by Mick Lowe
But during his junior year Jake had run afoul of a demanding trigonometry teacher backed by an iron-willed principal who was determined to put a stop to his shenanigans. Jake was heartily indifferent to the expulsion notice when it came—school had always been, at best, barely tolerable.
“Uh, Bob?” Jake directed his query at the back of his new partner.
“Bob?” Jake repeated, a little louder this time.
Still no answer. Oh well, perhaps it was just as well. Jake felt foolish about his question, which would have been “Are we nearly there yet?” Even to Jake it felt like something a peevish child would ask his parents on an over-long road trip.
Maybe the old fellow was a little hard of hearing … It was something Jake had also noticed with his own father and uncles, miners all, especially when they gathered around the kitchen table over beer, recounting endless rounds drilled and blasted, copious tons of muck hoisted, the rascality of diverse shift bosses, many now long since retired. They were all slightly on the deaf side, big men with booming voices, each eager to make himself heard, so as the beer flowed and the night wore on and the winter windows steamed up, the din in the McCools’ cramped kitchen began to rival that of the stormy end of a production heading itself. Jake’s mother and her sisters-in-law retreated to the relative tranquility of the living room before the re-enactment of these prodigious mining feats ever began, but Jake sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, soaking up every word. The Romance of Mining.
Bob came to a stop next to a short tunnel branching off at a right angle from the haulage drift.
“1050 cross-cut,” he gestured.
Jake could make out a few cap lamps, and a few forms moving about around a piece of noisy equipment.
“See how those fellas are wearing their lights on their shoulders?”
Bob was yelling now, directly into Jake’s ear. “They’re shifters! Only shift bosses do that! So when you see ’em coming, look sharp! Always have your safety gear on whenever they’re around, or else they’ll give ya a Step, right? And for Chrissake don’t ever let ’em catch ya drillin’ a bootleg!”
Jake nodded. He knew from the kitchen table talk that Steps were punishment meted out by company supervisors for on-the-job policy infractions. A Step One was a relatively light penalty, but a Step Five meant outright dismissal. A “bootleg” he was less certain about.
“And if you ever see any of ’em running like hell outta the mine, like they’re scared shitless, ignore ’em, you understand me?”
Jake nodded again.
The pair resumed their trek.
After another few paces, Bob paused again.
“1052 cross-cut.” Again he motioned to a short perpendicular tunnel.
Again Jake could make out a few figures moving about, the dim illumination of cap lamps, but this time there was no noise.
“Samplers and engineers,” Bob explained in his normal speaking voice. “And if you ever see them running outta the mine like they’re scared shitless, ignore them, too, understand?”
Jake nodded, and they resumed their trek.
At length Bob led the way off the drift.
“This here’s our heading.”
Jake sensed they were leaving a well-travelled road and entering a space that was alien, unexplored and alluring. And more than a little dangerous. Gone was the level ground of the haulage drift, with its capacious, smoothly arched roof.
Now, suddenly, they were clambering through and around a tricky surface littered by small jag-ged rocks that were sometimes the size of small boulders.
Finally Bob stopped after they entered what appeared to Jake to be a vast, yawning cavern.
“This here’s our stope. It’s where we make our money.”
“How’s the ground, Bob?” Jake was already instinctively shining his lamp up to inspect the roof of the place. He could make out chunks of rock, some nearly the size of those Beetles the Volkswagen company was just beginning to sell so many of. The rocks, which had evidently worked loose from the roof of the stope, were rendered harmless by a heavy wire mesh screen. Jake didn’t even want to think about the damage they could do if they were to fall on him or Bob.
Jesperson shrugged. “Oh, so-so. Garson’s an old mine, so it’s loosened up a good bit. We’re mining out the pillars now.”
“How … How’s the bonus, Bob?”
“Well now, that’s gonna depend on how good a driller you turn out to be. Ready to get to work?”
Jake nodded, and Bob walked to one end of the stope, a wall that was partly covered with garish white painted markings, which Bob pointed at. “This here’s the face, what we call the breast. These marks were put here by the engineers to show us just where to drill. Our job is to drill off a round, holes eight feet deep, load them and take out our round, before afternoon shift comes in.”
Jake nodded that he understood.
“Well, let’s get at ’er then … Here, you’ll be needin’ this.”
Bob proffered a medium-sized adjustable open-end crescent wrench. “You can fix most anything with one of these. And if all else fails you can always use it as a hammer. Mind, now, everything turns backward in a mine. Counter-clockwise, right? Everything is threaded so it turns to the left.”
Bob surveyed the breast, playing the beam from his cap lamp across it, before beginning to use it as a pointer. Like a schoolteacher standing in front of a blackboard, Jake thought.
The dim yellow beam swept over the four topmost painted circles, which formed an arc. “Back holes,” Bob explained. “Back’s what we call the roof of a stope, or heading.”
Below the back-hole painted marks Jake could make out five more marks, also forming a rainbow below the top four. Beneath that was a dense cluster of marks inside a square. “This here’s our cut,” Bob said, indicating the cluster. His light swept over the bottom three marks in a horizontal line that formed the bottom of the square. “These are your helpers.” Next the light played down across the four bottom marks that were just above the floor of the stope. “And these are your lifters. When it comes time to blast we wire ’em all just so with the igniter cord so each shot goes in the right order. That way we get a nice clean round, see?”
Jake nodded, even though the strange markings and sudden welter of information might as well have been so many Egyptian hieroglyphics. Bob’s light rose again, this time to a spot on the breast where there were no marks, nothing that Jake could see. The light stopped at a slight discolouration in the rock. Jake could just make out the faint outline of a circle. “Bootleg,” Bob warned. “Unexploded powder, where the cross-shift’s helpers didn’t all quite blow.”
Bob’s light wiggled all across the breast again. “See all that glitter?”
Jake nodded.
“That there’s free gold, free silver. Very rare you ever see that, but this here’s a very high grade stope. They say just the PMs—the precious metals—’ll pay for the nickel in muck this rich. You don’t see it every day, that’s for sure. High grade’s soft ground. Easier to drill, but also a lot less stable. Ya gotta be careful ’bout ground conditions.”
Bob knelt to pick up a piece of equipment, grunting as he stood back up. “Jackleg drill.”
Jake studied the apparatus cradled in Bob’s arms. Two black rubberized hoses trailed from it. The whole affair was heavy and unwieldy, that much was evident. It was basically two pieces, the leg, which telescoped in and out of a piston, and the drill itself, which were joined at a pivot point where Bob was standing. The piston was roughly five feet long, and the drill steel, which was notched into the front of the drill, protruded for another six feet or so. Balance and leverage were the thing, as Jake could plainly see. Bob hefted the mechanism into place.
“Ready?”
Jake nodded.
Bob pulled up on a lever at the back of the drill—the throttle—and pointed the tip of the drill steel at the exact centre of one of the white painted markings.
The jackleg, which had been an iner
t piece of metal weighing well in excess of one hundred pounds, dead weight, now sprang alarmingly to life. The air line, which provided the motive force at one hundred pounds per square inch of pressure, stiffened and hissed, the piston extended the leg to its full length and the drill steel started to gush water from its tip as it began to smash against the face.
The device was now a living, powerful thing, instantly alive with an ear-splitting roar. A jack hammer adapted to work on the horizontal. The noise was just as intense, but here in the stope it had nowhere to go. The thing did not so much drill into the rock as it simply rammed into it with sheer brute force, turning the diamond-tipped drill steel a quarter-turn—counter-clockwise, sure enough—between each air pressure-driven surge.
It was a slow, arduous process, but Bob was successfully probing into rock that had lain undisturbed for a billion years. Then he closed the throttle, and the drill abruptly fell silent.
He looked at Jake. “Wanna give it a try?”
“Sure, why not.” Jake stepped forward and braced for the weight as Bob relinquished the drill.
It was a struggle just to hold the drill, much less to start or “collar” a hole with any accuracy. Instead, the drill steel skittered harmlessly all over the breast, and Bob quickly intervened, shutting off the throttle.
“You’ll never collar a hole that way! You’ll write your name all over that breast first!” he yelled. “Here, let me!” He grabbed the drill again and, with amazingly little apparent effort, placed the drill steel tip square in the middle of a painted bull’s eye. Then, with a series of short, sharp bursts, he collared the hole.
Each hole took a while. They had to stop to exchange shorter drill steels for longer ones, and even to replace worn diamond bits with fresh ones, and Jake counted twenty-four hole marks in the breast. But once the hole was collared and the drill was hefted into place, Jake learned, drilling deeper was mostly a matter of just holding on, making sure the drill hole was straight and true. If this was “soft” ground, he couldn’t imagine the hard stuff.
Once, when Jake had the drill shut down to change steel, the back began to make loud, ominous noises over their heads. It snapped, with a loud cracking sound. Bob just grinned, and waved off Jake’s evident alarm.
“Back’s just working, is all. Happens all the time. Just remember, when you see me runnin’ like hell outta the mine, then you run like hell.”
V
It was a sweaty, exhausting business, but by early afternoon Bob and Jake had finished drilling their final hole and were ready to start loading each hole with Amex, an ammonia-based form of high explosive, relatively inert until set off by some kind of ignition—the igniter cord—which Bob looped in precise order from hole to hole. The trick, Bob explained, was to give each blast, or “shot,” somewhere to go, to displace the rock being blasted. If everything went according to plan each eight-foot hole they had just spent the shift so tediously drilling would break cleanly and in proper sequence. Each would displace the surrounding rock into the void just created by the preceding blast. A new heading would then be created, eight feet deeper into the pillar.
VI
Jake wasn’t sure he had the energy to make the walk back to the loading station—a mile-and-a-half, Bob had told him—at the end of the shift. But to remain anywhere in this part of the mine when all the blasts were set off—carefully coordinated for the time between shifts when the mine was empty—would mean certain death, so he had no choice but to begin to retrace his steps of the early morning.
At last, to Jake’s overwhelming relief, the first bulb leading back to the loading station came into view. Jake couldn’t remember ever having been so tired when he and Bob flopped wearily down on the plain wooden benches that lined either wall beside the loading station. Jake noticed his ears were ringing, but he preferred to dwell on how much bonus he and his partner had just earned. They had taken their assigned round, after all. And Bob had even complimented Jake on his promise as a driller. High praise, coming from someone with Bob’s experience. Bob was a man of few words, Jake sensed, so even a scattering of encouraging words meant a lot … Yes, he felt pretty good after his first shift—he was no longer a boy now, but a man earning a man’s wages. But where was that cage? It began to dawn on Jake, as other men from the level began to drift onto the benches, that he might be in for an indefinite wait. It was rush hour in the mine, after all, and there was but a single cage to lift all the day shift workers to surface …
Jake’s mind began to wander to Jo Ann, his girlfriend. Now that he was a bona fide miner, it changed everything. Why, soon he’d be able to buy a car—perhaps even that cherry ’57 Chevy Biscayne coupe he’d had his eye on, and they’d no longer need to borrow a vehicle to go and watch the slag pouring.
Watching the slag pouring was the unique local weekend nightly ritual where amorous young couples parked to make out at the base of the sprawling slag heaps in the city’s West End, out back of the huge Copper Cliff smelter.
Jo Ann Winters had been Jake’s girl all school year, and they were readily acknowledged by their peers as a “steady” couple. Jo Ann might not have been the most beautiful girl in the class and she certainly didn’t have the best figure (she was, in fact, rather flat-chested), but she had a ready wit that always made him laugh, and Jake adored the spray of freckles across her nose and the fair skin of her cheeks. He liked Jo Ann a lot. He couldn’t help but think of their last time out parking when the world turned a fiery pink as the molten slag ran like lava after it was tipped from the pots of the hot metal cars high atop the slag heap. The intense heat had inflamed their passion so much that Jake had begun fumbling with the top button of Jo Ann’s blouse, —the furthest she’d ever let him go—before she once again told him, politely but firmly, to stop.
Even sitting here on the hard wooden bench Jake felt a stirring in his pants, and, for the first time that day, he caught himself feeling a slight twinge about where he was. As part of his orientation Bob had made him climb one of the wooden ladders that led up out of the mine. It was a precautionary exercise, Bob had explained, because if the power ever failed or the hoist broke down, these ladders would become the only way out of the mine. (And besides, as Bob did not tell his youthful charge, you’d be surprised how many neophytes mastered the back-breaking art of the jackleg and the spooky, scary realm of the stope and the mine generally, only to freeze in terror when it came time to clamber up the exposed, hundred-foot long ladders. That was a deal-breaker in Bob’s books.) But, even in his bulky, unfamiliar miner’s garb young McCool had climbed slowly but surely to the topmost rung.
Even that one ladder had left Jake feeling out of breath and fatigued, conditions he was at some pain to conceal from Bob. And now, as he thought of Jo Ann’s creamy, soft skin and her virginal, forbidden breasts, Jake recalled that one ladder. The thought that some twenty-odd such ladders now separated him from Jo Ann was a sudden, discomforting epiphany. And all that rock between him now and the fresh air, the brilliant light of day! A half-mile of solid rock—all that weight!—suspended overhead! Jake swallowed, shifted edgily on the bench, and told himself to get a grip. Where was that bloody cage?
After what seemed an interminable wait the cage finally arrived. Bob didn’t board, announcing he had to attend some kind of briefing with the incoming cross-shift.
Once again Jake found himself in the centre of a tightly packed mass of humanity for the trip to surface.
This time the smell was of sweat, and the mood in the cage was strangely subdued. There was none of the barbed political banter of the morning, which Jake accounted to the fatigue his co-workers seemed to share with him after shift.
But then, after a short interval, the cage’s ascent abruptly stopped.
“Young Mr. McCool, I believe this is your stop,” said the tender in the same wry tone he’d used that morning as he swung out the heavy steel gate. But now there was a hint of malice in his voice.
Suddenly Jake felt himself being pushed o
ut of the cage, manhandled by his fellow passengers.
“What the f—? What the!” Instantly adrenalized, Jake found himself on some foreign level, one he could sense was unused, deserted, having at some time been removed from production.
But he had more immediate problems, facing a semi-circle of his fellow miners who quickly confronted him with angry, jeering words.
“Well, lookie here!”
“What we got here, boys?”
“What we got here is what happens when a Commie fucks a bitch!”
“Yeah, that’s right! Youse get a pinko son-of-a-bitch!”
Wide-eyed in disbelief at this sudden turn of events, Jake was careful to keep his back to the cage door, lest the threatening semi-circle before him become a fully encircling—and probably fatal—ring of pure human hatred.
If only he had a weapon, some kind of equalizer! Jake felt feverishly through the pockets of his coveralls. And there was the crescent wrench Bob had handed him back at the beginning of the shift, which now felt a lifetime ago.
It wasn’t much—a standard-issue miner’s eight inch crescent wrench—but Jake fished it out and brandished it as he would a knife. And, to Jake’s surprise, no one wanted a piece of the hard, rounded end of the thing, diminutive though it was.
The ensuing stand-off gave Jake time to catch his breath and size up his situation. He was badly outnumbered, perhaps twenty to one, and they continued to rain down jeering insults upon him. This explained the quiet in the cage, Jake realized—only one side of the Steel-Mine Mill divide had been represented.
