The Intersection
If you drive behind the hogback west of Carbondale, you'll wind up on Thompson Creek, where Snowmass Coal operated mines in the 70s. There's not much to see now, just a couple of settling ponds.
Back then the place was a beehive. Trucks rumbled in and out. The wash plant was humming. Shifts of miners worked around the clock. Locomotives carried carloads of coal out to this dark underground crossroad from working faces deep in the mine. A track slope descended from the top of the mine to join coal-hauling tracks at the bottom. Graffiti scrawled in red over the portal warned all comers they were entering the "Shortcut to Hell."
Let's go down into the mine. The cable runs out from the hoist room between the tracks, over the planks, over the knuckle, and down the track slope. You crawl into the mantrip just outside the hoist room, scrunch up in little low-roofed metal cars, which are painted yellow, chipped and scratched. You crowd into one, jam up against your buddies, slouch down because it's low. The hoistman, Bill Lopez—a burly guy with a mustache and a lip full of chew—pays out the rope and the cable slides over the knuckle.
The cars click-clack and rumble as you descend. You're in a different world. No more sunlight. The track slope is very steep. Your buddies' caplights flash around and light up the ribs, washing over chalky gray support timbers passing by at a regular clip. The trip slows down as you slide under the belly of a corrugated tunnel called an overcast. Next thing you know, you're at the bottom.
Here's the Intersection, where two tracks meet. You step out into moon dust, wearing steel-toed brown-rubber boots. You've got your diggers on. They're crusty because they don't get washed often. Guys are wearing dark-blue denim ones, gray striped ones and handsome brown canvas ones, frayed but durable. With clean diggers on, fresh from the laundry, you look so respectable and dignified. But most of the time you just look like a hobo.
Some diggers are lovingly patched; others tattered. The men tuck their pant cuffs into their boots and tape them shut to keep the dust out. There's the round imprint of a Skoal can in an overall bib. Some men sport white hard hats, some wear green hats, but most wear yellow hats. The white ones are bosses; the greens are new hires. You get a yellow one after you've been there a year. The hats are scratched up with reflective stickers all over them.
The production crew heads for the face. Bullgangers set their lunch boxes on the rib, ready to go to work. You've got track men, guys building stoppings, roof bolters, belt men, pump men, mechanics. The fireboss has already gone in ahead of everybody and signed his initials all over the place with a fat piece of chalk, certifying that everything is safe. He has to record his observations outside in an official record book. The law can hold him liable if safety hazards go unreported. There are many ways to get yourself killed in a coal mine, but this mine is pretty safe.
So here we are at the bottom, a large open area with tall wooden cribs—crisscrossed stacks of eight-by-eights—supporting the ceiling. Some lean a little. Tall walls of coal called "ribs" hang over the tracks, threatening to collapse. They're supposed to be coated with white rock dust, but here and there they glisten black where they've been sloughing.
Down here at the bottom of the track I saw my first pair of rail tongs and gave them the name "booger pullers." The sobriquet caught on with the other miners, so I was proud to have added my two bits to the lingo. They operate like giant, man-high calipers. You pinch a rail with these iron tongs and, other miners helping, you huff and puff it along inch by inch.
When I first came here, I still had a green hat. That meant guys like Jack Orlanger could push on me as much as they wanted, and there was nothing I could do about it. He had a loud mouth. We'd be packing solid concrete blocks up those steep, dusty, low-roofed slopes, hunched over, dripping with sweat, then he'd yell obscenities at us. Kick it in gear, you fornicating anuses. Once we were straining to move a lumbersome steel rail, grunting along, and he barked at me like that. A terrible anger flashed in me: instantly I wanted to grab a crib and smash his head with it.
It was hard for me to face my own rage. That night after work, I went to a fellow miner's house to confess my sin and ask for prayer. Since Ray was a Christian, I figured he could straighten me out. "Ray," I said, "there's a guy in the mine that made me so mad I wanted to kill him."
"Let me guess," said Ray. "Is it Jack?" I nodded my head. "Well, don't feel so bad, brother. I've wanted to kill him too."
The ribs kept sloughing down there, and there was a lot of coal to shovel. I remember standing under a big overhanging rib and the coal was piled up pretty deep where it had collapsed. Jack told a bunch of us to start shoveling to clear it away. We weren't too sure we wanted to bend our backs right underneath that rib. Then I decided to just jump in there and start mucking away and not think too much about it. I sensed Jack's approval, and that made me feel good.
Then I was down there shoveling with a tough Spanish guy. We were working under a tall rib and I had an intuition that the rib was about to give way. I didn't want to seem chicken, so I just kept at it with the guy digging alongside me. All of a sudden the whole thing came whooshing out and we high-tailed it and ran out of there, with the coal right on our heels. "I had an intuition that was going to happen," I told him. He was peeved. "Next time you get an ‘intuition' like that, you say something," he said.
The mine superintendent was red-haired Gary Sanders, a transplant from West Virginia where coal seams are only four feet high. He was in "tall coal" out here in Colorado: you could walk around in our mines standing straight up. Back east, you crawled or walked hunched over. Down at the Intersection, the top was making strange clicking noises, like snapping toothpicks. There were signs the whole ceiling might cave in. "Don't worry," Sanders assured us in his high-pitched twang, "it's just bottom heave."
That night the whole thing came down. An area of rock the size of a basketball court just cut loose and came smashing down. Giant slabs of sandstone and shale were piled in a big jumble on the ground, 20 feet deep. There were boulders in there as big as cars. Someone told Gary, "The bottom heaved last night." It took six months to clean it up.
The day after the cave-in, a lanky Mexican named Ignacio and I were sent up into the caved area to start bolting and hanging chain link fence. Although apprehensive about going up in there, I was also curious to see what it looked like. We climbed between the collapsed slabs and the freshly caved ceiling to the high point where it domed out. The ceiling was wet, gray-brown, and seemed, well, virgin. It had the feel of danger, but wasn't really dangerous.
I remember picking my way down that heap of jumbled slabs when a rock cut loose and started rolling toward me. I ran down the slag pile ahead of it, laughing my head off, while it picked up speed and chased me all the way to the bottom.
A dramatic moment came soon after the cave-in. Some major slabs had choked off the bottom entry of the mine. Two gigantic ones leaned against each other, waiting to collapse. It was essential to get in there and blast them apart, but nobody wanted to risk their neck getting underneath those things. The mine superintendent ordered the shift boss, Steve Gatchell, to set up a jack leg in there and start drilling. He refused. You could hardly blame him. The super threatened to fire him, but Gatchell wouldn't budge. None of the other bosses wanted to deal with it either.
Next thing you know, the super was on the phone to Terry Gundersen, the owner of the mine. "Nobody'll work under these slabs." An hour later Gundersen himself appeared underground in his white hat and blue diggers to pow-wow with the other bosses. After deliberation, they settled on Ephraim Munoz, an hourly man. Ephraim said sure, he'd do it. The rest of us stared as Ephraim dragged the jackleg and hoses in there and set up to drill. There was an iron-hard courage, a nonchalance in the face of death, that won instant awe from all of us who watched.
I'll never forget those killer slabs leaning against each other like a giant tent, lit from the inside by Ephraim's caplight, the drill steel plunging into the rock, spinning at a ferocious rate, Ephraim standing jauntily under those slabs, grinning out at us cowards.