Rock Dust
Cold, white dust collects on mine timbers like rime frost, lies a foot deep on the floor. You glide through it, surf through it—the dust is soft like talcum powder. You kick it up with your feet as you walk. Plop, plop.
Federal law requires everything in the coal mine to be covered with pulverized limestone—it’s supposed to dampen an explosion. There are rock dust "stations" underground—yellow holding tanks buried under years of accumulated dust. You have to dig through layers of it just to find the hatch door.
Rock dusters (men on graveyard who spray the mine with dust) wrap up in burlap to stay warm while they’re minding the tanks. You get chilled down if you’re not wrapped up. You push a lever to pump white dust through the lines, then settle back for a 20-minute snooze.
Four-inch aluminum pipes transport rock dust to all parts of the mine. They run along the roof at skewed angles, suspended from J-hooks and baling wire. Every so often, flexible hoses hang down from shut-off valves. Here and there, little plumes of dust emanate from quaint pots and drums resembling old-fashioned stills. These are called "trickle dusters."
You wake from your nap and walk the dust lines, opening valves along the way, blasting the passageway with thick, choking clouds of white. You get dizzy, can’t tell right or left, up or down. A man approaching from a few feet away — his caplight beaming right into your eyes — seems to be drifting in from another planet. The stuff frosts the insides of your nose, cakes your eyebrows and eyelashes, grits your teeth. It sifts into your boots and fills up your gloves. Sometimes you wonder how, after so many years of this, there is any room left in the tunnels at all—you’d think they’d be totally plugged up with dust. You go out the hole at 6:45 in the morning, leaving the mine pristine white. When you come in at 11:00 that night, the tunnels are coated with a fine layer of sooty black, and it’s time to start over again.
Rock dust comes in 90-pound sacks. It’s ground-up limestone, calcium carbonate quarried from the walls of Glenwood Canyon. Tons of the stuff come into the mine every night on little rail cars called the "trip." You off-load the sacks by hand, stacking them like sandbags around a combat trench. You work up a sweat. The dust-covered paper slips through your hands and sends a gritty chill down your backbone.
I remember bringing in a load of dust one evening and stacking it at the bottom. A fellow named Mark Edwards helped me. We made swift work of it, then chatted awhile. Mark stood opposite me on the other side of the stack, smiling. The next day a section of roof collapsed and killed him.
I have an indelible image of another man, Big Bird, whose real name was Mike. When I think of rock dust, I think of him. There had been a terrible gas explosion at the mine. Fifteen men died. There were union meetings and safety demands, and the men voted to go on strike. The last shift before going on strike felt unreal. Gloom hung heavily in the tunnels. I could imagine the white flash, the concussion, the melting heat; bodies strewn across the floor. At the end of the shift we rode silently out to the track, crammed into the back of a diesel-powered Scout. We didn’t know when we’d return.
At the tracks we climbed onto mine cars, which were nothing more than sheets of flat steel mounted on wheels. A low guard-rail of heavy pipe surrounded each car. Bags of dust were stacked on the cars four-deep. As the trip lurched forward, and we began our ascent, one of the men grabbed a bag, ripped it open, scooped up several handfuls of dust, and flung them all directions.
The tension broke as one man after another grabbed a fistful of dust and pitched it at the nearest smiling face. We were eating it, wiping it out of our eyes, laughing our heads off, and Big Bird planted both feet firmly on the floor of the railcar, tore a sack in two, and heaved a good 40 pounds of dust at one of the slaphappy miners, plastering him against a guardrail. It was no- holds-barred the rest of the way up the tunnel. Big Bird took some hefty shots but never went down. He just stood there unbudged, coated with white from head to foot. I can still see the wet curl of his lip, the smirk of triumph in his eyes.