The Deep Dark Read Free Page B

catching up with the miners. Airborne silica turned lungs into wheezing dust bags. Corneas were trashed by gritty dust belching through the working areas, forced along by the man-made cyclone of ventilation fans. The omnipresent dust that bloomed inside the working areas after blasting consisted of near-microscopic particles of lead, tetrahedrite, and razorlike pieces of silica from the quartz that frequently hosted the veins being mined. After each round was blasted, the air thickened with gray dust. Miners breathed it all in. Some tried to deplete the cloud through the judicious use of water over a muck pile as they were slushing out their stope, the working area whose name was a bastardization of the word “step” from the days when mining was done in a stairstep fashion. But water only goes so deep—no more than six inches—and men and machines stop for nothing. They didn’t wear any kind of respirator or paper filter, though common sense would indicate that such precautions might help. Some of that was the result of tradition and ignorance, but it was also that Sunshine’s underground was so hot that it was difficult enough to breathe even without a barrier across your mouth. Breathing a little easier underground at age twenty was paid for at age sixty, when scar tissue from abrasive dust caught up with a man’s lungs. More than one old miner ended his days with an oxygen canister, a metal mongrel trailing on a leash with every step.
    The steam-table heat of the mine and the repetitious work of mining machinery also created inescapable peril. Hands, wrists, and legs cramped up to such a degree that men looked like aberrant sand crabs, with arms all bunched up and hands locked in claws. One miner cramped up while waiting at the station for the cage, the underground elevator system. When the cage arrived, he couldn’t stand up. His legs had turned into rusted C-clamps tightening around the bench. To beat cramping, some ate potassium-rich bananas. They thought a banana, not an apple, kept the doctor away. One miner opened a pickle jar, drained all the juice into a glass—and chugged the briny solution in two gulps. The light-green-tinged liquid tasted like shit, but the salt did the trick. In the mid-1960s, Sunshine installed enormous ventilation fans that improved conditions, but for those guys working underground, it still felt like being in Panama in the middle of August.
    Most miners became astute at reading their bodies. Before the onset of a headache—when a dull throbbing alerted a man before the pain jumped into a sledgehammer on the cranium—was the only time to stem the inevitable cramping. Salt tablets stored throughout the working levels were the preventive, of course, and miners ate handfuls all day long. Wait too long, and fingers, toes, and other body parts started to curl, and nothing short of a bath in a vat of Morton’s would cure a case of heat cramps. A man in his teens and twenties could handle it better than an older miner, but even youth didn’t guarantee immunity. In the underground, nothing did.
    Chronic heat-related indigestion was also an underground scourge. Men had to drag themselves to the station to get out of that hot, stinking hole, sometimes feeling sicker than they ever had in their lives. One Sunshine miner got so ill from the heat that he vomited all the way from 4600 to the 3700 station. As strong as they were, men had been shaken like paint mixers all day long underground, and they arm-wrestled with 115-pound jackleg rock drills in their stopes and rained sweat from every gland. One miner chomped Rolaids like Beer Nuts; another carried a bottle of sickly pink goo that he swigged with the same gusto as a whiskey shot.
    Two variables ensured that underground accidents could and would come to pass—the earth was unstable and men took chances. Launhardt knew how men thought underground because he’d worked there.
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