The Deep Dark (15 page)

There ain't anyone coming back here,
Peterson thought. If the cage didn't get there soon, he knew he was going to die. So would the others. The smoke had built to the point where it could be
felt
as much as seen and tasted.

Several minutes later, fill-in cager Greg Dionne appeared at the gate on 4600. A tall guy with a sturdy, sinewy build, Dionne was foreman Harvey Dionne's son. At twenty-three, Greg Dionne was a well-liked go-getter who could size up a fellow and pronounce him a best friend before a beer was half drained. He swung open the gate and removed the mouthpiece of his self-rescuer. He'd come just in time. They loaded and belled the cage to 4600.

12:22
P.M.,
M
AY
2
4600 Level

W
ITH THE FOUR MEN FROM 440
0
—B
ILL
M
ITCHELL,
R
ANDY
P
ETERSON
, Speedy Gonzalez, and Dusty Rhoads—on board, Dionne left the cage to answer a ringing phone while Peterson helped Dennis Clapp, Virgil Bebb, Charlie Casteel, and several others climb on. When Dionne returned, he belled them to 3100
—
not
the station at 3700. Mitchell, who had once been a cager, knew the bell system and wondered what was up. The man train was on 3700. The men from his level had gone to 3700.

As the cage passed 3700, the men aboard saw a wall of smoke backlit by lights that normally flooded the station with daytime brightness. Some of the guys groaned when it dawned on them they wouldn't be stopping there. They were soaking wet from their own sweat. One complained that his coat was on 3700—and he needed it.

“Shit, it's cold in the Jewell,” he said.

Around 3550, the cage sputtered and yo-yoed without warning. Bill Mitchell wondered if the hoistman had been smoked out, and had had to clutch out and stop the cage. It made no sense to stop it there for any other reason. The 3550 had been boarded up for years.

“There's no place for us to get off,” someone called out from the back.

“What's he doing? What's he stopping here for?”

One man let out a kind of guttural scream, and Dionne tried to keep order. He was calm, and his reassurance felt genuine.

“He's clutching out one side,” he said.

A moment later the cage heaved again, upward to 3100, where it stopped. Gene Johnson was there, sitting on a block of wood to the right of the station. Flanking the foreman was Byron Schulz and cager Roger Findley. Some saw Schulz as a goof-off—a kid who didn't take mining seriously. Schulz, twenty-one, was a cut-up. He'd make a joke, pull a prank, or just kick back a little longer than some thought he ought to. At Sunshine he'd done most of the jobs given to the green guys out of high school. He'd operated the mucking machine, done a little mining, acted as a helper, and run the cages—double-drum and chippy. Schulz was caging on the double-drum the morning of May 2, pulling muck from pockets on 4200 and 5600.

Shift boss Virgil Bebb distributed self-rescuers, but nobody was having much luck getting them to do the job. One miner rammed his against a coupling to activate the breather.

“I
want
to get this thing working,” another said, as though the force of his will would make it operate.

Seeing this, Johnson got up, his movements slower than the usual quick deliberation he gave to everything. He yelled at the men to get moving and not stop for anything. He told Dusty Rhoads and Arnold Anderson to get down to 3400 and he'd give them the go-ahead to turn off a pair of 150-horsepower fans used to boost the ventilation system. It occurred to Johnson that the fans might be making things far worse—pushing bad air into the mine.

Only two—Mitchell and Peterson—knew the way out to the Jewell. Dennis Clapp had worked at Sunshine for a couple of years and had never before set foot on 3100. Speedy Gonzalez passed a wet T-shirt to Peterson to plaster over his mouth and nose until he could get his self-rescuer working. Peterson stared blankly at the cylinder with the nose pinchers, mouthpiece, and flimsy head straps.
This is a piece of crap. They are all pieces of crap.
He scuttled it to the floor. Peterson was jacked up and anxious to get out of the mine.

“Forget these fucking things! Let's go!”

The men below 3100 continued their frantic calls for a cage. Each was answered, but one thing wasn't disclosed. The trapped men thought they were talking to the 10-Shaft hoistman on 3100—the man who could get them out of there. Instead, the suggestion to crack open an air pipe and build barricades came from a foreman on the surface.

“Hang on, help is on the way,” he said.

Castaneda stayed on the overloaded party line. As frenetic overlapping voices taxed his comprehension, it hit him hard that miners in the deepest levels where smoke was not as severe were almost apologetic when asking for help.

“Yeah, I know you have a job to do,” one coughed into the phone. “But I want you to know we're down here.”

By then the hoist room on 3100 had been silent for what seemed like hours but was more a matter of seconds or minutes. Castaneda refused to think the worst—that the hoistman was dead. Maybe he'd passed out and another was on his way.

A moment later, Castaneda heard Dusty Rhoads's voice break the silence. From 3400, on the mission to turn off the fans, he said that Arnold Anderson had passed out. Gene Johnson answered, and the instructions he gave should have clued in everyone to how serious things had become.

“Don't wait,” he told Rhoads. “You just better get out of there.”

12:23
P.M.,
M
AY
2
3100 Level

F
EAR CAN PARALYZE.
I
T CAN MAKE A MAN COWER LIKE A KICKED
dog as he gives in to terror. Occasionally it leads men to actions they would never, ever disclose. Cowardice in battle is written about only by someone other than the man who ran. Terror can also jolt a man and transform him into something greater.

Cage tender Peterson was as anxious as he'd been in Vietnam, when mortars hurtled right at him in streaks of white, only to hit another soldier, sending fireworks and chunky blood raining down. As he led men through the drift, his eyes burned and his lungs convulsed as though they were skirmishing inside his tightening chest—as if there was no room to hold all his vital organs. Peterson had suffered from asthma since childhood, a mild form that precluded running as a sport or pastime. At that terrible moment, his asthma made sifting oxygen from the black air nearly impossible. The only thing that kept the twenty-three-year-old from giving in to the smoke that was waging war against his respiratory system was that he believed if he didn't lead them out, they'd all die. He didn't think of his family, of any regrets he had or what he wished he'd done in the event that his own life would end right there. His only concern was the other lives on the line three thousand feet underground.

Just a little longer,
he thought.
If I can only hold on a little longer. These are my guys.

Things were deteriorating with a suddenness that scared the hell out of the men on 5000. Smoke turned opaque. Men were gagging, and nobody knew how to work the self-rescuers, which had been locked in a bright orange cabinet on the station wall. Darol Anderson, the timberman working with Delmar Kitchen, raced to the box, busted it open, and, despite the smoke, somehow read the instructions. The plunger that activated the unit by breaking a protective seal, however, proved formidable. Anderson used his wrench to smash open the seal.

Anderson scooped up self-rescuers and passed them out. Markve was so unfamiliar with the units that when the canister cover fell onto the track, he took his lamp off to look for it. He thought that the protective cover was the self-rescue unit itself.

Kitchen kept his teeth clamped on his mouthpiece and helped others smack their self-rescuers into working.

The men on 5000 were blind. It was so dark, one man pressed his palm into the shaft to feel the steel gate of the cage—in case it was there and no one could see it. The smoke moved in a circle, following the airflow of the drift. It skirted over the grizzly, leaving the air there, approximately forty feet from the station, halfway clear.

Men huddled in the grizzly, sunken below track level, and let a whiz-bang discharge fresh air over them.

“Come over here! At least we have a little air,” one called over to the station, where the smoke continued to build. None went over. They were paralyzed.

12:25
P.M.,
M
AY
2

5000 Level

W
HEN THE CAGE CAME, IT WAS SO SUDDEN AND FULL THAT
Delmar Kitchen didn't make it in time to get a spot on board, though he was right behind his partner, Darol Anderson, who had. It was impossible to see exactly how many were on board, but it appeared to be about ten men. Another couple could be shoehorned inside, if not for the muck pile that consumed a back corner. Kitchen stood on the station and worried about his father, Elmer, and his brother, Dewellyn. He hoped they were already out of the mine.

Cager Greg Dionne held a rag over his mouth and nose, and was making a move to bell the men up.

“You're going with me,” Anderson yelled at Kitchen.

Kitchen took a couple of steps back. “I'll wait here. I'll catch the next one.”

“I'm not leaving you. Jump. Jump aboard.
Now!”

Anderson held out his arms and scooped up his partner. Another miner frantically pushed some muck to the side to try to improve Kitchen's footing, but the effort proved futile. Somehow, as Dionne belled the cage up, Anderson kept his arms around Kitchen. Kitchen flailed and grabbed for a railing. With no room for his heels, most of his weight remained on his toes. He caught a rail and hung on. The cage screamed up the shaft so fast that some thought it was going at muck speed. Even in the dimness of the cage, Kitchen could see that another miner was having trouble.

“Can I have a bite of that thing you got in your mouth?” he said.

Though it was risky, considering his precarious balancing act, Kitchen removed his mouthpiece and the other miner took a long drag. Seeing this, Anderson offered his self-rescuer to another young miner while he held his breath. At about the 3550 level, there was a sudden burst of fresh air. Good, cool, fresh air. It was as if they'd all been underwater and suddenly, when they'd thought they might drown, they broke through the surface.

“Thank God, we have some air!” a man called out. Relief was more powerful than fear. For a moment the men thought the worst was over. But in another flash, the smoke returned.

A
CE
R
ILEY WAS CONFUSED BY THE SOURCE OF SOME SMOKE.
A
T FIRST
he thought the pig, or jackleg's oil reservoir, was throwing too much oil, but his partner, Joe Armijo, disagreed and the two even argued for a moment what it could be. Armijo, thirty-eight, was more than a partner; he and Riley were drinking and hunting buddies. The son of Mexican immigrants, Armijo was both tough and stubborn. He had reason to be. Beyond the rigors of a tramp miner's life, moving from the Coeur d'Alenes down to a gold mine in Nicaragua and back, he had an additional burden. His wife, Delores, was emotionally unstable. His home life was a living hell. One time he told Riley about an incident that had occurred en route to a doctor.

“She jumped out of the car and ran to the police station. Said I was kidnapping her. They damn near arrested me.”

Riley counted his own lucky stars.
No man should put up with that,
he thought.

When warned about the fire Tuesday afternoon, Riley was somewhat indifferent. There'd been other fires, and using past experience as a gauge, he figured they'd sit around the station and yak until all the hubbub and smoke cleared. Gyppos didn't have a minute to waste. Every moment was spent working to make money. Coffee breaks and jawing over lunch at the station was for the day's-pay guys. Even when an Idaho mine inspector came through and wanted to talk, a typical gyppo would turn a deaf ear and get back to work. Short of cutting off his air supply, no real gyppo would stop to talk to anyone. Keep blasting, breaking rock, and planning the next round—all the way to the bank. If they had saved, which most didn't, their bank accounts would be flush. In the best of times, up into the early 1970s, the best gyppo miner made upwards of $50,000 a year.

Ace Riley gathered up his cigarettes and looked down the drift. He was overwhelmed by how thick the smoke had grown. It had a strange golden or yellowish cast and smelled a little of sulfur. It was more extreme than anything he'd ever seen underground. When he and Armijo got to the station, someone directed them to respirators stored off the station by the waste dump. Riley's mind was so fogged from the carbon monoxide that at first he thought the nose clip was the part that delivered good air. And like the rest of the men, he struggled to push down the button so that the unit could perform its lifesaving task. He beat it against the corner of a wooden box. He put in the mouthpiece and drew a breath. Nearly instantly, he felt better. He found himself thinking,
This ain't so bad. I could go on all day like this if I had to.
He didn't know that the BM-1447 self-rescuers were only good for about a half hour.

Not everyone was doing quite so well. Norman Fee, the son of Kellogg High School teacher Elizabeth Fee, braced himself on the station's concrete and steel-plate floor. Fee, twenty-seven, was one of those who could have pursued another career, and was in fact close to earning a college degree. He faced the shaft head-on as the column of smoke spilled a fetid, inky cloud into the drift. He wore a BM-1447 around his neck, but the mouthpiece dangled. Over the next few minutes, different miners picked it up from the floor and shoved it back into his mouth, but it never stayed put. Nearly delirious and weak from the poisoned air, Fee could only mutter that the mouthpiece was too hot to take. His eyes had rolled back, and whenever he looked upward, they were half-moons. The force of his guttural coughing seemed strong enough to turn his lungs inside out. On all fours, Norman Fee waited like a dying dog at the opening of the shaft, waiting for someone to come.