The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

“Ain’t nobody left alive down there,” Ray Rudd answered, his face ashen and stony.

  “Oh, come on,” Clapp said.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh shit.” Clapp lingered a moment before leaving. It couldn’t be that bad. There were too many still missing. Among them were Clapp’s cousin and Ron Flory’s best friend, Mark Russell, twenty-nine.

  Rudd stayed where he was. All that he’d been in his life—baker, rancher, sawmill hand, miner—couldn’t have prepared him for May 2. He’d been a district fixture since 1951, when he’d answered the call of a colossal banner stretched across the old highway: WANTED 500 MEN, BUNKER HILL & SOUTHERLAND. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

  DOWN THE ROAD FROM THE SMOKING MINE, THE BIG CREEK STORE seethed with mounting dread. The watering hole had become the nerve center for women from all over the district. Sunshine’s switchboard operator told callers that she didn’t know anything, and referred them to the store. The place was overflowing, and Big Creek Store owner George Dietz was in fine form. Dennis Clapp, having just been given a reality check about the seriousness of the blaze, asked to use the phone. He wanted to let his wife know he was all right.

  Dietz flatly refused. “Emergencies only.”

  Clapp wanted to deck him. Asshole, he thought, if this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.

  Cager Randy Peterson was also among those who showed up at the bar. As cold beer streamed down his throat, Peterson overheard another miner say he’d seen Jim Bush lay down his dying brother Bob on 3700.

  “Then the rest are all gone,” Peterson said. “All that’s out is all there’ll be.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Dietz, acknowledging anxious faces around the bar.

  Peterson looked over at the women. One was sandman Bud Alexander’s wife, Celia. Mrs. Alexander’s face was twisted in panic. Bud hadn’t made it out. She tried to console herself that Peterson, a kid she’d watched grow up on the creek, didn’t know what he was talking about. Others shot names through the air, but the twenty-three-year-old clamped down. It wasn’t his place to tell some woman that only an hour ago he’d seen her husband buckled at the knees, hugging a T-shirt to his face. When a buddy pushed him for news about his own father, Peterson told a compassionate lie: “If he got back there in the fresh air and built a bulkhead, I think he’d be fine.”

  In reality, the Sunshine men drinking at the Big Creek Store were as trapped as their buddies underground. They weren’t going anywhere until it was over—one way or another. All they could do was stare into the bottoms of their beer glasses as if answers could be found there. Women watched the door. With every new face in the doorway, silence fell and hearts jumped in unison.

  Miners sequestered away from wives and girlfriends repeated the same questions over and over, as if truth could be found in the juiced mind of the fellow one barstool over. They wanted to know what their pals were facing underground, what they had faced already. Were guys stomping each other to death over a self-rescuer? Or were they helping each other out? What the hell had happened? And why? Sunshine’s safety program came up frequently in their rants. Some held Bob Launhardt responsible for not teaching the crew how to use the self-rescuers. Many more blamed Sunshine management for not getting people out fast enough. Ace Riley was among the angry and bitter. By then he’d sifted through the day’s events, and his distress had turned into resentment. He was sure the apparent delay in giving the evacuation order was a chief reason the fire had turned into a disaster.

  “If they hadn’t been looking for that fire,” he said, “they’d have been out of there. The bigshot was in Coeur d’Alene, having that big meeting. All them bosses were scared to death they was gonna lose their jobs.”

  And just as the idea that something very bad, something very newsworthy, was occurring, members of the local press had already entrenched themselves in Sunshine’s personnel and accounting offices. A Spokane TV station’s fifty-pound film cameras jostled aside adding machines and Dictaphones as reporters and camera crews rearranged desks to their liking. No one could figure out how reporters had made it to Big Creek that fast.

  IT WASN’T MUCH TO LOOK AT, A FLAT-ROOFED, LOW-RISE BUILDING of painted cinder blocks, but KWAL radio (“Silver Dollar Radio, 620 on your dial!”) was Communications Central for the district. Just off the highway in Osburn, KWAL was not only the third-oldest station in the state, but the only one that disseminated the valley’s news. Whatever was going on made it to the ears of sales manager Paul Robinson, thirty-two. Nothing, Robinson knew, escaped his listeners. Between the mélange of tears-’n’-beers country music, rock, and Golden Oldies tunes of his playlist, Robinson infused the airwaves with district news and high school sports.

  When calls about the fire came, Robinson, a compact man with sparkling eyes under heavy black brows, was completely perplexed. He’d been underground at Lucky Friday, and considered it the world’s largest steam bath. Sunshine, he’d heard, was the same way.

  It would take a thousand gallons of gasoline to start a fire, he thought. Water’s everywhere down there. Dripping off rocks, timbers.

  Robinson made two phone calls: first to Sunshine, where he learned that no one knew much, except that the situation was serious and it was going to take some time to get the men out; and then to the Federal Communications Commission. Robinson asked for permission to stay on the air past the normal 11:00 p.m. signoff. FCC approval came straightaway.

  Over in Wallace at the elementary school, the intercom had the timbre of a walkie-talkie. Fidgety kids grew still, however, when the announcer said the after-school basketball game was canceled.

  “There’s a problem at Sunshine Mine,” the voice said. “Some of our coaches won’t be able to make it today.”

  Players groaned. Matt Beehner slid into his seat, crestfallen. He was from a family of sports enthusiasts, and he loved hoops. What’s more, his dad, Sunshine sanitation nipper Don Beehner, was going to be there to watch. Instead, Matt went home, got something to eat, and turned on the TV. Men with yellow hardhats and the turtleshell breathing apparatus on their backs moved around Sunshine’s mine yard. They looked like a swarm of yellow-backed beetles moving around a hive. This is weird, he thought. The twelve-year-old ate his snack. His father would be home soon, and he’d have a great story to tell.

  MIDAFTERNOON, MAY 2

  Seattle

  AS SHE HAD EVERY DAY ON HER WAY TO WORK DOWN SEATTLE’S Aurora Avenue with its row of kitschy motels, Janet Launhardt regarded the glory of snowcapped Mount Rainier. No matter how many times she’d seen the vanilla-sundae peak, it inspired breathtaking awe. Sadly, the days embracing that view were waning. As soon as school was out next month, she and the children would join Bob in Pinehurst.

  Tuesday afternoon, a co-worker at the moving company where she was employed asked Janet if her husband worked at an Idaho mine.

  “There’s been an accident over there,” she said. “It seems awfully bad.”

  Janet reached for the knob on a desk radio and turned up the volume. There were lots of mines in Idaho, she knew. A news bulletin provided the only really important details a moment later. It was at home, and it was Sunshine. She knew Bob spent part of his day underground, but she was unsure of his specific schedule. Janet spent the rest of the day a wreck, dialing for answers, but unable to get through to Sunshine. She searched for a reason why Bob hadn’t called her. He must be too busy. It would be two days before they’d talk.

  Twenty-five

  2:25 P.M., MAY 2

  Pinehurst

  ACCIDENTAL MINER JIM GORDON WAS RAISED TO BE A RANCHER, but a cheating wife and a motel business that went belly-up sent him and his three kids to a little house on Moon Gulch and a job at Sunshine Mine. Gordon found himself in the midst of men who were a tougher, rougher, and rowdier bunch than he’d ever known. He learned that if a man dropped a bar of soap in the shower, he’d best bend at the knees to retrieve it, or a guy would hump his backside for laughs.
Gordon considered miners “uncouth”—a word choice that underscored the chasm between their worlds. But after he’d lived in the district awhile, something unexpected happened to him. Gordon found he was more like those men than different from them. In reality, he changed, and they remained the same. Miners shared a brotherhood, and Gordon learned that having a place in that fraternity assured if something ever went wrong, there’d be a fellow there to help out.

  Standing in front of a Pinehurst auto repair shop, afternoon shift miner Jim Gordon glanced at his watch and scanned the roadway. His partner on 4800, Johnny Lang, was running a little late.

  “No sense in going in today, Jim,” a man called out from a passing car, just about the time Lang’s truck reeled into view. “The mine’s afire.”

  A quintessential miner, Johnny Lang loved speed, especially the hasty tempo of a day underground. With only six hours in the stope, there was hardly enough time to get everything done. Working at high speed was the only way to mine. From his first step into his stope, Lang was a blur. First he mucked out what the opposite crew had blasted. The muck pile was slushed down the chute to muck cars on the track below. Next, he and his partner would push forward, bolting the heading, drilling the next round, loading it, and shooting it, before calling it a day. Time flew on dragonfly wings.

  Lang was also on the rescue crew, and he’d have to go to work whether the mine was on fire or not, whether it was open or closed. He assumed that whatever had been burning had been extinguished. In fact, on the drive to Big Creek, Lang remarked that he couldn’t really think what could be burning that couldn’t be snuffed out in about five minutes.

  “Oh, man, what the hell’s burning down there?” he asked a foreman, watching the monolith of smoke rising in the drift.

  “Don’t know for sure,” the man said. “Timbers from those old, worked-out stopes, we think.”

  Lang and Gordon learned that Davy Mullin and Gordy Whatcott, their opposite shift partners, were among the dozens who hadn’t made it out. The news hit Jim Gordon particularly hard. They have to get those guys out. Those are good, decent men. Whatcott, thirty-seven, was the kind of Mormon who drank an occasional beer and hung out with the guys. He and his wife were raising three boys and three girls. Mullin, thirty-four, was an Okie who stretched one-syllable words into two and walked with an ambling cadence that said “good ol’ boy.” He was the type who’d crawl up a raise dragging a jackleg and a thermos of coffee. Earning a little under $145 a week from Sunshine, Mullin and his wife were raising a combination of his, hers, and ours, which included nine-year-old twin girls with rhyming names.

  A twist of fate had kept Lang from being among the trapped. Whatcott, who ordinarily worked the second shift, needed to take care of some personal business the first week of May. They traded shifts.

  Meanwhile, Jewell hoistman Lino Castaneda finally left the hoist room. He tried to console himself with hope that his fifty-five-year-old half brother, Roberto Diaz, and the others had only passed out. Soon they’d be put on stretchers, tethered to oxygen tanks for the ride to the hospital. Castaneda knew Diaz had been in the group that went to save Bob Bush. None of them were brought out on stretchers. Not one.

  If they are going to get anyone out, they will get Bob Bush. He’s a boss. Roberto will come out because he’ll be with Bush, Castaneda thought.

  AFTERNOON, MAY 2

  Downtown Wallace

  THE AFTER-LUNCH HOURS DRAGGED AT WALLACE’S FIRST NATIONAL Bank. Foreman Gene Johnson’s daughter, Peggy Delange, twenty-one, was crunching numbers when a customer came in and gave the first report of the fire. She looked up at the clock. Good. Dad’s out by now. He’s stuck doing paperwork, just like me. She worried about her uncle and her brother-in-law, but was unsure what shift either of them worked. Yet as customers dispensed more news, a kind of urgency started to spiral. She began to doubt herself and what she actually did know. She had helped her father after school, and she knew his daily routine as well as he did. But each comment weighed on her, one stone at a time. Her boss told her to go up to the mine.

  Even though grown and married, Peggy Delange considered her dad the most important man in her life. He always had been. As a girl, she would find herself lost in the inky images tattooed on his sturdy back, a pair of mermaids flanking a massive tall ship, waves, and sky swirling above and below. Her father’s back was a storybook illustration of shapes and tiny thin lines, a Beatrix Potter illustration gone slightly mad. Peggy would study her father’s back and his powerful arms as though they contained a mystery to be solved. In reality, Johnson’s back told the story of his military career. He also had the names of his wife and his oldest daughter and son inscribed on his muscular arms. The middle kid, Peggy, so much wanted her name added to the graffiti that told the world where her dad had been, and who he loved.

  “How come you don’t have my name there?”

  “You were an afterthought,” he said, wrapping his words in a mischievous grin.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I want my name there, too!”

  PEGGY DELANGE’S AUNT, JOANN BARKER, FELT HER OWN HEART sink with worry Tuesday afternoon. Her husband, shaft repairman Robert Barker, was missing. JoAnn tried to minimize her anxiety with her continuation of a daily routine from which she seldom deviated. Robert wanted dinner on the table at five every day, not five-fifteen. He also wanted the TV off, and the kids at the table. She had always catered to him throughout their twenty-four-year marriage. During frigid Shoshone County winter months, she even started his truck in the morning so it would be warm for his drive to the mine. And the morning of May 2 she had served a sweet roll and coffee to Robert, still sprawled in bed in the bedroom of their cozy Kellogg home. He knew he was spoiled. Before leaving that morning, Robert kissed JoAnn and whispered a line from a Charley Pride song: “Kiss an angel good morning.”

  But Tuesday afternoon found JoAnn and the youngest of her six children around the radio. What they wanted to hear, of course, was good news. An interview with the president of the Northwest Mining Association provided the kind of hope they needed.

  “If the men are at lower levels, they may be trapped by lack of transportation out, but it’s hard to see where they would be physically harmed,” he said.

  The words barely eased her fears. JoAnn Barker knew how treacherous mining could be. When she was fourteen, her father was killed when his motor jumped the track at the Liberal King Mine and slammed him against the rock like a bug on a windshield. He bled for ten days and never regained consciousness. Her husband had also contended with a litany of injuries. Stripping collection plates at Uncle Bunk’s zinc plant had left him with third-degree sulfuric acid burns from his hands to his elbows. Each night, JoAnn had applied a thick paste of baking soda to relieve his pain. Barker could have put on elbow-length protective gloves, but the Death Valley heat of the plant made such gear unbearable. Some workers even went shirtless at Bunker Hill.

  AFTERNOON, MAY 2

  Woodland Park

  THE OLD HECLA MINING COMPANY WATCHMAN’S HOUSE WAS IN need of repair when Don and Wava Beehner bought the white two-story in Woodland Park, just outside of Wallace. Fortunately, Don Beehner was quite handy with that sort of thing, as were his wife and, in time, their children. The first, a boy named for his father, Donald Gene Beehner Jr., was born two weeks before Christmas in 1954. Two years later, Barbara Ann arrived; another two years brought Nora Jean. The last child came in 1960, a son they named Matthew. All would learn how to wield a paintbrush—green was their dad’s favorite color, and much of what was painted reflected that hue—hammer a nail, and keep the garden patch turned over and planted.

  When she first heard there was trouble at the mine, Wava Beehner knew Don was helmet-trained and was probably fighting the fire. But throughout the day, news and rumor were a dripping faucet. Everywhere she went, someone said something about it—all bad. Like any mother of four with a million things to do, Wava Beehner tried to focus. She spent the afternoon running e
rrands and chasing after her kids. In Wallace, she came across a friend who also worked for Sunshine.

  “Have you seen Don?” she asked.

  “I seen him earlier. He’s with the rescue guys.”

  “Do you think he’s all right?”

  “Oh, you’ll hear from him. I’m sure he’s doin’ fine.”

  That satisfied her. Her husband would be in his element. He liked being in the center of someone else’s storm. But as the day progressed, Wava Beehner could no longer ignore the fact that she really didn’t know what was happening. When her sister-in-law offered to take her up to the mine, she was out the door with her purse. The sister-in-law knew a thing or two about mining tragedies. Her husband had been killed at Sunshine in 1964.

  AFTERNOON, MAY 2

  Cataldo

  THE WESTERNMOST TOWN IN THE DISTRICT, CATALDO, WAS HOME to a ruggedly beautiful Jesuit mission built in the early 1840s. The oldest building in Idaho—a structure of wood, wattle, daub, and “not a single nail”—the mission was a great white swan, lingering and watching over rolling hills. For the Catholics of the district, the Cataldo mission was a source of deserved pride.

  Home from the Army barely over a week, Doug Dionne was visiting with his mother, Betty, in the family’s tidy Cataldo home, when a radio news item cut their conversation. According to the report, a fire had trapped some men underground at Sunshine. Both knew Harvey and Greg were on shift and underground. Doug drove his mother to Big Creek, and when they arrived they found Harvey in the mine yard. He was grim-faced, saying that he’d narrowly escaped the smoke.

  “But Greg’s still down there,” he said.

  AFTERNOON, MAY 2

  Shoshone Golf Course, Big Creek

  TUESDAY HAD BEEN A NICE AFTERNOON ON THE LINKS JUST BELOW Big Creek, marred only by an unusually hazy sky and the sound of the sirens as police cars whizzed passed Shoshone Golf Course. A skyscraper of a man with dark, flinty eyes, Art Brown was transitioning into the mine manager’s job at Lucky Friday. The position was a mining man’s dream. After spending the morning in the mine, mine managers returned to the sunlight of the surface for lunch. He did the books, reported to his boss, and if the sun was shining, he’d be out by 3:00 p.m., headed for the golf course or the fishing hole or, in some cases, to the district motel where his mistress waited. Mine managers didn’t read the Wall Street Journal or fret over metal prices. All they had to do was get the muck to the mill every goddamn day.