Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  On the International Space Station the astronauts have weekly videoconferences with their families, and the Chilean recue team prepares something similar for the trapped thirty-three men. For the moment there is no video link between the surface and the mine, so instead the rescue team asks each family to record a short video message to send down below. The psychologists tell them to communicate positive thoughts, not to speak of family complications, and these instructions are clearly on the minds of five members of Alex Vega’s family as they gather underneath a tarp on the mountain to record their greeting.

  “Hello, my love,” begins Alex’s wife, Jessica. This will be the first time Alex sees her since she denied him that kiss on the morning he went to work, and she speaks in a gentle and natural voice that belies all she’s been through over the last three weeks: from the first days when she worked hard to keep her children on their school routine as if nothing had happened; to the worries of those final days of waiting when so many gave up the miners for dead. “Here I am, sending you all my strength, my cariño. Your children are well. They send you kisses.” She says, in a mildly suggestive voice, that they’ll have “a proper celebration” when he gets out. She is sitting before a Chilean flag that’s decorated in the center with a portrait of Alex looking clean-shaven and movie-star handsome. Next to speak is Roberto Ramirez, the mariachi who wrote a song in Alex’s honor. Roberto is the boyfriend of Alex’s sister, and he addresses Alex by his nickname, Duck. “Crazy Pato. You gave us the scare of our lives. But when you get out, I challenge you to drink a tequila with me.” His sister Priscilla says, in an upbeat voice: “Little brother, this is a lesson God is giving us. I hope you can see it. God doesn’t send us a test we can’t endure. And this one will be no different.” She jokes about the beard he has in the video, which makes him look like “a wolf man.” Alex’s father, José, who entered the mine to try to get his son out, is wearing a white miner’s helmet. “Son, I want to say hello to you, and all your companions, your brothers, because they’re not just coworkers anymore, but brothers in this great odyssey that you all are living.” More than forty of Alex’s relatives have been gathered at the camp, José says, but couldn’t be squeezed into the video. Then the elder Vega apologizes for not having more to say because “we Vegas are people of few words.” A cousin adds: “Alex, you united the Vega family like never before,” and everyone before the camera nods at this truth. Finally, they launch into the song they sang on the night before the miners were found, with Roberto the mariachi pointing to Alex’s father, to his family, and to Alex’s portrait on the flag to illustrate that the song is about Alex and all of them, and when the song ends Priscilla raises her fist playfully and everyone shouts: “And El Pato will return!”

  On August 28, inside the mine, the thirty-three men huddle around the small screen on a video camera to watch these videos, their first glimpse of the outside world in twenty-three days. Luis Urzúa sees his wife, Carmen, and she looks exhausted and depressed, and a short while later he writes her a letter telling her to cheer up. For three of the men, however, there are no video messages—or so it seems. “They were very upset, especially José Ojeda, whose message was on the camera but they made a mistake when showing it,” Víctor Segovia writes in his diary. “He got really upset and didn’t even want to see it when they tried showing it to him.”

  The video the Galleguillos family sends down contains a surprise: Jorge’s twenty-six-year-old estranged son, Miguel Angel, is on the screen.

  Before the accident, “I had a problem with him. He rebelled against me,” Jorge says. “We didn’t have a lot of contact.” Fatherhood is a challenge for any man, but what it means to be a miner and a father in Chile has changed dramatically in Jorge’s lifetime. Jorge grew up watching his own father enter a small shaft mine alone in the 1950s, and he can remember being six years old, playing outside the entrance to a mine while his father worked inside. His father toiled underground with a pickax, and outside in the sun Jorge dug small holes and covered them with wood planks, making play “mines.” Jorge’s first paid job was at twelve, loading pack animals with one-hundred-pound bags; later he (like Darío Segovia) also worked carrying loads of rock out of a mine in a harness made of wolf’s leather. Decades of underground work toughened Jorge, and if you asked him why he was still working underground into his late fifties, he might say, “Because the mine is for the brave!” ¡La mina es para los valientes! He worked hard to spare his own children the dangers and rigors of underground work, and his reward was a son who didn’t understand why his father could be gruff and angry. On August 4, the day before he entered the doomed San José Mine, Jorge had called Miguel Angel, who was celebrating the recent birth of a baby boy. Years earlier, the first Galleguillos grandson had died not long after being born, but this new baby boy, or guagua, was healthy.

  “I asked Miguel Angel about the guagua, and he said, ‘What do you care?’” ¿Qué te importa vos?

  “How is your little girl?” the elder Galleguillos asked.

  “Why?” his son asked, irritably, and with that their final conversation ended. For seventeen days Jorge wondered if that would be the last time he talked to his son, the painful memory of Miguel Angel’s brusqueness adding to the sense that he was leaving his life with so much unfinished and unsettled.

  But the first letter down from his family had words of support from Miguel Angel. And now, on this video, Jorge Galleguillos sees sitting and standing before the camera his brothers, his sister-in-law, his niece from Vallenar—and his two sons, Jorge on one side, Miguel Angel on the other. The same Miguel Angel who was so curt with his father on August 4 speaks words of encouragement. “Viejo, take care of yourself,” he says. “Just be as strong as you can.”

  After seeing this video, “I felt this amazing joy. This emotion,” Jorge says. “But a little after that I started to get sick. I got depressed. It’s hard to describe.” Seeing one of the things he most wanted in life, an acknowledgment from his son, sends Jorge into a long funk. He struggles to explain why. Perhaps it’s the realization that he had to be buried alive for his son to forgive him whatever he’s done to make him angry. Or maybe it’s the simple fact that he can’t be with the son who is speaking with him again, or see his new grandson, or the rest of the family he now knows is reunited and gathered up on the surface. “I had this longing to be with them,” he says.

  Jorge has had to be brave and strong in his long mining life. Brave when he was twelve years old and entered a mine for the first time, and strong when he was an old man and the mine was wearing down his muscles and lungs. But he’s never had to be brave and strong in this way before, with his body weakened by two weeks of hunger and humidity, dependent on others to feed him, the object of a family love that he can see but can’t return. Suddenly the things that should make him feel good make him hurt. A few days ago he wanted desperately to eat something, but that chocolatey nutrition supplement the rescuers have sent from the surface to feed them, Ensure, is roiling away at his insides. “That milk took its revenge on all of us,” he says.

  When the Pastor, José Henríquez, drinks his bottle of Ensure he gets so sick he nearly passes out. Pedro Cortez sees this and gives his bottle away to another miner. Many of the men begin to suffer the first in a new series of intestinal and urinary disorders that will torture them in the days to come. Several of the men need to urinate, but can’t, and eventually their collective suffering is bad enough that Mario Sepúlveda tells Yonni Barrios, their nurse, to demand a remedy the next time he talks to the doctors on the surface. Jorge Galleguillos has even less strength to deal with these complications. His legs are swollen and even walking a few feet is painful. A fungus is spreading over his body. At the daily meeting, he often can’t rise to his feet, and the men stand over him and say a prayer for his recovery.

  * * *

  Víctor Segovia’s diary has not always been upbeat in the days since the drill broke through and found the trapped thirty-three men. “Claudio
[Yáñez] ruins my mood by sleeping all day and only wakes up to criticize … [Darío] Segovia almost got into a fistfight with Franklin,” he writes on August 24. “Everyone’s spirits are very bad. Before help arrived there was peace, we prayed every day … Now that help has arrived, instead of being more united, all we do is fight and argue…” Every other day, Víctor records new rumbling from the mountain, a reminder of the rockfall that trapped them. Escape from this aural torment is tantalizingly close, but for the moment all he can do is wait to be rescued—and to be fed. “Now I know how an animal in captivity feels, always depending on a human hand to feed it,” he writes. Almost every day, his diary records another petty argument between the men, but on August 28, after seeing those first family videos, his mood is upbeat. “Everything is well organized … Our spirits are quite high today. We are very happy.” After weeks in which their clothes have been soaked in sweat, and nearly all of them shed their shirts, a shipment of new nylon shirts arrives. They are the same red as the jersey of the Chilean soccer team, and many of the men begin to wear them.

  On the evening of August 28, this newly uniformed team of Chilean heroes gathers for a meeting. “We spoke about a very private matter for when we get out,” Víctor writes in his diary. “We’re the only ones who know what we’ve lived through. We’ll share it in good time.” The subject of this meeting is the very story they’re living. They’ve gone from being nobodies risking their lives in a piece-of-shit mine to talking with the president and his ministers, and even with a beloved Chilean icon, the soccer star Iván Zamorano, who had a brief phone tête-à-tête with Franklin Lobos (the two men were teammates for two years in the 1980s). The sense of their own celebrity is infectious, especially to Mario Sepúlveda, who has been making noises about how there’s going to be a lot of money to be made in the telling of their story. Newspapers are starting to come down the shaft, and the men have seen a story comparing them with the Uruguayan rugby team that was stranded in the Andes; the article described how the Uruguayans sold the rights to a movie and book. Juan Illanes says the story of the San José Mine belongs to all of them, and they have to share in it equally, and this is so obviously true that no one argues with him. Illanes says further that they should keep to their previously agreed pact of silence about the accident and its aftermath, and that the diary Víctor Segovia has been keeping is a record of the struggle and that it should belong to all of them. All the miners agree: Víctor is their official chronicler.

  The next day Víctor is writing with the new pen and notebook he’s asked his family to send him. Mario Sepúlveda comes to speak to him. Víctor’s diary is a “holy object,” Mario says, it might be the book that tells their story one day, and thus worth money to them all. Víctor thinks about this a bit and writes: “I wrote this diary to survive, not to turn it into a book … I didn’t realize it was such a big deal.” Víctor, whose education ended when he got kicked out of school in the fifth grade for fighting, never imagined that putting words to paper could make him feel better about himself or that he would one day think of himself as a writer. He’s never traveled beyond the desert cities and towns around Copiapó, but underground he’s become the chronicler of a story that will one day circle the world.

  * * *

  In the trailers and bungalows on the surface of the San José Mine where the leaders of the rescue have set up shop, it seems as if the entire world is moving to support them. “We could ask for anything, from anywhere, and people would try and get it to us,” Cristián Barra says. Drilling experts and drilling technologies from around the world are headed for the mine: from Johannesburg, South Africa, and Berlin, Pennsylvania; from Denver, Colorado, and Calgary, Alberta; and from a U.S. Army forward-operating base in Afghanistan. The Chileans are planning on restaging one of the great rescues in mining history—at Quecreek Mine in Pennsylvania in 2002—and they’re going to need a global cast to pull it off.

  At that American coal mine, nine men were trapped when they inadvertently triggered an underground flood. They were rescued by the drilling of a vertical shaft 240 feet deep and thirty inches wide, through which they were raised up in a steel basket. The Chileans will need to drill a hole that’s eight times as deep. To do so, they summon one of the biggest drill rigs in Chile, an Australian Strata 950 raise borer, from the Andina Division of Codelco in the nearby Fifth Region of Chile. Unlike the smaller machines that have drilled three diagonal boreholes to reach the men, this 31-ton machine can only drill straight down, and it begins working on August 30, near the spot once judged too unstable when Eduardo Hurtado’s Terraservice team tried to drill its first hole three weeks earlier. This is the drill that will take until December to reach the men. But even before it begins working, Igor Proestakis, a mechanic with one of the drill teams, presents an alternative plan to his bosses. Why not take that third, six-inch drill hole that reached the men at the workshop, and simply widen it, using a series of ever-bigger drill bits? A few days later, André Sougarret approves the drilling of this second rescue hole, to be called Plan B. It will be drilled in two stages, the first twelve inches wide, the second twenty-nine inches wide.

  There’s one problem with Plan B, however: No one in Chile has ever drilled a twenty-nine-inch hole sideways that’s as deep as the one they’ll need. The best machine to drill such a large diagonal shaft is a Schramm T130XD, and soon one such rig is on its way to Copiapó from the Collahuasi mine, more than 600 miles to the north. After soliciting advice from mining companies around the world, Sougarret’s team decides that to speed up the drilling it will accept an offer from Center Rock Inc. in Pennsylvania to use one of its clustered drills, which is essentially four drill bits, each the size of a volleyball, attached to a single shaft. This equipment will be used to drill the second phase of Plan B, and it weighs 26,000 pounds. UPS agrees to ship it for free: first overnight by truck from Pennsylvania to Miami, thence on a flight to Santiago, and finally by truck to Copiapó, where it arrives on September 11. There are very good drillers in Chile, of course, but the depth and angle of the borehole needed will require an operator who can make the equipment do things it wasn’t designed to do, so the Chileans reach out to the Kansas-based drilling experts at the Layne Christensen company. Who is the best driller you have on a Schramm T130? The company calls Jeff Hart, who’s in Afghanistan, drilling holes to provide drinking water and showers for U.S. troops.

  Plan A and Plan B will soon be in motion, but both will push their drilling equipment beyond design limits and the probability of failure is high. Sougarret decides, then, to add a Plan C: a massive oil-drilling rig that will take days to assemble, but which will actually drill faster than Plan A once it gets going. The Canadian company Precision Drilling Corporation has one such machine sitting idle in southern Chile; thirty-seven truckloads are required to bring Rig 421 from a work site a thousand kilometers away. The technology that will guide it to its target and some of the technicians will come from the South African company Murray & Roberts.

  In a series of phone conversations, Sougarret outlines the three drilling plans to Luis Urzúa. It doesn’t really matter which one reaches them first, of course. But when it’s all explained to Urzúa, it seems the Plan B drill will likely be the fastest.

  The government of Chile is marshaling resources from dozens of different agencies, and several top-level officials are living at or near the mine site, including two members of the president’s cabinet. The entire operation has the feel of a Chilean moon shot, and like an expedition to outer space it should have a name. The minister of health, Jaime Mañalich, telephones President Piñera and suggests they call it “Operación San Lorenzo,” after the patron saint of mining.

  The president does not warm to the idea, according to Carlos Vergara Ehrenberg’s behind-the-scenes account. “Lorenzo,” the president repeats. No, that sounds too much like Laurence, as in Laurence Golborne, he says. At La Moneda, the president’s advisers have continued to conduct private polling on the rescue, and recently t
he numbers have begun to show something of concern: As high as the president’s approval rating is, Minister Golborne’s is higher. Golborne, who once occupied one of the more obscure posts in Piñera’s cabinet, has become the face of the rescue, and he’s starting to outshine his boss.

  “Let’s call it ‘Operation Jonas the Prophet,’” the president says. The name never catches on, however. Instead, the Chilean and world media assembling at the site continually refer to the operation to reach the buried men by the name that’s already been adopted, informally, by the men and women working in the rescue crews: “Operation San Lorenzo.”

  * * *

  To keep up the spirits of the men living below as Operation San Lorenzo unfolds, and to keep them from turning on one another, the psychologist Iturra has access to a powerful, joy-inducing medicine: the voices of the people they love, as heard in a telephone connection. One by one on August 29, wives, brothers, mothers, sisters, fathers, sons, and daughters are guided past the lines of police officers and the security fences, to a small metal communications shack, roughly six by eight feet wide, that rests on the sandy dirt just a few paces from the hole that reaches to the thirty-three men below. There is a camera and a microphone, linked to another camera and microphone in a gallery inside the mine. In preparation for this moment, the psychologist has written a letter to the trapped men. Among other things, he’s told them that those with two households, or with amorous complications, should give preference in these teleconferences to their wives and families. “I told them this because I could already see the conflicts with the girlfriends that were unfolding in the camp,” he later says. “And I also told them it would be easier that way: because, after all, lovers and girlfriends tend to be a lot more forgiving than wives are.”