Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“It was
hard
work,” he said. “It doesn't matter whether I liked it.”
Whether or not he had liked the work, though, he had decided to spend his retirement
here. His children worked in the mine, and he saw no reason to leave. He smiled as he
looked down over the mining complex, and not for the first time, I reflected that there was
more than one kind of health.
The explosives man broke the spell. “Why did you come here?” he said, laughing. “It's
so dirty and black!”
Back at the extraction area, below, I stood by the cave-like mouth of the tunnel for a
long time—hours, it seemed—and smoked, and lay on a pile of corrugated sheeting in the
sun, and smoked, and eventually wondered if anything was ever going to happen.
The tunnel mouth had walls and a metal ceiling, and a sign over it with two golden char-
acters, and the tracks in the ground, and it all sloped down at a steep grade away from the
daylight, to a second, deeper, older mouth, a tunnel mouth built out of stone, and then dis-
appeared into the earth. It was a tunnel, but after staring at it for an hour, I decided that
really it was a cave in the end.
I tried to offer a cigarette to the guy next to me, and was again too slow, and again ac-
cepted one of his.
Then there was a grinding sound, not quite a rumble, and the cable went tight, and the
man whose cigarette I was smoking went and stood on the tracks. The grinding grew louder
and louder, and everyone started paying somewhat more attention.
At last the tunnel roared, and a train of five mining carts shot out of its mouth. I felt
the urge to dive for safety, even though I wasn't in the way. The man standing on the
tracks—who
was
in the way—floated onto the leading cart, as casually as if he were step-
ping onto a streetcar. He reached down with lackadaisical precision and removed a thick
metal pin to release the tow cable. The carts moved fast, spiriting him backward away from
the tunnel mouth, and as they went by, I saw it. The coal. It filled each cart to the rim, in
shining, sticky, dribbling mounds.
The cable-release man hopped off and another man stepped on. He threw aside another
pin and the link that connected the lead cart to the train. The cast-off gear hit the black
ground with a deep, metal clank. Another worker had put a block on the track to stop the
following carts, and now the lead man coasted free, riding his cart along a wide arc of track,
all the way to the hopper, where yet another man waited, also with coal on his face, also
wearing a jacket and sweater, work gloves and trousers, dark with coal—everything black
with the stuff. The lead man stepped off his cart just as it crashed into the hopper, and the
two men pushed on the levers, using the cart's momentum to upend it. They dumped its
contents into a chute, where the rocks were shaken out of it, and then the coal was sent
