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The Hard Rock Miner
The hard rock miner died last night, a thin man, a strong man, with the soft-sad eyes of a thoughtful child.
His name was Neil. He’d been a miner most of his life. He chewed Copenhagen and played guitar (he loved hard rock). In Vietnam he’d been awarded the Silver Star for an act of great courage.
After the war, at twenty-five, he went to work in a uranium mine outside Moab called The Gentleman Sloan. Two years later, he moved into the coal-mining country of east-central Wyoming. Then, at age thirty-one, he drove into the spiky mountains of southwestern Colorado and began working in a gold mine called The Equity, and this is where he remained for the rest of his life.
His end began suddenly, less than ten months ago, when he was only fifty-eight-years-old. He found, one unforgettable evening, a terrifying eruption of crystal-like growths all along his ribcage. His doctors punched cylindrical core samples out his skin. They drilled him full of holes and loaded him with tubes like tiny sticks of dynamite, blasting caps of pinkish-blue. Cancer is what they found. Cancer blooming like clusters of quartz everywhere beneath his skin.
The strangeness of it was not lost on him: that something so small could take down a man his size—a man so living and vital, a man, in short, like him.
He had not expected to die this way. He thought his end would come in the cold dark caves among the echo-drip of black water, or from black lung.
Or perhaps on his way home from work one star-spent frozen night, a wall of white would come pounding down out of the galactic blackness above, building in a moment a skyscraper of snow atop him and his jeep. But it had not been so.
Enraged, he cursed at first. And overnight his skin went totally slack, the flesh about the bones—a padding—melting like candlewax. His temples grew indrawn, clustered with silver veins. For reasons the doctors could not explain, the cave of his mouth began to morph so that his palate became a ceiling of ribbed rock, tasting of sulfur and sprouting miniature stalactites of limey tissue, or bone. The gold-and-copper of his hair, which had lasted him his whole life, now faded to galena threads, threads of winking lead.
Over the years, the mines had exacted heavy tolls upon his health, as mines so often will. A chronic cough plagued him the last decade of his life. He had poor blood circulation, his veins dying like underground streams inside his skin, and his skin, from head-to-toe, transparent, mica-thin.
Twenty years previous, on a cold autumn morning, while he was exploring an abandoned shaft, he was brought up short by an iron fist clenching inside his chest. It sent him running back in the direction he had come. He’d barely made it. Lack of oxygen, they said, had caused a small heart attack. Thereafter his “ticker” (as he termed it) was never again the same.
And who could forget the time, early on in his mining career, when a stone slab the size of a boxcar busted loose from the low rock ceiling above and mashed him face-first into the soggy ground. He lay like that for two days and two nights, unable to move at all, while his headlamp subsided into ultimate black, and he, half-delirious, heard the whole time the purling of underground streams rocking gently by. This, he thought, is it: this is how I die.
His rescuers told him later that the softness of the earth and the freezing cold had, in part, saved him, but mainly, they whispered among themselves, it was the sheer strength of his will, and the strength of his muscle and bone.
Still, for all this, he loved his work. He loved the whole lifestyle, loved it with his body and soul. He loved the sound of sluicing water, the smell of wet mineral and adamantine stone. He loved the vitreous air where he worked (and worked), the air itself exuding sparseness, the reek of ozone and pine. He loved the sandy tailing ponds, their poisonous waters, the sound of the ravens grokking at him from the firs all around the mine, and the firs themselves stunted and dark and weird, crepitating with human-like moans. He loved all the magpie and the chipmunks and the fat brown marmots – “whistle pigs,” he called them – sunning themselves in the sharp western sunlight the short summers long. He loved the arsenic-burned rocks they scorched their bellies on.
He loved the massive gray shadows that tilted the ground, and the white dusty earth that the ubiquitous mountains cast their shadows upon.
He loved Sugarloaf peak in spring, with its necktie of mist and wig of snow, and the ragged mountains beyond poking the sky – and that sky forever, in his memory, tarnished like zinc, or a verdigris stone.
The rarified air he could never get enough of: the glassy gales in autumn and the mean winter wind pouring down from the milky sky above, rushing through the conifers in sporadic bursts and blowing the black cliffs bare of vapor and snow, showing naked chines of rock – rock everywhere, the smell of rock, rock rearing up into the high-altitude air, angular walls all along the roads that led up to the mines.
To him this was worth ten years of life.
And his life was not yours, or mine.
Our final meeting came on my last day of work, before I moved out of the San Juans for good. He was just coming on shift, swing. He stood at the entrance of the shaft, half turned away. A long shadow from the mouth of the cave fell diagonally across him, and in his hardhat and yellow slicker, the hard rock miner looked like one about ready to fight fires, or cyclones. His headlamp was not turned on yet. His boots were covered in year-old muck. His gloves poked partially out his bib. For some reason, then, I do not know why, he turned to me and waved goodbye. Then he swiveled back around and lumbered alone into the black dripping shaft, where no light shone at all, and then he disappeared forever from my sight, underground.
Published in Literature
A good read. One day I was driving south of Carson City and I saw a man walking his mule across the street. The critter was loaded with all the ecoutrements of mining life like a glimpse in to a rough glorious past.
Amen.
Beautifully true. Thank you.
Heartbreaking and beautiful, just the way I like it. Thanks!
Thanks, Ray. It’s a wonderful bit of painting with words.
Thank you!
I truly appreciate that, @ddavewes.
Thank you.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.
Thank you.
Thank YOU.
That gives me such a shot in the arm. Thank you.
“Evocative, intoxicating, intriguing and completely satisfying”
That illustrates how your exceptionally kind comment struck me, as well.
Wyoming?
Your avatar reminds me of the bucking bronc mascot at the University of Wyoming, where I ran track.
I LOVE your comment. Thank you.
Ray, you don’t know it, but you are writing the stories about my husband that I always wanted to but did not know how. Thank you. Thank you very, very much.
Your writing weaves layers of large and small things, and I love it. It improves with a re-read, my best read, one to be chewed slowly. (I stole that)
Was picking up both your books but it looks like the second is a rewrite of the first, correct?
Thanks again.
Thank you, sweetness.
Curiously enough, there are no such things as readers. There are only re-readers.
Said Nabokov.
I’ve always preferred literature and movies that yield up new meaning with each pass through.
In answer to your question, yes, it is a rewrite, and it does differ. I apologize if there was confusion. It turn out that it’s virtually impossible to delete a book off Amazon once it’s up. My first publisher, now retired, decided to leave it and have Amazon post a note saying it was an updated version. But I don’t think it’s clear.
Thank you!
An absolutely lovely essay and one I’m glad I had the opportunity to read.
Thank you very much.
Wow! Your imagery is the perfect blend of beautiful and tragic.
Beautiful and tragic — not unlike your angel eyes. ;-)
You’re exceptionally kind. Thank you for reading and thank you for your lovely comment.
Right before I clicked on my alerts, I thought to myself, @rayharvey, I need me a story.
Any more installments coming soon?
Actually, yes.
As coincidence would have it, I just posted something:
http://ricochet.com/414074/ex-high-school-basketball-star/
Thank you for thinking of me!
Damn Ray. Just… damn.
A life well lived.
I totally agree, friend.
Thank you for very much.