The miners

Wonders in a Cold, Dark Place

By Rick Horowitz


"My daddy said don't ever be a miner,
For a miner's grave is all you'll ever own..."

Knowing it would end badly, we started our grieving in advance, and then waited for confirmation.

How could it not end badly? The numbers told us all we needed to know: nine men trapped in a four-foot-high tunnel more than 200 feet underground by millions of gallons of rushing water. Cold and sooty water. Rising water. Sooner or later, there could be only one result; the numbers made that plain.

And what the numbers didn't tell us, the lyrics did. We'd heard -- we'd sung -- the folk songs, the songs of the miner's life. Which often as not, we quickly remembered, meant songs of the miner's death. The tunes felt mournful, the words real. The work might be safer now than it was back then, but safe it would never be. These men were venturing deep inside the earth, as their fathers and their fathers' fathers had done. There was something elemental about it, and yet unnatural.


"Well, it's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew,
Where the dangers are double and the pleasures are few,
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines,
Well, it's dark as a dungeon way down in the mines..."


Up at the surface, the optimistic announcements continued to pour out, hour after hour, until we couldn't help but notice how many hours had already gone by, and how many, many hours still lay ahead. The narrow pipe had somehow found them, had managed to deliver oxygen when oxygen was dwindling. The narrow pipe had delivered oxygen, and allowed them to tap out a head count in return. Nine men underground. Nine men living.

But for how long? How long before the head count became a body count?

We knew how this would end. Determination and courage were fine, but the laws of nature would not be denied. Water was more powerful than air. Human beings needed heat, and food, and fluids. These were elemental, too.

And then the setbacks -- the shattered drill bit, the excruciating delay. Now even the optimistic announcements had shadows across them, subtle nods to reality. Everything that can be done is being done, they wanted us to know. They'll keep at it for as long as it takes. But the men have been down there a very long time, they acknowledged. And it's been days since anyone has heard a sound.

Deeper they drilled, closer they came, until -- finally -- the breakthrough. The rescue shaft had reached its target, they told us, but before they told us anything more about what they'd found down there, they needed to talk to the miners' families.

We knew exactly what that meant: The news would not be good. There would be no smiles, no cheers, no fists thrust skyward in exultation. When the time came to tell the rest of the world what the families were now learning, it would be just what we'd been fearing, just what we'd been expecting, from the very beginning.


"All their lives they dug their graves,
Two miles of earth for a marking stone..."

But not, somehow, this time.

Posted 7/30/02. Get award-winning commentary from syndicated columnist Rick Horowitz twice every week.

Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist, TV commentator, writing coach and public speaker

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