The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

  11:30 A.M., MAY 2

  3700 Level

  SHAFT REPAIRMAN AND MECHANIC JACK HARRIS AND HIS PARTNER, Keith Breazeal, finished tightening bolts on the head frame of a new borehole on the 3700 level and returned the length of the drift to the station at 10-Shaft. Some of the passageway was barely six feet in height, suitable for a mine car but not for walking without affecting a Quasimodo stoop. It was lunchtime at the mechanics shop, where a bunch of miners, motormen, and other laborers assembled to eat and talk about their mornings. At almost fifty, Harris was one of the older men underground. Harris had been a mucker, a motorman, a cager, and finally a shaft repairman on graveyard, then day shift. It was a good life, and for the most part, time flew underground. Time to start, time to eat, and time to go home. He and his wife and their houseful of eight kids lived just down the road from the mine. Big Creek and Sunshine—everything a man needed—was right there. A sentimental fellow, Harris never removed a ring that his mother had made out of a steel nut when she worked at a Seattle shipyard during World War II.

  After eating, Harris and Breazeal waited for the chippy to load up with timbers before the ride to 4400 for offloading. Cagers Randy Peterson and Roger Findley finished their work, and Harris, Breazeal, and Delbert “Dusty” Rhoads, a mechanic, stepped on. Breazeal pulled a cart with an acetylene torch and an oxygen canister. When they reached 4400, Harris noticed a light wisp of smoke coming down the shaft.

  “What the—?”

  Peterson and Rhoads got off to source the smoke, and Findley, Harris, and Breazeal continued down to 4500 to see if it was coming from there. It wasn’t a working level, but it was used by shaft repair crews as a staging area for timbers and supplies needed on lower levels of the mine. The smoke didn’t appear to be coming from there, and Harris didn’t think it was all that bad. He’d been in smokier places. It never dawned on him that the influx of smoke in the shaft could be coming from above them. They decided to go up to 3700 to continue their shift. A mine car there needed welding.

  But when Harris pulled the bell cord for the chippy hoistman to raise them to 3700, nothing happened. It didn’t move. The smoke started to thicken so much that the men began to choke. Findley sought relief with a deep drag off the oxygen line from Breazeal’s little cart before ringing the bell for the double-drum hoistman. The chippy signal, he thought, was out of order. He belled a second time, but no answer. Not even the response—two long buzzes—the “take five” signal that indicated the hoistman couldn’t move the conveyance just yet. Two buzzes always meant “Sit tight and I’ll be right at you.” Just dead silence. The men waited a few minutes before going over to the other side of the shaft, where the double-drum ran up and down in its separate compartment bringing in supplies from above, taking out muck from below. They planned to take the double-drum to 3700 to see what the hoistman was doing. They were willing to cut him a little slack. It was possible that the bell was out.

  Harris squawked for the cage. A second later the cable began to move in that fast, reeling pace of a machine that at times seemed alive with its strength and force.

  Cager Peterson appeared in the haze and pushed open the heavy steel-plate gate.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “We’ve got a fire somewhere,” Harris said. He and his partner got on, shoving the cart with their welding gear into the rear of the cage. “Ain’t down here.”

  ABOUT THE TIME ROCK RABBIT LARRY HAWKINS HEADED TOPSIDE, foremen Gene Johnson, Bob Bush, and Harvey Dionne were guzzling the last of their coffee in the blue room when electricians Arnold Anderson and Norman Ulrich called out “Smoke!” from down the drift. The three foremen grabbed their lights and left to investigate. Smoke was coming from the 910 raise, a three-hundred-foot cut through old workings, long since mined out. Jim Bush and Harvey Dionne hurried to locate its source. Gene Johnson and Bob Bush went the opposite way, to 10-Shaft, to alert the crew.

  Dionne climbed up a lumber pile to peer over the heading of the raise, a clearance of no more than eighteen inches. He twisted his head and fixed his cap light onto the dark gap. Nothing but black. He strained to see behind the wall. It was like staring into the empty blackness of a schoolkid’s slate. He finally saw smoke—an enormous, undulating cloud—boiling behind the timbers. The source of the smoke was coming from the 910 raise. It had to be. Dionne climbed down, and he and Bush jumped on a couple of motors and went west down the drift, away from the smoke toward the Jewell. They met a muck train coming, and sent its driver back to close air doors while they continued on. Things were under control. Everything would be just fine.

  11:30 A.M., MAY 2

  Sunshine Offices

  PERSONNEL OFFICE ASSISTANT BETTY LARSEN, THIRTY-NINE, WAS A short, round woman with auburn hair and nerves of Jell-O. At lunchtime, Larsen and other office women left the administration building for the employee break room in the immense green sheet-metal-clad building in the middle of the mine yard. It was a quiet morning, with all the bigwigs at the annual shareholders’ meeting. Not that anyone took advantage, but they savored the freedom nevertheless. The women noticed smoke coming out of Sunshine Tunnel, on the mountainside north of the mill complex. Smoke also came from the big blue steel stack over a seven-foot-wide borehole called Big Hole. It exhausted air from the 1900 level to the surface.

  “I’ve never really paid much attention,” one of the women said. “Maybe there’s always that much smoke?”

  Larsen didn’t think so, but she wasn’t quite sure. She looked up at the smoke, puzzled but unworried.

  Larsen, whose sole office skill was typing a brisk 105 words per minute, was another of the South Dakota newcomers of the 1950s. Like so many, Betty and Duane Larsen went on hope and faith from the surging sea of prairie grasses to the dingy towns of the Coeur d’Alenes. Betty thought Kellogg was a dump, a smelly place with no lawns, unpainted houses, and dirt that wasn’t even pretty like the black soil of the Dakotas. Even the Miner’s Hat drive-in, a replica of a hardhat with a working lamp as its omnipresent beacon, sat in a cloud of dust along the highway. Larsen also noticed that the scruffy men were pale-skinned. Farmers back home were clean-shaven and tanned from outdoor work.

  “These men look like convicts,” she told her husband when they first arrived.

  “That they do,” her husband said.

  To a teetotaling Seventh-Day Adventist, Kellogg was one bar after another, with no shortage of customers. Back home, there were one or two drunks. Kellogg, she thought, was a town of drunks. Gambling, cards, and slot machines also reigned. And, fittingly, silver dollars were the favored currency. Some men lugged so many coins in their pockets that they nearly lost their pants. Before Kellogg, Larsen had never even seen a silver dollar.

  By the time the office women finished their lunch on May 2, they assumed the fire was under control. Betty Larsen was sure that since there was nothing to burn down there, an underground blaze couldn’t be a major calamity. When she noticed a company ambulance ready to go, someone told her that a victim of smoke inhalation was going to the hospital for treatment.

  That’s too bad, she thought. She hoped the fellow wouldn’t miss much work.

  Nine

  ABOUT 11:35 A.M., MAY 2

  Jewell Shaft, 3700 Level

  AT TWENTY-SIX, JEWELL CHIPPY CAGE TENDER KENNY WILBUR was still waiting for a chance to apprentice as an electrician and get out of the mine before he was an old man at forty. After lunch Tuesday morning, Wilbur hung around 3700 kibitzing with sanitation nipper Don Beehner, as the pair did at that time nearly every day. Beehner was an easygoing guy who could talk about anything, a trait Wilbur knew he put to good use when bartending nights at the Wallace Corner. Beehner, who was responsible for emptying the crude toilets and disposing of garbage underground, had things to do topside the last part of his shift. He usually waited on the station while Wilbur unloaded the cage, then they rode to the surface together.

  A ringing phone interrupted their conversation. From 10-Shaft, electr
ical foreman Floyd Strand told Wilbur there was a fire, and that they’d been looking for its point of origin. It was getting so smoky, however, that a hoistman with a bum lung had been sent out on a muck car. Bob Scanlan was now operating the double-drum. Strand said they were going to evacuate the mine.

  “Get the cages on the double-drum,” Strand said. He seemed remarkably cool, without the slightest trace of alarm. “I want a cage there all the time.”

  During day shift, the double-drum was configured for muck, not men. Wilbur belled himself topside. He joined the double-drum hoistman, and the two of them went up to the collar, or top, of the shaft to pull out the pins and switch out to man decks. The exchange took a few minutes. When he returned to the station, Wilbur told a trainee to watch the men exiting the mine.

  “Keep a count as best you can,” he said.

  No one had any particular anxiety about smoke. It just wasn’t uncommon underground. At that time of day, clouds of smoke emanated from the cumulative blasts that miners reserved for shift’s end. Such timing allowed the dust particles to settle before men returned to survey the success of a particular round the next day. There could be other causes for a little smoke, too—machines, cigarette smoking. Wilbur remembered how the power went out occasionally and the drifts clogged up with smoky air. That had happened four or five times since he’d been at Sunshine. Sure, guys coughed, but after a few minutes it usually cleared up and everyone was fine.

  Miners can take a little smoke, he thought. It isn’t like it’s going to kill anybody.

  11:45 A.M., MAY 2

  4600 and 4800 Levels

  BESIDES THE BELL SIGNAL SYSTEM AND THE SQUAWKER, SUNSHINE had AN UNDERGROUND TELEPHONE SYSTEM MINERS KNEW AS THE “RED PHONES.” WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE TELEPHONE BY THE DOUBLE-DRUM HOIST ON THE SURFACE, WHICH WAS BLACK AND WAS MERELY LABELED RED PHONE, all phones underground were indeed a dull crimson. The phones were a pager system and a party line, which allowed any man to pick up and hear what was being said. They were the old-fashioned hand-crank models, powered by two dry cells and mounted just outside the cage. They crackled from level to level and took some experience to operate.

  Shift bosses Virgil Bebb and Charlie Casteel were talking on the station when the phone, the squawker, and the bell system went haywire. Casteel was in charge of the 4800 level, which connected with 4600. Some of the men working for Casteel would get off the cage at 4800 and head up to their stopes, depending on where they were in their work. Bebb, fifty-two, ambled across the station to answer the phone. It was a call from an upper level that there was a fire, but by then the call was moot. Smoke had begun to skulk into the drift. Bebb told a pair of miners to get the word out to the seventeen men working on that level that the mine was going to be evacuated.

  At almost six feet tall and barely 130 pounds out of the shower, Dennis Clapp was a stick-figured young man with wire-hanger shoulders. He defiantly wore his sandy blond hair shoulder length, and braced himself to defend it when guys like Dewellyn Kitchen reached to tug it during the man-train ride to 10-Shaft. Sometimes he wasn’t able to. Kitchen was quick. Clapp and his partner had been mining on 4800 for nearly four years, and were nearly finished with their stope. They’d worked their way up to 4600, just below track level. Clapp was drilling a round, his eyes fixed on the rock. Compressed air spun the steel drill bit and a spray of water washed down the cloud of dust. A cap lamp flashed and Clapp looked away from the drill. A worker down on track level called up that there was a fire in the mine.

  “Someone needs to get back down to 4800 to tell Flory and Wilkinson and the Syndicate crew to get out,” the man said.

  Clapp hadn’t noticed a thing. With the friction of the drill, there was always a tempest of smoke, burning oil, and dust. He volunteered to go down to Flory and Wilkinson’s stope. Climbing down was easy, of course. But the thought of going all the way back was too much after a long morning of drilling.

  It’s closer going by the track than climbing back out of this, he thought.

  DOWN IN A STOPE BETWEEN THE 4600 AND 4800 LEVEL, MINER Ron Flory slid a cigarette from the protective case strapped to his hat with a slice of a inner tube. Both of the six-footer’s well-muscled arms bore permanent reminders of his youth. One tattoo, a tarantula, had been started when he was sixteen and in jail for stealing gas and tires off a ’56 Crown Victoria. A cellmate had drawn the spider and started outlining. After Flory was released, his sister pulled his skin tight and poked a sewing needle through a puddle of India ink to finish the tattoo. The other tattoo, a cartoonish image of a dagger, had seemed like a good idea when he was an eighteen-year-old Army private.

  Flory and Wilkinson had started the shift barring down, scaling off loose rock from the opposite shift’s blasts, before settling into mucking out the stope with a slusher, a compressed-air-powered scraper. Wilkinson put his entire wiry body into the task, feverishly pulling a pair of levers that pulled the muck into the chute and down to the muck cars lined up on the sodden tracks below. His arms were bare; a tattoo of a curvy come-hither woman moved with the muscles of his right forearm. He wore thick lenses that saved his eyes more than once in the days when safety glasses were seen more as a hassle than a safety requirement. Without them, Wilkinson couldn’t aim a drill. Flory, a toothpick dangling from his mouth as always, called over to Wilkinson that he thought he smelled a little smoke.

  “Slusher motor might be burned up,” Wilkinson said, his voice carrying over the din of the machine.

  Flory filled his lungs. “Smells like it,” he said.

  After giving their equipment a cursory review, the pair concluded that their slusher was all right. The problem must have been someone else’s down the drift. Wilkinson went back to the machine to drag more muck to the chute opening while Flory took another drag on his cigarette. He wondered about the source of the smoky odor.

  Maybe it was a generator on the battery barn. Or the battery on the motor.

  FROM TOP TO BOTTOM, THE MANWAYS BETWEEN LEVELS WERE TWO hundred feet of ladders, offset so that a fall wouldn’t carry a man all the way down to certain death. When Dennis Clapp finished the long climb down, he found Flory and Wilkinson back slushing.

  “Hey! There’s a damn fire,” he yelled, flashing his cap lamp. “You guys are supposed to get on a motor and get the Syndicate crew out. Tell them to get the hell out.”

  If there was any real urgency in his voice, it was only because added volume was needed to ride over the normal racket of the mine, a never-ending grinding of metal machines, the sound of the slusher scraping loads of muck from the back of a stope, and the thunder of rock smacking rock. Clapp watched a thin haze curl through the hot, moist air. At first the wispy cloud hesitated and hugged the edges of the raise. Then it swirled upward. The young miner didn’t like the looks of it. It wasn’t because he thought it was dangerous. It was more like a nuisance he didn’t want to face. The air had been clear on 4600, so he decided to go back up that goddamn two hundred feet of ladders. He’d be out early with a beer in an hour. That sounded damn good.

  11:50 A.M., MAY 2

  4600 Level

  A MONTH FROM HIS TWENTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY ON MAY 2, TERRY Jerome was another man who had once figured there’d be something more than mining. A graduate of Kellogg High, he’d started as a summer helper with the intention of saving up enough cash to take classes at a junior college in Coeur d’Alene. By May 2, 1972, he’d been a Sunshine miner for two years and knew he’d be underground for the rest of his life. Jerome and his partner, Roger Koisti, were off of 10-Shaft on 4600 repairing timber on a service raise coming from 4400. Service raises were the lifeblood of the mine, carrying water pipe, compressed-air lines, and electricity from level to level. Without all that flowed through a service raise, no man could survive the conditions of a deep metal mine like Sunshine. The two men were at track level, replacing timbers that had taken too much weight and busted at the entrance to the raise, when they heard smoke was causing problems up above. They were told to
alert other crewmen and get to the station. To save time and facilitate communication in places remote, dark, and noisy, miners used “air tuggers” to send notes from track level to the working areas above. Tuggers pulled cables connected to buckets that brought material in and out of stopes and raises where men worked two hundred feet above the track line. It was too noisy and too far away to yell for a man to come down.

  Hearing was a casualty of the underground, anyway. The constant eardrum-splitting din turned many miners deaf enough that their wives had to scream to get their attention, and the sound on their TV sets was cranked up to window-rattling volume. Earplugs were required at Sunshine, but it was a rule that most ignored. A man couldn’t be bothered with something as silly as earplugs. A few checked them out from the safety office, and others brought in cotton balls or wadded-up paper towels. Terry Jerome had discovered that filter tips from smoked cigarettes made serviceable earplugs.

  He sent a tugger up with a note indicating there was a fire.

  IT WAS QUIET AND SMOKY ON THE STATION AT 3700, 10-SHAFT. JACK Harris couldn’t even make out the faces of the guys sitting around waiting, but he knew there were a bunch of them. Pinpoints of light from their cap lamps pricked the blackened air. Some were in clusters; a few stood isolated. Yet, through the smoke, Harris could see the irrepressible Gene Johnson, a BM-1447 self-rescuer in his hand, directing traffic and giving orders. Johnson’s brow narrowed to a tight V, and his mouth was a straight line. He ordered cager Randy Peterson to release the cage and send it back to 3700.

  “Get every man into the cage that you can, and get up to 3100,” Johnson said. “Give it a two-one-two and let it come back down.”

  The directive also meant that they’d be running only a single side of the double-drum. Running both was the rule on the system, which was counterbalanced—one cage or skip always going up, the other always on the way down. Johnson apparently didn’t see that there was time for clutching in and out as in normal operations.