by Gregg Olsen
About that time a motor came into view, and the motorman called for the men to jump into the empty cars. Markve and Follette rode together. Three-fourths of the way to the Jewell, they hit another gust of sweet, fresh air. The motorman ordered everyone out of the cars, and returned to 10-Shaft. Follette helped steady Markve as they walked out. If the motorman hadn’t come just when he did, Follette doubted that Markve would have made it out. He was convinced that some of those men left back at the station didn’t have a fighting chance. He hoped the motorman would get to them in time. Bob Goff’s twenty-nine-year-old wife had already lost one husband in the mines. It didn’t seem fair that she’d have to suffer that again.
BUZ BRUHN, DEWELLYN KITCHEN, AND A FEW OTHERS STOOD BY the shaft on 5000; the smoke seemed lighter in color, more or less white. In the midst of it all, Bruhn noticed a man standing by the grizzly with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. The miner was talking, smoking, and casually holding his self-rescuer as if it were a dinner bucket. On the station, miners talked about what under God’s green earth could be burning?
And suddenly, Byron Schulz appeared.
“Get on,” the young cager said.
“On what? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Get on the cage.”
Tentatively, Bruhn stepped through the smoke. It was right there. Eight or nine guys were aboard, some in a bad way, while others seemed fine. Bruhn reached back for Kitchen and pulled him through the smoke. By then the cage was full; men held each other with viselike determination. No one was going to fall through the open doors. A few seconds later the cage disappeared up the shaft. Men closed their eyes to shut out the stinging cloud. There was nothing to see anyway; smoke blocked the pulsating lights that signaled the changing levels. Only decreasing air pressure and the give of the cables indicated they were moving. At the station, Gene Johnson commanded in the center of a black cloud, barking out directions. He punched his hands through the smoke in the direction of the old hoist room, about a hundred feet from the shaft. Some muck cars were lined up there behind a motor. Several men were already aboard, and others climbed in.
Buz Bruhn couldn’t find Dewellyn Kitchen. The miner he had yanked aboard wasn’t his partner after all. It was a tall, thin young guy with a mustache who’d just come back from Vietnam, some kid who had been in the mine no more than three or four days. One of the other guys from 5000 called over that Kitch had stopped to remove his false teeth so he could put them in his dinner bucket, something he did every day. Bruhn knew another cage would get back down to 5000 and pick up the rest of the crew. He’d meet his partner in the dry.
Bruhn’s mouth was afire. The BM-1447 was a red-hot poker. He removed it for a few seconds of relief. His lips and tongue had been burned.
“Buz, the motor’s there,” Johnson said. “Go get on it.”
“Can I give you a hand?”
Johnson shook his head. “Get on the motor and get out. Now.”
ONLY ONE MAN WAS ON THE STATION AT 3100 WHEN DELMAR Kitchen and the others stumbled in. It was Charlie Casteel. The twenty-nine-year-old shifter, a former Air Force airman second class, stood like an apparition next to the shaft. The beam of his lamp scratched at the thickened air before stabbing at Kitchen’s raining eyes. Casteel did not hold a self-rescuer. Kitchen carried his, believing after the burst of cool air on 3550 that the device was not necessary. It took only a second to see that he was wrong.
“Get through that door!” Casteel shouted. But Kitchen remained inert. He didn’t know what the boss was talking about. Up to that moment, he’d never set foot on that level. He was lost.
Casteel kicked his voice up more and worked his smoke-sore lungs. “Get through that door and don’t look back. Just keep going!”
Though he was unsure of what he was doing, and the fire—wherever it was—had laid a veil of smoke obscuring everything, Delmar Kitchen plowed ahead as fast as possible. His lungs burned. He could see faint red lights, like burning embers of a campfire, and he knew to follow them. He pushed open an air door, and more smoke charged in. By then, Kitchen had given himself over to only one thing. He would not look back. He would save himself. He had three children and a wife, and the smoke was coming for him like some kind of unrelenting monster. His partner, Anderson, was a few steps behind, but if others were following, it was unknown to him. He traced the tracks and moved as fast as he could, clenching the self-rescuer in his mouth. He knew he didn’t have much of a chance.
Throughout the mine, in pockets and stations where they waited, miners were trapped and unaware of the extent and the whereabouts of the fire. They didn’t know that the 3700 level was in worse shape than the 3100. None could conceive of what was happening above wherever they were. Thousands of feet of rock separated them. Each crew was isolated, each man in some way alone.
12:46:30 P.M., MAY 2
5000 Level
THE SOUTH CAGE ARRIVED ON 5000 WITHOUT A CAGER. IT HAD BEEN sent down to get shift boss Bob Anderson and miner Merle Hudson—and the other men who had missed it or had stayed put by the grizzly, taking in gulps of fresh air that became increasingly smoke-filled. No one got on this time. The cage hovered for fourteen minutes. Then it left the level for the last time.
3100 Level
A MILE IN NEARLY COMPLETE DARKNESS OFFERS NO REAL SENSE OF time. Each step was at once timid and desperate. A man couldn’t be sure where he was, but wasting time to figure it out wasn’t possible. Delmar Kitchen never looked back. Not once. He’d been told to get his ass out of the station, and he meant to do just that. No matter what he encountered, he’d keep moving forward, holding the self-rescuer to his face and trying to see where he was going. A moment of relief was only that, a fleeting respite from eye-searing smoke. It appeared to thin and thicken in patches, as though it were a solid that coagulated along the ribs of the drift. The effect was cruel. Every time it cleared, there was the false hope that the worst was over. And then he was back in it again. Kitchen used a free hand to rub the smoke, sweat, and grimy tears from his eyes. He squeezed his eyes shut even as he continued his run in the dark. Relief came as the smoke dissipated a bit between 5-Shaft and 3-Shaft. But would it last? Would the smoke return as it had before? His legs trembled, and he wasn’t certain how much farther he could go. He didn’t understand why he felt so strange. Was it the smoke or shock?
Tom Watts fell in the muck. Though his body gave out, his brain processed an eerie and peculiar sight. He could see under the smoke; a layer of fresh air a foot high insulated the track rails. It was good air. Watts got up, and found the smoke growing thinner as the he traveled west down the drift. He stopped at the old timber station not far from 4-Shaft.
“I can’t go much farther,” Watts said, “without taking five.”
At the station, men watched and waited for more of their buddies to arrive. A soft, hazy light of a motor pierced the smoke down drift, growing brighter and larger. The motor’s cars were stuffed with men. Bob McCoy, in the last car, was in grim shape. The fifty-six-year-old had been on the cage up from 5000. He was propped up in a car with another miner, fighting to hold a self-rescuer in place.
Ace Riley’s muscles pumped, pulling taut the fabric of his soaked T-shirt. He felt dizzy and weak. As he lifted himself from the muck car, he lost his balance and fell. Pain shot through his body, but he didn’t cry out. He just lay there watching. It was like he was viewing a slow-motion replay from a TV football game. Miners moved with seemingly hurried motions, but at a protracted pace. Riley saw Launhardt and his crew running with backpacks, but they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He scanned the drift. Men were all around, scattered like fallen leaves. A few were receiving oxygen from tanks brought from the machine shop. One fought off his rescuers, saying he didn’t want a “damn mask” over his face.
“You’re trying to kill me,” he said, shoving a mechanic away.
Finally, at the station, Delmar Kitchen was even more confused, nearly disoriented. He couldn’t understand wh
y he had difficulty walking, even after a couple of mechanics gave him a blast of oxygen.
McCoy struck a match and took a drag off a cigarette. Without any apparent warning or reason, McCoy fell to the ground. Everyone was utterly dumbstruck. He’d just come from a smoke-filled drift and one puff of a cigarette knocked him to the ground? What caused that? They pulled McCoy to his feet and shook him, snapping him out of his stupor.
Out of the twenty-five men working on 5000, sixteen had made it to the Jewell.
BACK AT THE 3100 STATION, MEN CONTINUED COMING OFF THE cage, gagging and gasping. Some held BM-1447s to their mouths, and others either hadn’t been given one or had given up on the tuna-can-sized unit. Roger Findley steadied himself by the shaft. The nineteen-year-old counted the crew emerging from the curtain of smoke. Forty-nine men stumbled off the cage before the last cage zoomed to the station, returning empty. The cage was lowered another time, to the 5000, but once more returned without a soul. Findley was growing dizzy and doubted he could hang on much longer. His nose sent out streamers of mucus, and he could hardly see through the water in his eyes.
“I can’t take the smoke no more,” he called over to Gene Johnson. “I’m going to head out of here.”
The foreman nodded. “We’ll see you, Roger.”
Findley picked up an oily rag and didn’t look back, but he knew that ten or more men were still sitting around the station, coughing and waiting. One guy was eating his lunch. Very nearly overcome by fear and the burning-rubber-smelling smoke, the cager made it another 150 feet before he tumbled in the darkness. Reaching to pull himself up, he felt the form of a human body. Then another. What the—? He started moving again only to fall a second time. There were bodies of several men, maybe a dozen or more. He could hear several making gurgling sounds as life seeped away. Findley called out names, but none moved. He wasn’t a big man, at only five feet five, but he was muscular and in good shape. Still, he couldn’t lift those miners. He couldn’t do a damn thing for any of them. At the junction of two drifts, Roger Findley grabbed a whiz-bang and directed its flow to a fallen miner’s face. What else could he do? He went on.
12:53 P.M., MAY 2
5800 Level
AFTER MORE THAN A HALF HOUR OF BEING IDLE, THE NORTH COMPARTMENT of 10-Shaft’s double-drum moved once more with about ten men from 5800 and 5600 on board, bound for 3100. Among the group were Delmar Kitchen’s father, Elmer; Bob Launhardt’s buddy from the Talache gold mine, Duwain Crow; and a Mullan man named Doug Wiederrick.
One of the three would make the ultimate sacrifice.
Eighteen
1:01 P.M., MAY 2
Jewell Hoist Room
SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED TO THE HOISTMAN AT 10-SHAFT ON 3100. Surface hoistman Lino Castaneda didn’t know what the problem might be, but he knew someone had to get down there and run the hoist, or the men wouldn’t be able to get out of the mine. He dialed the Kellogg number of another Sunshine hoistman. That was a bold move. No one was supposed to call in another employee unless directed to by a shifter. In the culture of Sunshine Mine, no one ever second-guessed a higher-up or did anything that cost the company money without getting approval. Castaneda didn’t care. He’d pay the man out of his own pocket. But the phone just rang and rang. Come on, answer! He thought of another hoistman, but that guy lived in Coeur d’Alene. He couldn’t get there in time.
1:03 P.M., MAY 2
4800 Level
ABOUT THE TIME THE TATTLETALE RECORDED ITS LAST MOVEMENT, most of the men on 4800 had determined that their self-rescuers were useless and had ditched them. The air was reasonably clear where they had gathered by the battery barn. But looking at what was coming down the shaft, it seemed a good bet that the air around the station would soon be contaminated. No one conceded concern. Help would arrive soon. Someone suggested that opening a pair of air doors about fifty yards down the drift might drive away the smoke. The doors ran east-west across the drift and were used to channel airflow to the lower levels. For all that the miners on 4800 knew, the ventilation scheme was a house of cards, and one change could affect airflow a thousand feet above. It was a risk they had to take.
Partners Ron Flory and Tom Wilkinson took self-rescuers and went for the air doors. The first of the big wood-and-steel doors swung open without any trouble. But when Wilkinson pushed on the second door, it opened, only to slam shut again. It took strength to do it alone. He planted his feet, pressed his shoulder against the door, and shoved with everything he had. His self-rescuer fell from his mouth.
Nearly at that instant, Flory looked over. His eyes running from the acrid smoke, he strained to see his partner.
“Wilkinson’s down in the piss ditch!” someone called out.
Flory spun around and yelled his name, but Wilkinson lay facedown in the narrow channel that carried runoff from the working areas. Flory cradled Wilkinson in his big bear arms. Jesus, what’s happened? At 135 pounds, Wilkinson was slight, but his deadweight seemed ten times greater. Try as he might, Flory couldn’t lift him high enough to get him over his shoulders. Something’s wrong. Lifting Tom shouldn’t be this hard. Flory felt dizzy and called out for help. A couple of guys helped him carry Wilkinson back to the battery barn. He was out cold. Flory clenched his shoulders and shook him with increasing intensity.
“Tom! Tom!”
Flory had no idea why Wilkinson had suddenly fallen unconscious. Maybe a heart attack or something. He had been pushing on the air door and just dropped. No words, no “Hey, I’m feeling funny . . .” He just slumped. Wilkinson was a discarded marionette, slumped in the muck in a heap.
Flory’s thumping heart propelled a surge of adrenaline through his heaving body. He looked at the other miners.
“I got to get him to better air,” he said. “Gotta get him out of here.”
THE LAST MEN ON 3100 WERE SPUTTERING WITH THEIR FINAL breaths. Some had already stopped trying to fight the smoke. It was as if the air were infused with acid. Elmer Kitchen, who had been helping Byron Schulz run the cage that morning, was sprawled on the ground. Buz Bruhn’s carpool buddy from Mullan, the decorated war hero Casey Pena, had plunged his head underwater in a trough in a wasted attempt to escape the merciless air. Duwain Crow, one of the toughest miners and motorcycle riders in Big Creek, was inert, lying across the track line. Blood surged from the stocky miner’s mouth and nose.
Double-drum cage tender Schulz sucked hard on the rubber mouthpiece of his BM-1447. His eyes bulged and his heart pushed at his rib cage. He turned around and went to find Gene Johnson. If anyone knew what to do, Schulz felt, it was the indomitable mine foreman. He walked around like he owned the mine. New guys thought he actually did. It was Johnson who had given Schulz his first self-rescuer when the smoke started—and when there was time to hand them out. Schulz’s light worked overtime as it passed its blade of light through the smoke and over dead men. It finally pinpointed Johnson. He was lying on the slab of the station; the big man with the military bearing had crumpled into a ball. He, too, appeared lifeless. Driven solely by adrenaline, Schulz went toward the hoist room, where he found Don Firkins, who’d escaped from 5400, buckled over on the concrete floor. Firkins, thirty-seven, was working desperately on a self-rescuer. His skin was nearly paper white, his black beard dripping in sweat and mucus. Schulz knew that Firkins had been safety trained. Why couldn’t he get the self-rescuer working? Between convulsions, Firkins tried to speak, but his words were lost in the noise of other men fighting for their lives. Nothing anyone was saying made sense. It was gibberish mixed with grace notes of despair and anger. Schulz knelt and tried to talk to Firkins and other fallen men, but none seemed to understand a word he said. One by one, the men in the room fell silent. Besides Schulz, the last two standing were Bob Scanlan and Doug Wiederrick. Scanlan, thirty-five, stood by the hoist chair fighting to steady his six-foot-three-inch body. His ruddy complexion had gone pallid, and he started to shake. Then, very suddenly, he slumped over. Wiederrick, also thirty-five, was upright, but appea
red dazed. It appeared he was desperately trying to get the cage to one of the lower levels, but in his confusion he was unable to do so.
“Doug, we got to get out of here,” Schulz yelled, his voice raspy. “There’s nothing more we can do!”
Schulz had doubts they could survive much longer. Everyone around them had passed out or was already dead. But Wiederrick, the last hoistman at 10-Shaft, was not completely in his mind. He didn’t see the urgency. It was as though he didn’t know all the men had fallen across the station like a toxic fish kill.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Schulz repeated.
A brief semblance of lucidity came to Wiederrick’s sweaty face, and he finally agreed to evacuate. The pair started toward the drift, but Wiederrick stopped.
“I’m calling topside,” he said, returning to the hoist room.
Schulz clutched one of the three BM-1447s that he’d used while Wiederrick picked up the phone and said they were on the way out, and needed to know where they’d find fresh air.
“Oh my God,” Wiederrick said. “We’ll never make it. I’ll never make it.” Those words barely out of his mouth, he fell to the floor.
Schulz tried to feed Wiederrick a mouthpiece, but the hoistman spat it out like a baby refusing a pacifier. Schulz, now in tears, pleaded, but Wiederrick wanted no part of it. On Schulz’s third try, Wiederrick defiantly batted the breathing unit across the concrete of the floor. Schulz fumbled in the smoke to retrieve it. We’re both going to die, he thought. He begged Wiederrick once more, but the hoistman turned away.
He’s giving up, Schulz thought. Doug’s giving up!
Schulz stumbled over to the water hose where men washed off diggers to avoid muddying up the station at shift’s end, tore off his shirt, and soaked it. Then he wrapped the dripping garment around the self-rescuer and his face. Everyone is dead. He could scarcely see. Tears surged in his eyes to impede the sting of the seamless, acrid black sheet. He tripped over a body. He couldn’t tell who it was, but a white hat caught the fallout of his light. Shifters wore white hardhats; crewmen wore yellow. Virgil Bebb? He got up, but after a few more hurried steps, Schulz toppled over another lifeless form. The young man’s face was burning hot. His throat was constricted with coagulated mucus. This was like tear gas, he thought; it surely wasn’t ordinary smoke.
