The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

  Ace Riley gathered up his cigarettes and looked down the drift. He was overwhelmed by how thick the smoke had grown. It had a strange golden or yellowish cast and smelled a little of sulfur. It was more extreme than anything he’d ever seen underground. When he and Armijo got to the station, someone directed them to respirators stored off the station by the waste dump. Riley’s mind was so fogged from the carbon monoxide that at first he thought the nose clip was the part that delivered good air. And like the rest of the men, he struggled to push down the button so that the unit could perform its lifesaving task. He beat it against the corner of a wooden box. He put in the mouthpiece and drew a breath. Nearly instantly, he felt better. He found himself thinking, This ain’t so bad. I could go on all day like this if I had to. He didn’t know that the BM-1447 self-rescuers were only good for about a half hour.

  Not everyone was doing quite so well. Norman Fee, the son of Kellogg High School teacher Elizabeth Fee, braced himself on the station’s concrete and steel-plate floor. Fee, twenty-seven, was one of those who could have pursued another career, and was in fact close to earning a college degree. He faced the shaft head-on as the column of smoke spilled a fetid, inky cloud into the drift. He wore a BM-1447 around his neck, but the mouthpiece dangled. Over the next few minutes, different miners picked it up from the floor and shoved it back into his mouth, but it never stayed put. Nearly delirious and weak from the poisoned air, Fee could only mutter that the mouthpiece was too hot to take. His eyes had rolled back, and whenever he looked upward, they were half-moons. The force of his guttural coughing seemed strong enough to turn his lungs inside out. On all fours, Norman Fee waited like a dying dog at the opening of the shaft, waiting for someone to come.

  Riley dropped to his knees. Fee’s self-rescuer had not been activated. That had to be the reason the grizzlyman was failing so rapidly. Riley yanked his wrench from his tool belt and beat the button on Fee’s rescuer until he felt it pop. He slid the mouthpiece into Fee’s mouth. Fee’s eyes showed nothing if not increasing fear. Men had seen that look before—a diner choking on a steak in a restaurant, aware of everything around him but unable to get air into his lungs.

  He spat it out. “It isn’t doing any good,” he said.

  “Keep the goddamn thing in your mouth,” Riley said, putting it back in with a less than gentle force. He meant business. The act alone should have been enough to shock a man into biting down on the mouthpiece, even a man with a mind consumed by fear. But Fee wouldn’t have any of it.

  While Riley continued to fight with Fee, the cage with Dionne and Schulz appeared at the station. Someone had got word to the hoistman on 3100 that Fee was in serious condition. The cage stopped on 4600—bypassing the men on 4800—to get him out of there as fast as possible.

  Riley reached under Fee’s arms and dragged him over to the gate. He wasn’t going to leave him alone there, gagging. Fee was a convulsing heap on the deck of the cage. Bob Goff, an experienced miner who had just come from an Arizona copper mine only two weeks prior, was also having problems. Goff was only just able to stand. Riley pulled his coat up over his head, using it as a shield against the smoke, and called out for Armijo and the others to get on the cage. In the heat and smoke of the 5000, the men on the cage could only feel the shuffle and movement of others as they stepped aboard. They couldn’t see much of anything.

  Riley noticed that Greg Dionne’s self-rescuer was a different model from what he and the others had. Instead of seeing a black rubber cover over something about two and a half inches tall, Riley saw a white cloth cover over a unit about four inches tall. At the top of the white cloth cover was a gray component about one inch high and with a stainless-steel exhalation valve mounted on the front. The mouthpiece, also gray, came from the back of the W-65 self-rescuer.

  The cager said it came from the hoist room. Despite the chaos escalating all around them, their conversation remained remarkably casual.

  “How’s it working?” Riley asked.

  “Pretty good.”

  “That’s good.”

  And then, at 12:33:30, the cage lurched and began its ascent. Only whooshes of air and a noticeable drop in pressure signaled a station every two hundred feet. Station and track lights were completely sealed off by the heavy, moving partition of smoke. And though a million things were going through his mind as they shot up the shaft, Howard Markve kept coming back to the most immediate of dangers. The doors to the cage were stuck open, and he could feel the wall plates of the shaft whizzing by his shoulder one right after another. If one was out of alignment and caught his shoulder, he knew he would die. Less than two minutes later, at 12:35:15, they were on 3100. Knowing it was 3100 and not the more familiar 3700, some men assumed they’d be going out the Silver Summit escape route. The Silver Summit mine connected with Sunshine on 3100, and was the only way out if the Jewell was in trouble.

  Shaft foreman Gene Johnson waved them off. Tom Watts, who’d just made it from 5000, was confused.

  “Gene,” he said, “did you say the Jewell Shaft?”

  “Yes, dammit, I said the Jewell Shaft!” Johnson gave him “the look”—a steely-eyed glance that said, Are you sure you want to bother me again? Even in the midst of confusion, the shaft foreman’s personality stayed true.

  The smoke consumed them one at a time. Watts wanted to help, but Johnson told him to get out. Watts offered the foreman his self-rescuer, believing that though the smoke was dense, he didn’t need it as badly as did the men following him.

  “No,” Johnson snapped. “We have everything we need.”

  As they went west along the drift, Watts felt as if he had a mouthful of dry ice splinters—a hot-and-cold sensation like a peculiar frozen burn. He took out his rubber mouthpiece. Others did the same.

  THE SECOND TIME THE CAGE CAME DOWN TO 4600, GREG DIONNE was running it by himself. This time he carried a box of BM-1447s.

  “Everybody takes one,” he said. None huddled at the station knew the first thing about the self-rescuers, so Dionne calmly told them what they were and how they operated. His composure was reassuring. It was needed. Some were choking as they fiddled with the rescuers and tried to pay attention to what the young man was saying.

  “See that little button on the front?” he asked through the smoke.

  The men closest to him, those who could actually see where he was pointing, found it and acknowledged it.

  “You push that button. It’ll tear the canister seal loose and you can breathe through it.”

  Raise miner Terry Jerome clamped his teeth on the rubber mouthpiece and put on the nose clip—one of the few to use one. Smoke assaulted his eyes and he tried to breathe.

  “Man, this dumb thing don’t work,” he said. “You can’t get no air through it.”

  “Take your wrench and beat the damn button,” Dionne said. “Make sure it tears the seal.”

  Jerome whapped it, heard the seal pop and tear, and in a second sweet air was filtered into his ravaged lungs.

  “It might get hot,” Dionne said. “That’s okay. It means the thing is working. Whatever you do—don’t take it out of your mouth.”

  The smoke thickened. Although they stood right next to Dionne, none of the men could see him. They listened to his every word. He was the only one who knew what to do.

  “Okay,” he said, “everybody get on.”

  On what? Jerome thought, unable to see a damn thing.

  Dionne wrapped his arms around their shoulders and started guiding each man onto the cage. Jerome felt a flutter of fear in the slurry pit of his stomach. God, he thought, I hope that cage is really there—or we’re dead.

  The cage was a heaving bulge of men with thumping hearts. Roger Koisti, one of the last men on, spread his arms across the open gate and held on as Dionne belled them away. It was fast, and it needed to be. The smoke was turning the two-thousand-foot-deep shaft into a chimney flue. But at 4400 the smoke started to thin to some extent, and Terry Jerome saw just how much his partner Koisti
had been hanging over the edge of the cage. A loose timber a couple of inches closer would have killed him. A minute or so later they made it to 3700, where Charlie Casteel waved them to the Jewell. The air was clear there. Everything looked good.

  Sixteen

  12:40 P.M., MAY 2

  5000 Level

  THE MEN IN THE EXTREME REACHES OF 5000 HAD NO INKLING OF the chaos overhead. Dewellyn Kitchen and Buz Bruhn were timbering a chute in a raise on the east side of 10-Shaft, in an area that longtime miners called “Good Hope Country.” Thirty-nine-year-old Bruhn was using a saw powered by the compressed-air line when a motorman came up the raise.

  “You better come out, Buz,” the motorman said. “There’s smoke out there on the station, and they want you guys out.”

  Bruhn conferred with Kitchen. They were so close to finishing shift that neither wanted to stop. A little while later an unusual odor wafted through the air.

  “Kitch!” Bruhn hollered. “What’s that smell?”

  “I think that fan’s getting hot back there,” he said, looking in the direction of one of the big fans that pushed air through the drift.

  “Okay.”

  But the odor was peculiar, an acrid scent that didn’t really reek like burning oil, more like rotting garbage, heavy and wet. They continued lacing up the chute with timbers before climbing down the raise a few minutes later. The fetid odor intensified and could not be ignored.

  “Hell, if we don’t go, they’ll send that kid back here to get us again,” Bruhn said, rolling his heavily hooded eyes as he and his partner got on the motor and started off for the station. A few feet off the 15 raise, they found themselves against a black, vertical, undulating ocean. The edges of the smoke masked the drift in such a way that the underground space seemed endless and constricted at the same time. The two miners considered returning to their raise where the air had been clear, with the exception of the sharp, foul odor that appeared to come from the air line. Neither had recognized the odor as the stench warning Launhardt had released some thirty-five minutes before.

  “If we don’t go out, they’ll send someone back here. Just put the motor on one point and let’s go,” Bruhn called out.

  Kitchen set the motor at its slowest and steadiest speed. “One point” was not unlike locking a foot on the accelerator and keeping it at ten miles an hour. It was the operator’s guarantee that they wouldn’t jump the track. Doing that would certainly be problematic, leaving the men to walk through that wall of smoke. And neither man—no matter how tough—was up for that. As the smoke advanced and thickened, they pulled off their T-shirts, wet from sweat and water, and covered their faces.

  They could scarcely see five feet when their motor crawled into the station. Closer in, through the shroud of smoke, they could see men scattered about. Some were by the shaft, a few more sat on benches, heads down, coughing their lungs out. Bruhn was drawn to the group on the benches. A few crouched down low, unnaturally so. He couldn’t determine whether they had fallen or had assumed that position to catch better air, below the smoke. Some breathed through self-rescuers. Most were hacking so hard they were nearly choking.

  Another miner fought his way through the smoke to reach Bruhn, whom he knew had been a mechanic. The miner contended that a pump off the station had burned up and was the source of the smoke. Bruhn went over to check it out. He knelt down and parted the smoke with his hands and studied the pump. Everything, it seemed, was in working order.

  Where is the damn smoke coming from? he asked himself.

  In the meantime, Kitchen found a small cache of self-rescuers. He reached down and snagged a couple for Bruhn and himself, leaving only one remaining in the box. Bruhn tried to decipher the instructions, but the smoke was so irritating he could barely read a word through his vision-blurring tears. Anger overtook frustration. He wondered what idiot thought a man could read tiny instructions in a smoke-filled mine?

  A miner who had been crouched nearby used his pipe wrench as a hammer and beat down on the release button. In that messy moment, when fear and confusion were escalating, Bruhn couldn’t even thank the man, who disappeared back into the smoke.

  “Come on, Kitch,” he said, holding the black rubber mouthpiece away from his face, “let’s get over by the shaft.”

  AFTERNOON, MAY 2

  Big Creek Neighborhood

  IT WAS BETTY JOHNSON’S DAY OFF FROM THE SILVERTON NURSING home where she worked as an aide. That morning she’d curled up in bed while her husband, foreman Gene Johnson, dressed for work as the soft light of dawn ladled down the mountainsides. Sleeping in was a deal they’d struck when she’d returned to the workforce. It was a one-sided pact. On Gene Johnson’s days off, he would rise at his usual time, however much Betty coaxed him to stay put. Johnson tried to comply with her wishes, but resting up just wasn’t his way. He was always antsy about wasting a moment of the day. That morning he fixed a big breakfast for the kids and perked strong, oily coffee. Before leaving, he reached over and gave Betty a kiss. She rustled in her slumber. He might have said something, but any words vanished in the fog of sleepiness. The screen door shut and he was gone.

  After lunch that Tuesday, Betty Johnson noticed a surge in traffic up Big Creek Road. A glance at the clock told her the timing wasn’t right for shift change, but she disregarded the discrepancy. A little while later she looked out the window and saw a neighbor home early.

  “You’re supposed to be working,” she called over. “Why aren’t you at the mine?”

  “Don’t know how bad it is,” he said, telling her of the fire, “but they cleared everybody out.”

  Gene Johnson’s wife remained at ease. The very idea of a fire, certainly a serious one, in Sunshine seemed out of the realm of possibility. She waited at her kitchen table for her husband to come home.

  Seventeen

  12:42:30 P.M., MAY 2

  5000 Level

  HOWARD MARKVE CIRCLED THE STATION, NURSING A PAIN THAT shot through his legs like a steel spike. Although he’d experienced his share of injuries, nothing had ever hurt like his knees at that moment. He kept the self-rescuer in his mouth, and after each lap he checked to see how his partner Follette was holding up. Markve wondered if it would be smarter to get back to their working area and climb up 125 feet, where he knew the air was freshened by the piped-in atmosphere of the compressed-air line. He wasn’t sure he had enough time to make it, and he didn’t know whether Follette or any of the others could make it, either. In particular, he had serious doubts about Norman Fee.

  “Let’s get out of the smoke,” he said, indicating where the men waited with blowing air from the whiz-bang. Follette pointed at cage tender Greg Dionne. He didn’t speak, because he knew it would be dumb to spit out that mouthpiece. But he knew that if the cage was going to come to any place in the mine, it would come to where Dionne was standing—on their level. A few moments later the cage indeed returned, and the men on the station staggered on. Overcome by smoke at that point, Dionne appeared to be dizzy, and Schulz helped him aboard. Schulz was wearing a W-65, a self-rescuer with a heat exchanger that cooled the air coming off the hopcalite. The BM-1447 could heat up to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. It was like breathing air from an oven.

  Follette wondered why the men across the drift just stayed put. He could see them through gauzy air. Why don’t they get over here?

  “I’m going to catch the next one,” Joe Armijo said, backing away to the fresh air.

  “You can squeeze in here,” Markve called out, urging Ace Riley’s partner to get on. Armijo refused. He was hacking badly and didn’t think he could make it up the shaft just then.

  “I’ll get some air down at the grizzly,” he said, retreating behind the thickening black curtain.

  A young miner, a kid, appeared in the smoke and said that he was going to go with Armijo to get some air, too. This time Follette wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Get in!” he said.

  The kid backed into the cage, and Follette swung his a
rms around him. There were at least fifteen or sixteen men crammed on the twelve-man cage. Follette hoped nobody would move behind him, or he’d fall down the shaft. He could see the other men across the station, still standing there. Markve planted his feet on the muck pile on the floor, and the cage took off. A hundred feet from 3100, a miracle of sorts materialized—a sudden rush, a band of fresh air. Markve took a deep breath. Never in his life had he tasted anything as sweet. Not honey on a spoon. Not the freshest milk poured from a bottle topped with a plug of cream. Those things would be sour compared to this air, he thought.

  There was smoke on 3100, but nothing like they’d seen on 5000. Foreman Gene Johnson and shifters Virgil Bebb and Charlie Casteel yelled for the men coming from the cage to get out to the Jewell. Howard Markve went over to help Bob Goff, though he really didn’t know what he could do. Goff needed a doctor. He was slumped against the rib; his body was swaying. Others were gagging and coughing. A few crumpled to the ground. Markve kept coughing, and every time he did, he let more smoke into his lungs. One of the bosses told Markve and Follette to leave Goff and get going.

  “We’ll take care of him,” he said.

  Markve trailed the others down the drift. He felt woozy. What was happening in the mine didn’t seem real.