Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
hang around his work site, instead of dragging us down the hill by our ears, as he should
have.
There were limits, though. He would not let us go underground. It wasn't safe, he said,
and it wasn't up to him, and the people who it
was
up to wouldn't let us go below either.
Besides, he said, the mine was no place for a woman. I didn't have to look to know that
Cecily was making a face.
A pair of miners wandered over to refuse my cigarettes. The supervisor gestured at me
and asked Cecily a question.
“Let me guess,” I said. “He's asking if I'm married.”
“Yeah,” Cecily said.
I grabbed my head. “Really?!”
“No, no,” she said. “I'm joking with you.” What he actually wanted to know was why
we were there.
This time, I thought, we should deploy
high school teacher,
a new role that I thought
was actually plausible. But Cecily went ahead with something like
professor of mining en-
gineering at a major American university.
“What if they start asking me questions?” I whispered.
Don't worry, Cecily said. We just have to tell them something.
In the gear house behind us, a large wheel fitted with a cable began to turn. The two
lengths of the cable descended into the tunnel-like mouth of the mine; each end was con-
nected to a train of five mining carts. If they ever got started, one set of carts would des-
cend, empty, while the other rose up from belowground, full of coal. But that was some
time off. There was no coal to be seen, except for everywhere. The wheel was only turning
so the crew could apportion the slack on the lines.
The track on which we stood ran through nearly five hundred feet of tunnel to reach the
loading area, which the supervisor told us was located three hundred vertical feet below-
ground. Several hundred miners were down there, powering their way through seams of
coal. Workers at the mine usually got a day off for every ten they worked. But lately, he
said, they had been working constantly, week after week without any days off.
The mine produced a thousand tons a day, which was on the small side, now that so
many illegal operations had been shut down. Mines with a daily production of three or four
thousand tons a day were not uncommon. In a few years, the supervisor told us, this mine
would either be retrofitted with new systems to replace its antiquated technology or be shut
down entirely.
