The initial tragedy at the Sago Mine has given way to analysis of what happened and why. A picture emerges of this place and this life - part of the national consciousness for a little while, before the camera crews move on.
This poem was written in the early 1990s, when I was a reporter at a newspaper in a small West Virginia mining town. I’d covered a handful of murders, a lot of shootings and stabbings, a few suicides – the backdrop for them all, a region where two of the nation’s worst mine disasters were the history highlights and where most of the industry had dried up and disappeared.
The poem was published some years back in Hard Love: Writings on Violence and Intimacy, edited by Elizabeth Claman and published by Queen of Swords Press.
Things Are Close to the Surface Here
In this small town we number
murders on the fingers of one hand:
A man killed his wife
for serving
green beans one more night.
A man killed his lover’s husband,
shooting through a closed
door, buckshot unfurling
a Decoration Day peony
from the tight bud of his chest.
A man laid flame in the halls
of an apartment building;
a woman leaped,
shoulders winged with sinewless flame,
her hope-chest china
found white,
unbroken, after three floors collapsed.
One shot a woman pregnant with his child
in the parking lot of the police station,
under the window where a dispatcher
scowled over a needlepoint posy
and logged 10-7 calls for lunch.
* * *
No one writes this
in police reports,
but when it gets too warm in early April
quiet men start fights
because they are idle,
and old factory ways tangle their feet
like bindweeds of abandoned fields.
Black granite cannot keep
the changing names
of those lost in economic wars.
They make a slow memorial
on the courthouse square;
they wear their empty hands,
medals of obsolete conflict,
fine metal forced
into a particular shape
by a die that no longer exists.
They have all lost
something physical
though the loss may not be seen.
That man, missing
the four fingers of one hand,
another without a foot,
and him, the man whose hip joint
was fused in some impact
so that he goes swinging his leg outward,
compassing mute circles.
* * *
When the ground gives under foot
it may be only the tunneling of a mole
(that striving panicked little body)
or the land may be subsiding
into the place where coal was
or the runoff that flashes silver
in drowned hay might just have found
a shorter channel to oblivion.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Hard work in a dark place
Did the men think the mine was unsafe?
A reporter asked that question of a family member outside the Sago Mine in West Virginia.
No, came the response, but slowly. They knew there were problems.
Miners know what's going on - they don't need an official report to be aware of gas problems, dust problems, machinery problems. We'll hear more about all those in the days ahead, (see this overview from MSHA), about the hundreds of violations, large and small, at a former Horizon then Anker mine that had been resurrected by Wilbur Ross - a familiar name here in North Carolina, where he is consolidating failed textile companies as he has coal and steel operations.
A certain amount of danger is implicit in this work, and miners accept that, with pride and stubbornness in doing a difficult job well, but also the sure and certain knowledge that you don't make $50 K a year in West Virginia doing much else. Mining provides a good life for the families of miners, but one they often try to keep their own children from choosing. Go to college, get a degree, work somewhere warm and safe and clean. But there is an attraction, heritage not the least. It's the feeling in military families, an honor code of sorts, of doing something valuable that most people won't do and can't do and really don't understand.
Check in at The Rural Blog for a look at what journalists closest to the community are saying.
There is, too, some of the same problem that affects all of us making considerably less than six figures.
Miners used to have more power in West Virginia and Kentucky, when deep mines were the rule rather than mountaintop removal - cheaper, easier, and you pay men to run a bucket instead of the specialized tasks of roof bolter and shuttle car operator and brattice-man. Miners had more power when there were more of them - the longwall mines that replaced roof-and-pillar operations are highly efficient, requiring many fewer workers to produce much more coal.
When mines were unsafe, United Mine Workers miners used to walk out - wildcat strikes. And those strikes disrupted the steady flow of coal to power plants, and they got attention.
Now there are fewer miners, fewer union miners, and wildcat strikes are part of a storied past, like picks and mules and "16 Tons."
Miners are more like other American workers today - they need to hang on to their jobs and their benefits. They squawk less and bear down more.
The same day that the bodies came out of Sago Mine, I heard business analysts trumpet the lack of wage pressure, how great it was that American wages were flat, flat, flat. Don't need to worry about inflation!
Corporate profits are up in most places outside the automakers, and executive bonuses sure aren't disappearing. But wages are flat, and health care costs more, and pensions are another part of the storied past.
I imagine the miners knew what the problems were. But they put on their helmets and steel-toed boots, checked their batteries and got in the man-trip. There was a job to do.
A reporter asked that question of a family member outside the Sago Mine in West Virginia.
No, came the response, but slowly. They knew there were problems.
Miners know what's going on - they don't need an official report to be aware of gas problems, dust problems, machinery problems. We'll hear more about all those in the days ahead, (see this overview from MSHA), about the hundreds of violations, large and small, at a former Horizon then Anker mine that had been resurrected by Wilbur Ross - a familiar name here in North Carolina, where he is consolidating failed textile companies as he has coal and steel operations.
A certain amount of danger is implicit in this work, and miners accept that, with pride and stubbornness in doing a difficult job well, but also the sure and certain knowledge that you don't make $50 K a year in West Virginia doing much else. Mining provides a good life for the families of miners, but one they often try to keep their own children from choosing. Go to college, get a degree, work somewhere warm and safe and clean. But there is an attraction, heritage not the least. It's the feeling in military families, an honor code of sorts, of doing something valuable that most people won't do and can't do and really don't understand.
Check in at The Rural Blog for a look at what journalists closest to the community are saying.
There is, too, some of the same problem that affects all of us making considerably less than six figures.
Miners used to have more power in West Virginia and Kentucky, when deep mines were the rule rather than mountaintop removal - cheaper, easier, and you pay men to run a bucket instead of the specialized tasks of roof bolter and shuttle car operator and brattice-man. Miners had more power when there were more of them - the longwall mines that replaced roof-and-pillar operations are highly efficient, requiring many fewer workers to produce much more coal.
When mines were unsafe, United Mine Workers miners used to walk out - wildcat strikes. And those strikes disrupted the steady flow of coal to power plants, and they got attention.
Now there are fewer miners, fewer union miners, and wildcat strikes are part of a storied past, like picks and mules and "16 Tons."
Miners are more like other American workers today - they need to hang on to their jobs and their benefits. They squawk less and bear down more.
The same day that the bodies came out of Sago Mine, I heard business analysts trumpet the lack of wage pressure, how great it was that American wages were flat, flat, flat. Don't need to worry about inflation!
Corporate profits are up in most places outside the automakers, and executive bonuses sure aren't disappearing. But wages are flat, and health care costs more, and pensions are another part of the storied past.
I imagine the miners knew what the problems were. But they put on their helmets and steel-toed boots, checked their batteries and got in the man-trip. There was a job to do.
Monday, January 02, 2006
West Virginia miners
Their memorials are seldom more than granite stones in the local graveyard, a name, dates, a death anonymous among those more usually suffered from heart attacks or penumonia.
Coal miners fight a long war of attrition, mostly silently, to help provide the electric power we take for granted. Some miners die. Many are injured, or fatally wounded in their lungs by a career of breathing powdered carbon.
Tonight in West Virginia, they're trying to get to 13 men in an Upshur County coal mine see CNN story - about 45 minutes from where I lived and worked in Marion County.
That county is best known as the site of two major mine disasters that changed safety laws. The 1907 Monongah disaster killed hundreds, men and boys, fathers and sons. The Farmington No. 9 disaster took fewer, but gave television audiences a glimpse into the hard world of the mining town, as reporters converged to interview wives soon to be widows. The Mine Safety and Health Administration has more information.
There was a memorial to each of these disasters. The one for Farmington No. 9 was a polished black column hidden up a side road that I passed as I went to visit a friend or go fishing. Few people knew it was there.
I built my home above a branch of the No. 9 mine. The land was solid there, but cracks appeared in the back fields, the rock and dirt subsiding over the works deep underground.
You lived and worked with mining, with subsidence and ground that burned, with black lung clinics and wildcat strikes, with methane explosions and coal truck accidents on the highways. The fatalism that allowed families to live with the industry permeated those who had no direct connection to coal. We, too, listened for the sound of a siren, for the rumble of a blast.
I was in the news business. I never covered a major disaster, though we had our share of stories on lives lost, one by one, to roof falls, and electrocutions, and collapses.
I went down in the mines, twice, once in Pennsylvania, once in West Virginia. I rode the "man trips" that rattled their way into the mine, trollies powered by naked electric lines. I was unreeled into the earth in a slope mine, descending gradually into the strata.
It was cold, and wet. Rats. The smell of urine. The bizarre whiteness of walls powered with rock dust to prevent explosions. The roar of continuous miners and the high-tech high-powered extrication of the longwalls. Symbols on the walls that marked rescue gear and the route up.
I remember the faces under the mine hats, at once strong and vulnerable. The weight of the belt you wore with the a self-rescuer attached.
We were inside the longwall machine when it hit a pocket of methane and all electricity was instantly cut. The darkness closed in around the lights on our helmets.
One of our tour group asked if we should walk out, and the supervisor leaned back, laughing. It'll be a long walk, he said. We're three miles in. We could hear the earth groaning above the massive hydraulics that held up the roof.
Tonight those men at the Sago Mine are miles inside the earth, past a wall of rubble. Their families gather at the white clapboard church, so expected that in a movie you'd say it was a stereotype. Like the coal-blackened faces. Like the rough mountains closing in. Like the rescue teams on their way into the mine. Like the way I cannot turn past those images on the television news.
Coal miners fight a long war of attrition, mostly silently, to help provide the electric power we take for granted. Some miners die. Many are injured, or fatally wounded in their lungs by a career of breathing powdered carbon.
Tonight in West Virginia, they're trying to get to 13 men in an Upshur County coal mine see CNN story - about 45 minutes from where I lived and worked in Marion County.
That county is best known as the site of two major mine disasters that changed safety laws. The 1907 Monongah disaster killed hundreds, men and boys, fathers and sons. The Farmington No. 9 disaster took fewer, but gave television audiences a glimpse into the hard world of the mining town, as reporters converged to interview wives soon to be widows. The Mine Safety and Health Administration has more information.
There was a memorial to each of these disasters. The one for Farmington No. 9 was a polished black column hidden up a side road that I passed as I went to visit a friend or go fishing. Few people knew it was there.
I built my home above a branch of the No. 9 mine. The land was solid there, but cracks appeared in the back fields, the rock and dirt subsiding over the works deep underground.
You lived and worked with mining, with subsidence and ground that burned, with black lung clinics and wildcat strikes, with methane explosions and coal truck accidents on the highways. The fatalism that allowed families to live with the industry permeated those who had no direct connection to coal. We, too, listened for the sound of a siren, for the rumble of a blast.
I was in the news business. I never covered a major disaster, though we had our share of stories on lives lost, one by one, to roof falls, and electrocutions, and collapses.
I went down in the mines, twice, once in Pennsylvania, once in West Virginia. I rode the "man trips" that rattled their way into the mine, trollies powered by naked electric lines. I was unreeled into the earth in a slope mine, descending gradually into the strata.
It was cold, and wet. Rats. The smell of urine. The bizarre whiteness of walls powered with rock dust to prevent explosions. The roar of continuous miners and the high-tech high-powered extrication of the longwalls. Symbols on the walls that marked rescue gear and the route up.
I remember the faces under the mine hats, at once strong and vulnerable. The weight of the belt you wore with the a self-rescuer attached.
We were inside the longwall machine when it hit a pocket of methane and all electricity was instantly cut. The darkness closed in around the lights on our helmets.
One of our tour group asked if we should walk out, and the supervisor leaned back, laughing. It'll be a long walk, he said. We're three miles in. We could hear the earth groaning above the massive hydraulics that held up the roof.
Tonight those men at the Sago Mine are miles inside the earth, past a wall of rubble. Their families gather at the white clapboard church, so expected that in a movie you'd say it was a stereotype. Like the coal-blackened faces. Like the rough mountains closing in. Like the rescue teams on their way into the mine. Like the way I cannot turn past those images on the television news.
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