Of cabbies, crowds and lingerie

By David Bond January 26, 2005 www.silverminers.com

Wallace, Idaho – “Hearses were in short supply in Kellogg, Idaho, in May 1972. A pickup hauled a dead miner to a hillside cemetery slashed with freshly turned earth. Another arrived in a station wagon.”

Thus begins “The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in America’s Richest Silver Mine,” a riveting, page-turning and gut-wrenching account of the May 2, 1972 Sunshine Mine Disaster by New York Times best-seller Gregg Olsen (Abandoned Prayers, Starvation Heights, Cruel Deception, Bitter Almonds). The Deep Dark is due for release by Crown Publishers on March 1st.

From the very first of his 319 pages Olsen wraps you around his finger at the Jewell Shaft portal that fateful morning and doesn’t let go until the last of the 91 men who lost their lives in the sudden and impossible hell that enveloped them at the lunch hour a mile deep inside is laid to rest. You can read Clancy or Higgins for great fiction, John McPhee or Jack Olsen (no relation, but a friend and mentor to Gregg’s nevertheless) for non-fiction, and you will find none better.

I read the rave reviews of The Deep Dark from Publisher’s Weekly and the like and wonder if they read the same book I did. They talk of the bravado and macho of mining men like this was something different out here in the Old West. Oh, one supposes there is some truth to the notion that western hard-rock miners are a breed apart. Indeed, hard-rock mining is part balls, but it is also part intellect, part luck, part skill, part determination, part creativity – and it is surely no part dumb labor, at least not in the sense that the practice of law or banking or accounting are dumb labor. There’s nothing rote about hard-rock mining.

Nor is hard-rock mining, by the standards of this day, exceedingly dangerous. Truckers, power company linemen, loggers, pay a far higher workers’ compensation premium than do miners. This will come as a shock to most miners. (Review the stats further and you will discover that for municipal employees, it is far more dangerous to be a sewer worker than it is to be a cop.) Bring up either of these well-documented comparisons in the wrong bar, however, and your jaw will be merged with your lower stern bearings.

It is the suddenness, the strangeness, the swiftness and the violence that injures or kills a hard-rock miner that gives us our death-fix with these people. And the fact that mining camps are small places. If your partner gets “slabbed,” (crushed to death in a sudden fall of rock from the back of a stope) there is a good chance he was on the school board, or an uncle to your neighbor’s kids, or coached little league, or taught debate.

No, what strikes this western reader is Olsen’s brilliance in bringing out the ordinariness of the men of the Sunshine Mine, then and now, the ordinariness of hard-rock miners and their human dignity. The kiss from a young wife. The plans to wash and wax the vintage Ford at shift’s end. The car-pool to work and its conversation about dumping shift that day to celebrate a friend’s birthday. And underground, even as death enveloped them, the passion of a man to save his friend’s life, to not get on the life-saving mile-long cage-ride to the surface until he was sure his partner was all right and already aboard.

It’s about guys who wouldn’t leave their jobs underground, at the controls of the hoists and aboard the cages, miners who having escaped death went back into the gas-choked mine to join a rescue team because there were men alive still underground, and gave up their own lives in so doing. Because they were miners.

On another level, The Deep Dark is an indictment of Nixon’s mid-1970s corporate America, the age of the leveraged buyout, where accountant- and law-degreed middle-managers dithered while a mile beneath them, men’s lives hung on every second of indecision. And the fury of real mining men against this corporate Pablum, the fury of young men who would become decades later captains of this industry. Harry Cougher. Art Brown. Among the first of the “helmet team” rescue guys who understood the gravity of the situation a mile beneath them while men without chests awaited orders from higher up and sussed-out their financial projections.

The horrors of the Sunshine Mine Disaster I will leave to the reader of The Deep Dark to unearth. They are plentiful and graphic to a fault. But they are not told in a “he said-she said” vein. You see first-hand the Sunshine Mine Disaster from the eyes of the men who were there. It is their tale. It’s a narrative style you will find refreshing – told by a journalist who has the dignity and the decency to be invisible. Gregg Olsen makes you the lens of the camera. He is not in the scene.

The Deep Dark will open old wounds in my mining camp. Huge wounds, ripped apart by a UPI reporter who posed as a Red Cross candy-striper in order to infiltrate the rain-besotted camps of soon-to-be widows and orphans until he was called out by a miner for the fraud that he was. (Trust me: 30 years later they still hate journalists here.)

Huge wounds, ripped apart by network television crews who hijacked Big Creek homes and power lines to file the latest sensationalistic lede. Huge wounds, ripped apart by Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior, Rogers Morton, who parachuted in to the mining camp to assure all of us that the mining company was doing all that it could even as Cougher and Brown chafed.

Huge wounds, ripped apart by “Jerusalem Slim” – Sunshine CEO Irwin P. Underweiser – who flew out from New York to set jittery shareholders to right by announcing, before the first corpse came out, that Sunshine Mining Company had production interruption insurance, and that a cessation of operations would improve the silver price – even as men still breathing that cruel air screamed from below in vain to be hoisted out, that from the company’s perspective, the Sunshine Mine Disaster was a good thing.

Huge wounds, ripped apart by a tragedy that killed ever seventh father and uncle in this mining camp.

Yes, Gregg, you stepped into my mining camp and you reopened huge wounds. But I think in a way I would have wished I’d done, you also healed them.

One of the protagonists of your book, Ken “Ace” Riley, was my next-door neighbour on Wallace’s South Hill. He woke us up on occasion in the 1980s, screaming the black-and-white replays of his nightmare underground, of losing his partner Joe Armijo, in the deep and the dark. Ken’s kids, Greg and Randy, taught me how to chop wood. And next-door neighbour Ken, when my pipes froze up, was first in the attic of my log cabin to show me how to cheat a copper fitting and make it work. He gave me a stolen Hecla axe, and took up where his kids left off, and within a week I could make toothpicks out of logs.

Ken Riley was just one of 200 men living an uncommon life, with a common story. When we met I was a journalist and he was a miner, working, after the fire, in Sunshine’s lamp room. But we shared an affinity for Heidelberg beer and good conversation. We almost never talked about the fire. But it hung upon our shoulders like St. Elmo. He talked obliquely about how the union and the company had screwed the men, but I never knew his real story until I read Olsen’s book. Ken’s kids tell me now that, yeah, I never really knew the Old Man. He didn’t want to unload, back then.

But Gregg, he talked to you.

I was shooting stick at the Long Shot Saloon (formerly the Tip-Top) in Kellogg one Saturday morning four years ago when Gregg Olsen wandered in, looking for me, wanted to know what I knew about the Sunshine Mine Disaster, said he was writing a book. Well, I’d heard that happy horseshit before, besides I was always going to be the guy who wrote that book and who was he? Then he started shooting out names like Dionne and Beehner and Kitchen and Bush, the real guys. Told me more about those guys than I knew myself – and they were my neighbours. I told him about Ace’s nightmares; he’d already heard, they’d already talked.

Then Gregg went away, to work over every Sunshine Mine Disaster survivor and widow still living for their recollection. This part of research preparatory to writing is – trust me – the most difficult. And my friends reported back to me: “I think this guy gets it.”

The pre-publication copies of The Deep Dark are in circulation this month up here, prior to its release to the New York snobs. (CBS News, by the way, does not want to touch this story because it is such ancient history. Apparently, so is the Hard Rock West. Hurricane Dan as dinosaur slayer.)

Here is one widow’s reaction:

“You have written such a powerful book. It took me back to those horrible days when the entire valley waited for words of hope. My father-in-law was Bob Bush, he was one of three men in his family who died in the mines. My ex-husband got out of the Shine in the early 80's, and we moved to Alaska. We are so much a product of that environment. So many memories, so many names. Buz and Jenny remain dear friends. Thank-you for writing it, for giving them dignity. Thank-you also for clearing up the mystery of why it was so lethal. My husband may have known, but he never told me. My thanks are so pathetic an expression of what I feel for the miracle of this book you have written. I had wondered for years why no one had taken on the task. You have struck the right note.

“I must tell you also, I consumed this book. Obviously so painful a subject would not be savored, but I couldn't stop. I missed my yoga class and read for 6 seemingly short hours.”

It was signed by a Sunshine widow, just a few days ago.

Hey, you with the cute charts: Men die for you. Hey you with the pump-and-dump scam. Men die for you. Ninety at a time, in the exploration camps, in the hard-rock mines. Does that make you, Mr. Normal with your accounting degree, feel superior?

Men die. It’s a fact of life for all of us. What Gregg does is dignify, for the first time in American literature, the hard-rock miner that walks amongst you. He is not macho. He is simply an American man. This is the stick-man miner of Hart, Twain and Solomon, suddenly flesh and bone.

The men who make lousy charts and stock scams are different from the men who actually bring you silver. Miners are living, breathing sentient human beings who occasionally die for you.

Gregg has breathed life back into the inert bodies of the 91 dead of May 2, 1972. That the Sunshine Mine is now in the hands of a man who lost uncles, grandfathers and friends in the Newcastle coal fields is of no small consolation to me. To understand mining at that visceral level – that mines are holes in the ground that occasionally do nasty things, especially if management is not looking – is not something your average MBA can suss.

Mines kill while you play with your chart toys in your air-conditioned condo in Florida. The beauty of the miners’ dignity is that they know this and go to work anyway. The least of the day’s pay hands has a triple-nine silver round on his mantle. He believes in what he’s doing.

Thank-you, Gregg. You’ve reminded the miner of the dignity he always had, a dignity that the poofters in their Park Avenue lofts will never know.

Gregg has healed us, vindicated our labours. Before you buy an ounce of silver stock, read this book. And give Gregg Olsen a Pulitzer. The American West has always had a friend in the hard-rock miner. Now the miner has a friend.