nine, whose wife is about to give birth to their baby, and Pedro Cortez, twenty-six. Then the new communications team quickly gets into a fight with Mario Sepúlveda, because Mario feels he should be able to pick up the phone and talk to the surface whenever he wants. “Perri almost got into a scuffle with Ariel,” Víctor Segovia notes in his diary. Ticona and Cortez both quit their new jobs and retreat to the Refuge, until Urzúa goes and finds them and convinces them to return.

  The new fiber-optic line is quickly put to use. On September 7, Cortez and Ticona and others connect it to the portable Samsung projector, which casts a television image onto a white sheet: The national soccer team of Chile is playing the team from Ukraine in an international friendly. Live, from Kiev. The Chilean team poses on the field for a picture before kickoff, wearing shirts that say FUERZA MINEROS. Almost all of the thirty-three men gather before the makeshift screen to watch the game, and most put on the matching red sh
irts they’ve been sent from the top. They are filmed while they watch, in a black-and-white video the Chilean government will distribute later to the global media. Franklin Lobos, who once wore the Chilean national team jersey as a player, offers a commentary on the game to Chilean television, which only adds to the amusing weirdness of what will become a light feature, related by news anchors with a gentle smile on their lips, about a group of working stiffs trapped under two thousand feet of stone doing the most normal-guy thing a guy can do: watch soccer. The men smile and wave at the camera, and in their identical shirts they resemble a crew sent on a mission to the center of the Earth. The men are unwitting subjects of global entertainment, but they don’t complain, though Víctor Segovia decides not to join his colleagues watching the game because he doesn’t want people on the surface to think that everything is okay inside their cavern-prison when it really isn’t. Eventually, more of the men will rebel against the idea that they are fish in a fishbowl: For a few hours they cover the camera that broadcasts a continuous image to the surface at the site where the palomas are unloaded.

  * * *

  Up on the surface, at least some of the family members are also resisting the sense that the collapse of the San José Mine is becoming a media- and celebrity-driven event. In addition to the politicians, the diplomats, and the philanthropists, actors and musicians are showing up at Camp Esperanza, too, like the Stetson-wearing Chilean cumbia-ranchera group Los Charros de Lumaco. The families are invited to pile into buses and attend a comedy show in Copiapó, and later there will be a lingerie giveaway for the wives and girlfriends. The musicians, comedians, actors, and purveyors of women’s underwear have come with no other intent than to prop up the families’ spirits, but Carmen Berríos, the wife of Luis Urzúa, has no use for any of them.