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July 19, 2004
When Mine Was Ours
Our local motley collection of black lungers, life-long molemen and tunnel crawlers, some of whom came from generations of miners for the Company, didn't know what to think when the Boss announced that he was going to close the mine.
There were still plenty of veins down there to mine out and it was as safe as it was ever likely to be. There was still a tidy profit to be made from coal, from raw ores, from rare gems, from caches of buried treasure that dated back to the days of the Barbary Coast, from entombed treasure rooms of Pharoahs who had suffered from wanderlust and gotten well lost ages ago.
But the Boss was telling us he was going to pack it in. Or rather, he was going to pack us in. There was something about a march towards globalism, people of all nations on equal footing, borders being imaginary, frictionless something-or-other. The long and the short of it was that the town's only Kinko's outpost was gonna run out of pink stationary before long, running off copies of all of our pink slips.
The Boss was laying us all off and packing up the mine to move it out of the country. He had a small island in mind, he told us, nice weather, hard-working locals who ask for a lot less than we do. With the money he would save on payroll, he told us, the expense of moving the mine would be negligable. He'd make the money back in eight months. Most of the cost would be packing material.
At that point, things got a little undignified at the company meeting. Big George started weeping and Little George, his pal, stroked his back while yelling at the Boss, “You capitalist swine! Look at what you’ve done! George hasn’t cried since nine years ago when he found that potato in his garden that looked like his dead wife! He’s not quick to tears! But he’s a man and a man has to have a job and mining is his job! And now you’re moving it overseas! The job! And without him!”
Old Mullroy scratched his coal-encrusted scalp and said, “If it would help any, I could take a pay cut AND would even dress like an island native if that would make you feel better, Boss. I could put a bone through my nose and put a half coconut on my head. I could paint my back and buttocks bright blue and eat nothing but tuna sandwiches while saying it’s whale sandwiches. Boss, I’m willing to marry up to six women and wear feathers in my hair if it’ll keep the mine right here.”
The Boss was unmoved. And besides, he said, they weren’t those kind of natives on the island the mine was moving to. They rode bicycles, sure, but they didn’t eat their fellow man or worship sun gods or anything. If their backs and buttocks were painted blue, he didn’t know about it, because they wore shirts and pants as we did. Also, he wasn't moving the mine there because he liked the culture. It was a monetary consideration.
“Well can we go to the island as well?” asked Gerald. Gerald was a lanky lad, unsuited to mining work, really, but eager. He didn’t mind working a pick to raise the ceiling height in passages so he could pass through as we could. His hair was cut short, was red, was flecked with metal shavings from picking at the veins of ores we couldn’t reach, which would rain down on his head while he worked. “I mean, I love this town and all, but I’d be willing to—“
But it was not an option.
No, the Boss said, we were without options. The mine was up and moving and when it was gone, we would be free to fill the void left behind with whatever we liked. Perhaps we could make it a swimming pool. Now there's a thought.
I met with my old pals Jason Hatchet, Jim the Marigold, and Jacob Half-a-Hand, and we came up with a plan. None of us had wives, women having trouble getting used to a man that spits up a soda can worth of black filth out of his lungs every night after dinner. And on top of that, Jacob only had half a left hand. The other half, he recovered and kept pickled in a jar in his living room, which did not lend a romantical element to his home, should any lady visitors be expecting one.
And Jim the Marigold probably didn't like girls.
So we packed up some lunches, wore baggy pants that we could fill with long necks at the bottom and bags of snack food at the top, blacked our faces with shoe-polish, and went out into the evening. Every house we passed was full of crying or men with raised voices. We slipped into the mines like seals slip into holes in the ice to go eat penguins.
We sank down to our favorite mine shaft, Betsy-3. All the main shafts were named for women, but not for sexist reasons or anything. It's just not many of us had wives. Black sludge in soda cans. Minds just naturally were pulled towards the feminine, given half a chance.
We camped out down there in the dark and the cold and the quiet and we waited. We munched our sandwiches and we waited. We waited for the whole mess, the whole mine to be lifted up and transported and we waited to meet our new coworkers and neighbors.
If they wouldn't let us work alongside them for pennies a day, if they wouldn't introduce us to their sisters, if they wouldn't teach us the proper way to paint our asses, we would wait some more. We know these mines like we know every mote-clogged inch of our lungs. We can stay down here forever or until they're telling stories about monsters in the deep. We'll wait and our lives aren't going anywhere without us.
We held each other in the dark and worked on keeping our breathing quiet and steady.