| Blast Off |
[Jul. 1st, 2004|01:01 am] |
When I started working with Pat’s crew full time, all we did was muck. When we got to that small platform, rubble and debris greeted us. Then we snatched up those miserable shovels and went to work. It was some of the longest eight hours of my life.
I never actually saw a blast, or even the drilling that precipitated it. Only the mucking. That changed about a week later.
The side tunnel -- now called “Shadow Lawn” for some strange reason -- was about 24 feet deep when we arrived for our shift. Darnell, Willie, Stu, Samora and I all groused before going down the shaft. The upshot was, if it was another day of hand-mucking, we were going to strangle someone. Why was it that we did all the heavy lifting, while the day shift got all the fun of blasting?
(Shadow Lawn is about 18,500 feet down the main tunnel, or a 30 minute ride on the loci).
After an uneventful ride to shadow lawn, we arrive to a strange scene for the uninitiated. A blasting mat has been lowered over the side tunnel entrance. It is maybe a 20-foot square, weaved in a tight mesh with the type of industrial strength cable you might see running from a telephone or electrical pole into the ground. Behind the mat, in the side tunnel, the wall is crisscrossed with what appears to be tangle of yellow wire.
I move closer to the rock face. Each wire runs into a hole, where it disappears behind packed red clay. The yellow wire, I learn, is actually a blasting cord. It’s a hollow plastic tube, filled with gun powder. The cord traces through the clay, past four sticks of dynamite, to the blasting cap which is jammed into a fifth and final stick of “powder.”
And there are 36 more holes just like that one. I stand four feet from nearly 300 pounds of explosives all set to pop, and that reptilian fight or flight center of my brain lights up. It’s telling me to get my fat ass outta there.
Before I can turn tail and run, Pat waves me over.
“This is going to be your first blast, isn’t it,” he asks with a shit-eating grin on his face. “This is the best part. I love this shit man.”
I smile too. Despite my unease, I’m looking forward to the show. I wonder if I’ll see flying rock or flames or a huge fire ball billow out of the small tunnel.
Pat points to the loads.
“See those holes? They’re all loaded with powder, then they’re packed with what’s called a clay dummy. That keeps the blast in the rock, so it don’t shoot out like a cannon,” He pauses, and looks to me for some sign that I understand. I nod.
“Okay,” he continues. Then he points to a larger hole in the center. It is three-inches in diameter. The others are all about an inch wide. “See that hole? That’s the burn hole. We leave that one empty. There’s only two holes that we don’t load, the burn and the probe. The burn is there to give the blast somewhere to go.”
He points to the four smaller holes that surround the burn. Two are about six inches above and below the burn, and the other two are on either side, also six inches away.
He points to the top hole directly above the burn. “This one here is the first one to go. It’s on a quarter millisecond fuse. When it goes, it’s going to take out this top part.” He pushed his hand down from the top hole to the burn.
Then he pointed to the bottom hole. “This one is on a three-quarter millisecond fuse. It’ll take out all this above it,” he said before pointing to the holes on either side of the burn. “Then these two will go. They’re a one and two millisecond delay. So basically what’s going to happen, is we’re going to widen this burn hole little by little as the blast goes. After these first four go, then the next circle of six goes. First those on top which are threes, then those on the bottom, the fours. Then the fives and sixes, and so on. The last round to go are those bottom holes, the lifters. They’re 12’s and 13’s. What they do is lift all the muck so we can get it out or else it would all pack down at the bottom.”
I nod my head, but Pat, perhaps sensing that I’m overwhelmed by all the data, waves his hand. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll learn all this shit soon enough. You’ll be an explosives expert when I’m through with you.”
Pat picks up a three-foot piece of pink “det cord.” The det cord is a little different than the yellow tubing. The det cord is loaded with the same material that is in each stick of dynamite. Pat tells me the military has used it to clear a landing zone in heavily wooded areas in desperate times.
“Just wrap this stuff around a tree four or five times and boom, it’s down. Ever see, ‘We Were Soldiers Once?’”
I nodded.
“Remember that part when they blew up all those trees to make the LZ? That was det cord. Same stuff.”
Pat ties in all the yellow cords that lead from the hole to the piece of det cord. As he double checks all the connections, Willie and Darnell run out a large spool of the yellow tubing out of the hole an about 100 yards down the main tunnel.
I prefer not to linger by the high explosives, so I follow Willie and Darnell. Pat emerges shortly after. He cuts the cord from the spool with a box cutting knife, then cuts again so that he holds a 10-inch section in his hand. He blows into one end, and a thin cloud of powder wisps then disappears in the dim.
“You always want to cut off a piece and blow it out to make sure there’s powder in it.”
He produces a plunger from an inside pocket of his grimy coveralls. He tells the loci operator to sound the five minute warning. Five long blasts on the horn. Then he jams the cut end of the yellow blasting wire into the plunger.
Darnell and Samora make idle banter. Willie absently smokes one of his menthol cigarettes. Stu is futzing with his spud wrench. Just another day in the tunnel for these guys.
Pat signals to the loci operator. “One minute,” he shouts. Five shorts blasts on the horn.
Pat waves me over. He places a small caliber shell in the chamber of the plunger. It looks a lot like the blanks starters use in their pistols for track meets. He gingerly covers the primed plunger with small disk, then sets the whole thing on the ground.
He makes a stomping motion with his foot while pointing at the plunger. He waves for me to do the same. I step over, fearing what I don’t know.
“Fire in the hole!!” Pat shouts, then waves for me to do the honors.
I look back at the others. The idle banter has ended. Although all are wearing earplugs, they have their fingers in their ears. Stu’s mouth is hanging open. He later explained that his dad was with an artillery unit in the army, and opening your mouth a little helps block the ear canal.
I look back down to the plunger. Pat waves again, more insistent this time. Afraid of not stepping on it hard enough, I stamp on the damn thing as hard as I can. I put all 230 pounds into it, and whatever strength I have in my right leg.
The small pop of the starter pistol round, then mazeltov.
A series of concussive explosions. A cloud of dust. A steady rumble in my chest that bounces on my sternum. Pat’s grin is ear to ear. So is mine. The explosions go on for maybe five seconds. After the final blast, he points to his eyes with two fingers of his right hand, then points behind me.
I turn around to see the shockwaves of the blast. The mist and dust of the tunnel pulses away with each blast. Instantaneously the tunnel is crystal clear then just as suddenly the haze returns. The shockwaves continue down the tunnel, well beyond our vision, to the head where the queen bee lies. The waves rebound from the head, and return our way. We feel the blast all over again. The pulsing haze washes over us.
The shockwaves go the other way too. They reach the shaft, and rebound again. They lack the same chest thumping power, but you feel and see them just the same. From that first pop to the final dull shockwave, maybe a minute or two has passed.
I turn to Pat. “I wanna’ do that again.”
He laughed. “I love that. I fuckin’ love it. Best part of the job.”
“That never gets old, does it?”
“Never,” he says. |
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| Scale Back |
[Jun. 30th, 2004|03:39 am] |
After dodging a few errant rocks, I took it upon myself to do the scaling.
Once we blast a round, Willie goes into the tunnel, which is still heavy with fumes and dust from the explosion, and hoses it all down. He rinses the rock walls of any dust and grime. I cannot be certain of the reason, because I did not ask and he has not told. I suspect it is merely to expose the rock face and any fissures that were created by the earth rattling explosion.
Following the rinse, Darnell hauls ass in there with the Bobcat and “mucks out” about 60 tons of debris. It takes Darnell about an hour or so move that much muck out of our way, dropping it all through a small trap door in the platform into muck cars waiting below. A normal human being in that Bobcat would get the same job done in twice the time.
In fact Darnell is so good with the Bobcat, or “the machine” as we have come to call it, he missed a two-dollar raise when a loci operator position opened up. It killed Pat to pass him up, but he didn’t have an option. No one else can run that Bobcat better, and taking him off it to run gopher missions up and down the main tunnel would have been an incredible misappropriation of a valuable resource.
Once Darnell is finished, Willie maps out the rock face, first marking the center point with pink fluorescent spray paint. He then spirals out 30-odd more marks, indicating all the six-foot holes we need to drill.
Early on, I noticed that Stu typically assisted Willie during this task, and usually “scaled back” the rock as he did so. Scaling back the rock is a fairly simple process. After a blast, there are often loose chunks of rock that didn’t fall in the explosion. Some of it hangs from the walls, waiting for the slightest nudge to send on gravity’s way. Others are well disguised a solid rock.
I watched Stu when he did it. He pulled out his hammer, and beat on the rock until chunks started flying. Then he’d stop, eyeball the wall some more, then work that hammer again. (Stu is the only member of the crew with a hammer. It has been widely used by everyone, including myself, for tightening air and water lines then loosening them later. During a moment of frustration, Stu snapped at Samora when he asked to use the hammer: “When are you going to get your own goddamned hammer.” Samora froze, but his smile never left. He didn’t answer. He just held the joint of an air line coupling that was only hand-tight. Stu handed him the hammer, then Darnell spoke up. “As soon as you lose yours.” Samora laughed as hammered the coupling tight, saying, “Yeah, Stu. As soon as you loose yours, Okay?”)
Anyway, Stu was bumped to loci operator, which basically removed him, the lead miner, from the crew. That left me in his place. Let me just say the difference between the capability level of a lead miner and FNG like myself is the difference between a Ferrari and a Dautson.
The first couple of days, no one picked up the scaling duties Stu left behind when he jumped on the loci. So I thought I’d give it a whirl.
While Willie was busy with his tape measure and spray paint, I pulled out my spud wrench and started hammering on the walls. I had no idea what I was looking for, but it became fairly obvious. Hammering on the wall, is like trying to knock the planet off its axis of rotation. It is the ultimate immovable object. Then you come to a dead spot. The loose rock. That’s the stuff that needs to come down.
Want to know the difference between solid rock and loose rock? Take a butter knife outside and try stabbing the sidewalk. Now try it on a bathroom tile. You know the sidewalk isn’t going anywhere, but that tile might crack if you beat it enough. The sound is different too. And that’s the difference in the tunnel walls.
So I beat on that hollow spot a few more times, and, holy shit, a crack forms. I hammer on a few more times, and the crack grows wider. I jab the pointed end of my wrench in there and pry at the rock. Then a slab about four or five feet long breaks off, and safely slides down the wall.
Honestly, I enjoy doing it. I enjoy making the tunnel safer no matter how tired my arms and shoulders get from prying at all the cracks and crannies. Finally, I feel like I’m contributing. But it’s frustrating at the same time. At one point of my trial by fire in the learning process I said to myself: “Why the hell is the Fucking New Guy doing this shit? I don’t know what the fuck I’m looking at.”
No one was there to hear me. Willie had long since finished mapping the drill holes and the closest human was about 100 feet away. But I kept at it until my arms ached from all the hammering and prying. But the walls and ceiling were clean. I didn’t have to worry about dodging any more rocks.
Since I started the scaling, I haven’t seen any more rocks fall from above. I don’t mean to come off as “Super Miner.” I just think all it took was someone to take the time to do it. I don’t need to tell you how frustrating that is. |
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| Danger, Falling Rock |
[Jun. 15th, 2004|03:32 am] |
Willie saved my ass the other day, and all of this week seemed to be a build up for something above to fall on my head or upturned face. There have been way too many close calls. I was due, I feared.
When that jackleg gets rolling, the very rock shakes. When two of them are going at the same time, the earth bucks at your feet. When I stand close enough, which is often, I feel it in the base of my skull. It rattles my medulla, and I dumbly wonder if my earplugs might shimmer from their purchase.
The rock face is no different. Loose bits of rock often tumble from the walls, most them about the size of a fist or smaller. But sometimes they come down the size of a dorm room refrigerator.
Darnell turned to me one day and said, “We got here the most dangerous mutherfuckin’ job in this here hole. I won’t fool you. This mutherfuckah is the dangerous shit. You can believe dat.”
The falling rocks, the temperamental jacklegs, the explosives... I believe dat.
I’ve fallen into a comfortable routine, nonetheless. I suppose I’ve been inoculated to the inherent dangers.
We drill. We muck, We drill some more. We muck again. We blast. Then we start all over.
Holding the drill bit in place as it tries to dance on the rock face, the fractures in the rock from the previous blast widen. I see it as it happens. As the bit catches on the rock, it suddenly jumps three inches deeper into the rock, then a slab of granite, about five feet tall and three to five inches thick, slides down the wall. Still holding the drill steel steady in my aching hands, I move my feet to the left and let the slipping rock land between my legs.
I glance up to Darnell who is running the other jackleg with Samora. He nods and reaches underneath his rain suit and produces a pack of More cigarettes. He lights up, and goes back to manning his drill with one hand, like some nonchalant bull rider.
The rock slides are fairly frequent, and they’ve become easy to avoid. There are usually indicators you see through the misty exhaust of water and oil vapor. I can’t see more than three feet in any direction when both drills are going, but I’m standing right there at the rock wall when it happens.
The mist is so thick, the drill operator can’t even see the end of the six foot drill steel. It’s part of the reason it takes two people to operate one. It gets tricky when communication becomes necessary. Samora once tried to tell me something when the drills were running. He shouted, screamed rather, in my hear. I didn’t hear a word, only a soft noise that sounded vaguely human under the relentlessly hammering drills..
It gets hairy when we have to install the rock bolts. Those go in overhead, and they give the jagged rock ceiling a little more stability.
We drill out five foot holes in rows of three, three feet apart. Then hammer in four foot long bolts that anchor the rock above us. It’s easy to dodge sliding rock in front of you, but it’s something else when it falls from above.
Willie was drilling, and I was his assistant, which called “chuck tending.”
I’ve come to hate those rock bolts more than anything else. More than climbing into the head of the Queen Bee, or even changing her snarled teeth.
First, there’s no way to install a rock bolt with getting thoroughly soaked, second, it’s downright awkward to hold that son of a bitch in place over your head, and finally it’s just plain scary.
The drill steel is hollow to allow for water to travel down the shaft in a lubricated oil mixture that prevents the bit on the tip from heating and melting on the rock. As Willie hoist the 80-pound jackleg into a full upright position, I aim the drill bit to the overhead mark. He starts the drill, and the water shoots out of the tip, gushing on the rock and raining down a torrent of water and oil. It cascades over my gloved hands, then rushes down my extended arm, under my shirt sleeve, and follows course to my armpit, down my side and back, and soaks into my pants. After one bolt I;m miserably drenched.
Once the bit starts moving, it’s near impossible for me to control. It wants to slide down the rock wall, rather than remain directly overhead. I’m standing by Willie, because you have to be shit-all stupid to stand directly beneath it. But the odd angle isn’t helping. Unaware of what I was doing, I reset my feet, and get a firm grasp of the steel then hold it in place. The steel bites, and moves an inch into the rock. Somehow, I hear Willie shout my name.
I glance to him. He nods his head to beckon me stand behind him. I slide a few steps back, and as I do so, a slab of granite, ironically the size of a rich man’s gravestone, plummets from the ceiling and craters into the precise spot I had been standing less than three seconds prior.
It fractured in three places as it hit the ground. I had to stare at it. I wanted to memorize the size and shape of it. Guess its weight like some creepy carnie at the state fair midway.
I forced my self to look back up to Willie. He nodded with a raised eyebrow. Seemed to be saying: “That’s what I’m talking about.” Samora and Darnell had the same look. All of them with a well disguised hint of fear in their eyes.
Two days later we were putting in more of those damn rock bolts. We use a different type of bit to put the bolt itself into the drilled hole. It is about six inches long, and weighs maybe 10 pounds. We got that sucker hammered in, but getting the jackleg back down to eye level, from a 13-foot ceiling is precarious.
I was helping Samora this time. He ran the drill, and I helped guide it back down to a manageable center of gravity so it wouldn’t topple over and break someone’s leg. The bit was jammed into the freshly installed rock bolt, and the jackleg took some coaxing to get back down. We shook it and beat it until it released all at once. Samora and I quickly and safely stabilized the jackleg as it hissed down from the ceiling, but I’ll be damned if that bit didn’t jiggle out of the locking chuck, bounce out of the machine and fell the last four feet onto my left cheek.
Samora and Darnell, who was standing nearby, both asked if I was all right.
“I’m fine. Let’s just finish these cocksuckers.”
Samora laughed, then giggled with his Jamaican lilt, “Oh, he’s fine he says. Okay, Charlie’s a miner now.”
On the way out after shift, Samora reached into his tool bag and wordlessly handed me a well-worn pipe wrench. I asked over the din of the outbound loci what he wanted me to do with it.
“It’s yours. You keep it. I have another, a new one.” |
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| Jackleg |
[Jun. 11th, 2004|03:47 am] |
So I’m working with Pat’s crew now while the Queen Bee grinds rock somewhere in the distance.
I nearly quit after the first round of hand-mucking. After the third day, however, I was still there, but it just got harder and harder each time. After the initial blast for the side tunnel, we had about 90 ton of muck laying around that need to be cleaned up. After clearing the trap doors in the bridge, we shoveled it into muck cars waiting below. It sucked and I wanted to die, but I got through it.
The next day the process repeated itself with one notable change. The hole was now six feet deeper than it was the day before, so the distance the muck needed to travel to those waiting muck cars was now longer.
By the third day, I was miserable. The side tunnel was by then 21 feet deep, and moving 90 tons of muck 21 feet to a four by four trap door is perhaps the most grueling work I’ve ever done. We basically had to shovel it all three times. First, Willie moved it from the main pile to a smaller one six feet behind him, then I moved that pile six more feet behind me, then Darnell moved that pile the rest of the way.
Did I mention it sucked.
There were five of us with shovels in hand for eight hours. We almost got half of it done by shift change. At one point during the all the work, Darnell gave me a long disgusted and exhausted look from the brim of his once-white greasy hard-hat and said: “You know there’s a better way to this, right? You know that, right?” It is the only time I’ve heard him bitch.
I prayed there was a better way.
The next day it was in practice.
I could see Pat was fuming on that last day of hand-mucking. He may be a little hot-blooded at times, but he is an incredibly loyal person. And the one thing he hates to do is let anyone down. I think he felt he let his crew down that day. All that hard work was something he didn’t think he should have allowed. He had to do it, but we all could see that he didn’t like it.
So he bought us beers that night, after raising a pitched fit with the tunnel superintendent after shift. The next day, the day shift hoisted a bobcat to the platform, and the handmucking all but ended there.
The same day Pat handed me a brand new tool, what miners call a “spud wrench.” It’s basically a 10-inch long crescent wrench, only the end comes to point. Most miners carry one because its utility is unsurpassed. They make good hammers when occasion calls for it, or prybars, and are used for just about anything that comes up when simple hands just aren’t enough.
Pat handed me the tool, “After three days of handmucking, I figure you’ve earned it.”
Willie was there. He laughed and said, “He got that right, Chal-lie. You’re movin’ up.”
I grabbed the wrench and held above my head both hands while chanting a high-pitched hum of some tune I remembered as a biblical hymn. Or it might have been the music that played when the Lady of the Lake raised Excaliber from glassy waters.
It had the desired effect. Pat and Willie both laughed.
Anyway, the nature of the toil changed once the bobcat got up there.
We drill, then Darnell mucks out with that bobcat, then we drill some more. Then we pack them holes with dynamite, then we blast. Then Darnell mucks out again, and the process repeats. Six feet at a time. We’re over 60 feet in now. Just 940 feet to go. Or thereabouts.
The drilling process is where the labor comes in, although you wouldn’t think so to look at it.
The drills are called “jack legs” for some unknowable reason, and I have come to hate those bastards. They weigh about 75 pounds apiece, and they have to be carried all over the place. I probably haul one or both of those cocksuckers in and out of that hole twice a shift.
There is no good way to carry it. I tried carrying it in the crooks of my arms. My biceps screamed with every step. The weight of the beast alone rose a deep bruise on the inside of my forearm. I tried carrying it over my right shoulder, and I could almost hear my clavicle creak under the pressure.
Carrying the thing is harder because it’s so damn awkward. First, the thing is extraordinarily top-heavy. Ninety percent of the weight is in the drill mechanism itself, which is about two feet long and a foot wide. To help with that weight in the drilling process, is a long prosthetic hydraulic piston, much like the monopods professional sports photographers use at big time events for their fancy lenses.
The telescopic piston is segmented into three four feet sections. It holds the weight of the machine while simultaneously driving the drill bit through the rock. All the operator has to do is keep the thing running. And there is nothing quiet about this entire unit.
There are two one-inch hoses connected to it, one water line to lubricate the drill bit as it works and one high pressure air hose that runs the machine. It is truly shocking to realize what the effect of dragging those hoses around has when you’re trying to lug that jack leg around. It’s like trying to swim with an anchor tied to one arm.
But I’m getting stronger, and it’s getting easier day by day.
When the jackleg gets going, it belts out an intense exhaust of water and oil vapor that clouds the entire tunnel. Visibility cuts to two feet or less. That exhaust also makes it impossible to wear the required safety glasses. Within seconds they’re fouled with water, grease, dirt, fog and all kinds of schmutz making visibility zero.
It’s a two-man operation running those jacklegs. The main guy runs the thing, and the support guy, me, helps guide the bit on a true path for the first several inches. That means going up front, and holding the steel as it spins wildly in your hands looking for purchase in the granite. You just hold on for dear life when it gets going, and try to keep the bouncing drill bit as close to the intended mark as possible.
I can feel the scraps of dirt and rock ricochet of my checks and forehead. Water and mud splatters into my eyes. When the drill bites, I move to the back, hold the piston down in the rocky floor with my foot. After 38 holes I feel the strain in my legs and the bottoms of my feet. Sometimes, that piston, driving the steel bit through rock, isn’t firmly anchored and it extends all at once.
It shoots out from under foot in an instant, and I thank god I wasn’t standing behind it when it happened. Darnell told me: “When that motherfuckin’ jackleg shoot out like dat, jus’ get out the damn way. You ain’t gonna’ stop it. Ain’t nothin’ gonna’ stop dat motherfucker. You seen me when dat happens. I just fuckin’ let that motherfucka go.”
There’s a danger of that piston engaging when you move it around as well. Once, Samora didn’t cut off the air supply when he went to move one, and the piston shot up all 12 feet, and threw him across the tunnel. Only his pride was injured. Darnell still gives him shit about it: “Mutherfucka. All you had to was let go. Stupid ass. Shee-it.”
I’ve heard stories about broken arms and cheek bones and twisted knees and sore ankles. I believe them all.
Before the drilling begins, Willie measures the center point in the tunnel and marks it with fluorescent spray paint. This will become the “burn hole.” Around it are four more holes. Around them are six more. And around them are 10 others. Then the perimeter of the tunnel is marked with about two feet between each mark. At the bottom are five evenly spaced holes, called “lifters”. The last hole drilled is called the “probe.”
Stu explained this probe hole is unlike any of the others in that it goes 12 feet, not six feet like the others. This is so we know “we’re not blasting into some underground lake.”
The burn hole is also different. It is three inches in diameter, not an inch-and-a-half like the others. Only the burn and the probe are not packed with explosives when blasting time comes.
That’s the fun part, watching that kind of mayhem ensue. Unfortunately we only get that kind of fun once a day at best.
The rest of it is wrestling with that jackleg. Holding that spinning steel in place long enough for it find a home, hoping your gloves hold out just a bit longer.
The other day, I wore the wrong king of gloves. They were cotton, which I prefer because they breathe better than the heavy duty rubber ones. But cotton, much like flesh, doesn’t hold up to spinning steel too well.
After the third hole, the steel tore open the glove on my left hand at the middle finger. Then two more fingers tore loose by the next hole. After that the right glove began to fail. Soon all 10 fingers were poking out of my gloves like I was a cockney beggar in an old movie. Then the pads at the heels of my palms wore out.
The only thing left was skin. I wanted to avoid tearing that so I switched my right glove to my left hand and vice versa, wearing the torn side on top. the ploy certainly didn’t hurt, but it didn’t help much either. By the last hole my gloves looked like the rock wall.
We drilled 38 holes, and my gloves were no better off. I am happy to report that my hands did survive. A little worse for wear, but no new scars to speak of. |
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| He ain't heavy ... |
[Jun. 10th, 2004|02:13 am] |
It’s been awhile since I worked on the Queen Bee with all the other drones, and I honestly don’t know how I feel about it.
On one hand, I was tempted to join all the other troglodytes by the filthy lucre that a TBM operator earns. It’s somewhere in the ballpark of 25 bucks an hour. Factor in overtime, and that could be about 90 grand a year. But the training process would be long. I knew that going in.
But it’s hard to train when you’re not within 5,000 feet of the control room. Granted, I’m not exactly doing what I was led to believe, but I think I prefer the change.
Working on the TBM was difficult for many reasons, but No. 1 on the list is my problem with Spanish. I took two years of Spanish in high school, then four semesters of it in college. You’d think I would have learned some of it during that time.
About all I can manage is ordering a cheeseburger and a beer. (Hamberguesa con queso y una cerveza, por favor.) Not real helpful when some Mexican dude is chirping for the acetylene torch and a six-inch bolt in his native tongue.
The other big problem came when the government stuck its nose up our end of shangri la. Just as I was beginning to figure shit out, half the crew was deported. I was back at square one in the credibility department, and the operator I was to train with was bumped up to Walking Boss. So a new operator was brought in, and that left me in the lurch.
On top of everything else, there was a good week where the Queen Bee rarely ran. There were recurring power problems, snapping conveyor belts, and who knows what else.
The icing on top of the cake was the loss of Pat’s Lead Miner, Stu, the Bostonian. His four-month old son came down with some strange virus, and the little guy spent three or four days under an oxygen tent in the ICU wing of the hospital. That left Pat’s crew a man short, and because there was little use of me up on the machine, I began working with Pat’s crew.
That was two weeks ago, and I haven’t glimpsed the machine since.
I prefer Pat’s crew to the others, if no other reason than we all speak the same language, even if it is a different dialect. His crew is almost a movie cliché.
First there’s Pat, the cranky boss man, who prefers to chew ass and ask questions later. He’s a screamer, And I giggle internally every time he plays the hard ass, because I know better. We’ve been friends since high school,, so it’s difficult for me to take him that seriously. He’s the boss, and I do as he says, but that tough guy routine is lost on me. I think he knows it, because he hasn’t tried it on me yet. I say yet because, it might be because I’m too new to get an ass chewing. I’m just too inexperienced to know better when something isn’t done to his standards.
Then there’s Samora, 27, Pat’s polar opposite. Everyone needs a guy like Samora around the workplace. Always upbeat, always smiling. Always goofing around. It’s tough sometimes to understand his humor because of a heavy Jamaican accent. He’s just a happy guy. Technically, he’s the mechanic on the crew. So if something breaks, it’s his job to fix it.
Samora apparently worships our bobcat operator, Darnell, who is the sleeping giant of the crew, and is rarely without Samora in tow. I think Samora is just an enjoyable person to be around, and I’d bet that no one would disagree with that. It’s a running joke with the guys that Samora and Darnell are one happy couple. Samora grins “like school girl” (as Stu put it) when the jokes about them fly. Darnell, just shakes his head, if he gives any indication that he heard the crack in the first place.
Darnell has a quiet way about him. He takes orders with either a “yessir” or no words at all. So when he does speak, I tend to listen very carefully. He’s a big guy, and seems to carry a lot of hard years on his shoulders. He looks like the type of guy with the wherewithal to really ruin your day if he chose to do it. He would rather not expend the energy. Stu once told me, when I groused about the condition of my car, Darnell might know a guy who could “make a car disappear.” When I got to know Darnell a little better, he told me of the four years he spent in prison. Pat tells me he’s on his way to shift or even walking boss sometime soon. He has a lifetime of experience in construction, and his plans, as far as I know, are remarkably simple yet elegant. Raise his kids to know what work is, save money, but a couple apt. units and retire early. He’d spend his days riding a mower, probably smoking one his More cigarettes and maybe a beer in one hand. Or maybe a Pepsi. I don’t even know if he drinks.
Stu on the other hand, is quite the drinker. He draws a distinction between an alcoholic and a drunk. “Alcoholics beat their women and go to meetings. Me, I’m a happy drunk.” An admitted drug addict (“you name it, I did it”), Stu is probably the most capable miner of the entire crew, pound for pound. I may have painted an unflattering image of Stu in recent posts, but he has it all figured out. There isn’t a person down there who hasn’t taught me more about what I’m doing or supposed to do than Stu, plain and simple. Whether it’s with the mucksticks (Work smart, not hard Charlie) or using the right type of earplugs (the red ones suck. The yellow ones are better), he’s taught me something new every time I’ve been down there with him. I can’t say the same for anyone else, although Samora is a close second. My healthy respect of Stu’s abilities led me to wonder why he wasn’t the shift boss, and Pat told me he probably will be on the next job. Pat also told me that he has been in the position before. He may not like the management role, but I’m just guessing.
Instead, the shift boss role goes to Willie, a 47-year-old, steam engine. The man’s endurance is incredible. I have gone on at length about his shovel work. Stu once joked to Willie, while both were pissed at Pat for some reason, “I’ll knock him on the head, and you could have him buried in 30 seconds with the way you shovel, Willie.” Willie’s not a bad boss. No one works harder than he does. I want to be critical of Willie here, but I’m having hard time at it just now. I’ve heard complaints that he’s not all too bright. Maybe, but I don't know. He sure knows a helluva lot more about his shit than I do. His locker is right next to mine in the dry house. So before and after every shift He has always offered some form of encouragement. I guess I didn’t realize it until just now, but I don't know if I would still be doing the job if he hadn’t.
I have a lot of respect for all these guys, and thinking anything negative, much less publishing it, makes me wince.
I can’t do it.
All these guys have been looking out for me since day one. Maybe I want to return the favor.
I’d run through a brick wall for any of them if needed. At least I’d give it one good try. I’m beginning to understand why miners calls each other “brother.” |
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| Odds and Ends, Pt. II |
[Jun. 4th, 2004|01:28 am] |
Me vs. Them???
Stu was probably the first to engage me personally since I've been here. Recently he started a conversation that was just plain obscene. It involved a girl he once knew and the various things he liked to do with and to her. Most of it involved her anus. I'm not making a judgment here, but that was a conversation I was never very interested in. In high school it was the same way. Some guys liked to talk about it, others didn't. In high school I was never the experienced one, so I had nothing much to speak of anyway. I don't know, maybe that carried over. I do know that the whole time he was talking about giving this girl the business, I marveled at the lights. Perhaps I'm weird, but it was fascinating to me to see the same principle that causes the bright colors of a sunset has the same effect on the lights. The lights are spaced about 20-30 feet apart, and the stretch off into the distance in a long row of perfect whit light. But as they go further and further in the distance, they yellow, and farther still they glow a touch orange, until at the furthest point you can just make out a dull red. But it's not just the lights. I'm captivated by the water rushing out of the walls, wondering at the streaks rust in some places; the odd sound of the echo during a quite moment; at the very engineering of things like rock bolts and Hilti bolts; the perfectness of the tube we stand in; how the conveyor works with system of switchbacks; the strength and mass of the cutters, and the awe of seeing them torn apart; the general self-sufficiency and competence of everyone down there. I's not uncommon to see a man drive a loci, hop off, operate a bobcat or excavator machine (or both), find something broken, cut it with the acetylene torch, then weld it back together before futzing with a power transformer, and get into the guts of a complex power tool and fix that. Then, the same guy will repair a break in the water line, which I must point out is a major pain in the ass, then rig 300 pounds of explosives for blast off. And that's the tip of the ice berg.
Anyway, those are things I often think about down there. I wonder if they all did when they started out. They talk about the things they talk about, and I nod and say "no shit" at all the right places, but I'm somewhere else.
...
Fact check
There are few points to clarify. I think I may have misled on a few facts.
First of all, the Queen Bee is 100 yards long, all told. It will grind through 60 feet of rock if running all eight hours of a shift. That, however, is uncommon. There are many interruptions, with repairs and maintenance. about 30-40 feet per shift is about average. Pat told me the world record for tunneled feet in a 24-hour period is just over 200 feet. Another point I goofed on is the voltage that runs through the main power cable. It is 13,800 volts, not 30,500. And finally, the side tunnel we've been mucking the last several days (See: Willie's Silver Hammers), is a 13x9 horseshoe.
...
Steam Tunnel
While the temperature in the head of the beast is indeed ungodly, virtually everywhere else is cool. Maybe 70 degrees or lower. It's cool enough in there to see your breath sometimes. You dont notice the chill until you work up a good sweat, and then it feels nice. When we were hand mucking last week, I noticed during my rest breaks, steam billowed from my shoulders, arms, and head. It swirled in the light of my mining lamp.
...
Hand Job
When I signed on for this job, I fully anticipated the sore arms and back. What totally surprised me, is the sore hands. They ache and feel swollen and ungainly. The mucksticks are normal shovels, but cut in half. Most have a handle, but some don't. I found that gripping one of those bastards wore my hands out before my back or arms tired. We haven't hand-mucked in almost a week now, and my hands still hurt.
...
Such Language
For some strange reason, I've been trying to limit the amount of cussing I do on a daily basis. It's some stupid thing I try to every couple of years. I was in the process of doing that when I still worked as a sports writer. Trying it in the hole is going to be tough. Some people say "um" or "uh" between words. Miners typically use "motherfucker" "goddamn" or "fucking."
For instance: "Motherfuckin' Willie better fuckin' goddamn get that fuckin' motherfuckin' jackleg up on there. I ain't fuckin' around with his motherfuckin' ass. Shee-it."
I can't quote any of the Mexicans and their particular parlance, but a common utterance among them is: "Puta Shit!" |
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| The rocks in Iraq |
[Jun. 2nd, 2004|01:01 am] |
I now know two guys who are willing to go to Iraq. They don't intend to play army man and "defend our freedom." Their reason is the great American Way: Capitalism.
There's a lot of money to be made in Iraq. At a minimum, a tunnel worker there can expect to make 180,000 yankee dollars a year. That's just the bare bones. Include overtime, a better grade for various levels of competence and skills, and a miner could clear a quarter million in 12 months. After five years in that shithole a feller could walk out a millionaire. Of course, its the only place in the world where you'd actually be safer working in the tunnel.
Samora, the Jamaican and Darnell, Pat's loci/bobcat operator, are both talking about making the trip. They both say they're going to wait a year before shipping out, let things cool off before they quite literally risk their necks for the almighty dollar.
At least Darnell has a plan. A husband and father of two, a 9-y/o boy and 15-y/o girl, he plans to sock away all that money, invest in a few apartment buildings, which is to say basically retire by the time he's 47 (five years). Samora's plan is, well, Jamaican. Make a whole lotta' money mon, a million dollars.
I asked them if I could have their earnings when their heads are sent back in their pie cans. They laughed. I added: "No, seriously, you probably wouldn't get decapitated. I'd say the odds are against it. Maybe 1 in 100 that you get yourself killed. That's good enough, right? Better than Powerball at any rate."
It is a temptation, however. That's a whole boatload of dough, and you just know you wouldn't be able to spend much of it while you're over there. Exactly who is that idiot American who's going to go out for a night on the town in Baghdad? Who is that guy?
No, I think it would basically be wake up, pray you don't get blown up on the way to work, work, pray you don't get kidnapped then ritualistically executed on the way home, sleep, and repeat. Doesn't sound like much fun.... but a million bucks is a million bucks is million bucks.
The college degree means about as much as the lint ball in my belly button right now. As far as I know, I'm the only one in that hole with one of those worthless pieces of paper, and until I arrived here, all of them were kicking my ass in the paycheck department. All own homes and nice cars. Shit, a few have portfolios.
And then there are two. The ones who could be millionaires before 2010.
I wish I knew that before I took my SAT. |
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| Odds and Ends |
[May. 31st, 2004|05:54 pm] |
When I began this, the intent was to go in a chronology of my transformation from a small town sports writer to a tunnel miner. I realize that I tend to jump back and forth quite a bit in the telling of just one simple tale.
In the course of flying down tangents, I tend to neglect a few elements which I initially intended to include. Below are some of those misplaced items.
...
Accidents
There have been two incidents since I’ve been working here. The first happened topside when someone went to check the radiator without due caution. As soon as he opened the cap, hot radiator fluid spewed onto his face causing serious burns.
The other happened on the TBM, while I was working with Pat’s crew. An inspector (quality control guys who just sit back and watch fro mistakes) suffered what we thought at the time was a heart attack.
We were about 1,000 feet from the TBM at the time and in the process of building that solid steel bridge. All of our equipment supplies and building material blocked the tracks, so it was going to make transporting the stricken man out that much more difficult. It meant we had to carry the man over 30 yards of tricky footing to another waiting loci. From there his journey was another 30 minutes to the shaft. I assume he was raised out of the shaft by the basket.
When the TBM loci arrived, the man was still conscious, although his legs buckled and bowed like a new born calf. The right side of face sloped in a downward slur, indicating to me that this was no heart attack, but rather a stroke. Four men silently helped him 30 yards to the other loci, and in a matter of minutes he was headed down the tunnel.
Pat said when he first met up with him at the TBM, he was totally incoherent and virtually unconscious. Pat said once they switched trains and were about 15 minutes from the shaft, he came to. “He pulled out a cigarette and started smoking on the way out.”
We found out later that was indeed a stroke, and that he would be okay. I had met the man the day before. Pat introduced him as his “first walker.” Then they traded jovial insults.
There were a few other accidents shortly before I arrived on the scene. Old School, the man who often works on the trailing gear of the TBM, missed several months of work with a severed fuck-you finger. One of the cutters apparently shifted as he tried to roll it through the muck. The 300 pounds of metal pinched his finger, removing it at the top knuckle. It was reattached at the hospital, but he only has limited use of it at best.
Finally, Balthazar, was basically shot while operating the right side drill. As he piloted a six-foot deep hole in the tunnel ceiling, a stray chuck of metal shot from the head, and nearly went clean through his thigh. Pat, who classified the accident as a freak occurrence, said it was like getting shot by a .45 caliber handgun. Balthazar returned to work a few days ago, manning the ride side drill.
...
Lunch time
Everyone uses a small cooler for a lunch box. Some guys haul in bigger ones, but I prefer the smaller one. I can fit a few granola bars, two bottles of water or Gatorade maybe a six-inch sandwich from Subway and a red bull in mine.
I find I prefer the fluids to food. Besides, there is no true lunch break in the tunnel. There is no whistle that shuts down the operation for a 40-minute rest.
Lunch break comes in small two-minute snatches. During a free minute, grab a nibble or two, maybe a swallow of water, then it’s back to work. Sometimes, they’re longer than that. But I have gone a few days when I never found the time to eat or drink anything at all. It’s usually then that I scarf down everything on the mantrip at the end of shift.
Using the restroom is similar. There are no restrooms, so the tunnel becomes our toilet. I have not witnessed anyone drop trou and squat, but pissing is frequent. I guess taking a shit in the tunnel is strictly an emergency situation.
...
Groupies
This may sound bizarre, but I think there is such a creature as a miner groupie.
I caught site of two of these rare creature the other night. After a particularly rough night of hand mucking, Pat offered to buy drinks for the crew.
Most of us went out, and there we bumped into the groupies. One might have looked attractive, but only after about six beers and two shots of tequila. Pat eventually scored on that one. There other was a beast.
Stu was working on her. The next day he asked what I thought about her.
I was debating between “uglier than a wind row of assholes” and some variation of the ugly stick theme when he said, “not bad, huh?”
“Yeah,” I lied, “nice.” It was all could say and maintain a straight face.
“And that was without makeup even,” Stu added.
....
White vs. Brown
One of the first things I noticed on my first day were the different helmets.
I, like many others, was issued a white hard-hat. But there were others who wore a brown hat, usually with a collection of stickers and what-not all over them. None of the white-hats had any stickers.
I found out much later that the brown hat is a status thing. Once you develop a certain amount of competence and authority, you get the brown hat.
I don’t know how the stickers work. But early on, I contemplated sticking two big red N’s, one on either side. The idea was to mimic the Nebraska Cornhuskers helmet logo. Moving into Southeastern Conference territory gave me the compelling urge.
I asked what Pat thought about this. His reply: “Do you want to get your ass kicked or something?”
Maybe I’ll wait on the red N’s.
...
Bobby’s way
Bobby, the TBM electrician, is from one of the Carolina’s. He’s got that lazy southern way of talking. Many of them do.
The accents down here is something I wasn’t prepared for. The Hispanics, the southerners, and then others like Samora, the Jamaican and Stu the Bostonian. There are maybe three people who speak with clear diction. I’m one of them.
It makes the learning process slow, but I’m catching on little by little. I spent a few hours following Bobby around as he showed me around the machine. He came to one spot, found there was something he didn’t like and decided to fix it. He jury rigged the contraption with a foot-long piece of No. 9 wire and a rag.
Then he turned to me: “There’s three ways of doin things down here. The right way, the wrong way and my way.”
Wayne the mechanic happened by as the point, took note of Bobby’s work and said, “I believe the politically correct way of describing that is Afro-engineering.”
Wayne’s from Colorado, making him one of three intelligible people down there. Pat is the third. |
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| Darkness Falls |
[May. 27th, 2004|03:31 am] |
I think it was the third day on the job when I got my miner’s light.
I was surprised by the weight of it at the time. But I soon learned there must be some minimum weight requirement for everything that goes down the hole. Nothing, I mean nothing, weighs less than 20 pounds. Including the fucking light. The red, 4-volt battery pack, which straps to the belt, doesn’t seem so ungainly at the beginning of the shift, but after two hours in the head with all those hot cutters, it felt like a 1,000 pounds tugging at your belt. I could feel the effects in my hip and ass. One monster kink was gearing up for cramp of the century, so I took the damn thing off and let it sink to the bottom of the tunnel.
It was not lost, or even notably damaged. The thing is made a whole helluva lot tougher than I ever was.
The lamp’s might is also surprising. I would equate it to one of those big mag-lites. not the wimpy two-battery jobbies, but the big honking six battery bad boy. When I was a kid and dad was a Douglas County deputy, he had one of those. I remember taking it outside to play the Jedi Knight, or light up the night sky searching for the Luftwaffe or Jap Zeroes.
I got five days of battery life out of my mining lamp before I snapped it into the communal charger. The next day it was gone. Some hillbilly fuckwad stole it. Have a nice day.
Initially I was intensely pissed off about it. I didn’t have the thing for a week, and then it was gone. By the end of the day, I was glad to be rid of the thing. The first two and half weeks on the job, I’ve been doing my best to be Johnny-on-the-spot with everything.
The only problem is that it’s hard to be Johnny-on-the-spot when you don’t know where to go or what the hell to do once you get there. Just as I’m figuring this shit out, although still physically still incapable of performing, they fire most of the crew, then a day later the Walking Boss, Primo, quits in huff.
So, now it’s just four of 11 guys from the original crew are still around and there are a bunch of new faces to whom I have to prove myself all over again. To make matters worse, Tim, the operator was promoted to walking boss, so they hired on a new operator, Jim. That guy’s already irritated me and I don’t think we’ve traded more than 12 words.
Jim likes to wear camouflage pants. That’s the first problem, but I can get past that. But what bothered me most occurred before I even knew who he was or what the hell he was doing in the hole.
After our short ride down the shaft, we jump in the mantrip which takes us through the four and a half miles of tunnel to where the Queen Bee waits. The trouble started when the loci operator didn’t crank the engine fast enough. So Jim starts yellin’ and screamin’ and throwing a pitched fit like he was missing the party.
I’ve know many people like this, usually in the lockeroom before football practice. They’re the guys who announce their arrival once the door swings on its hinges, typically with some shout or yell or screech of enthusiasm.
I never had much appreciation for that guy. I always got the impression they were trying to impress someone, or perhaps fool themselves into thinking they’re excited about the task at hand and are eager to begin. It was likesaying: Hey, get a load of me! Ain’t I a corker. I said, HEY, GET A LOAD OF ME! AIN’T I A CORKER!!”
Knock off the pretense, and get to work if that’s your thing, but don’t jump around like a complete ass and expect me to respect you for it.
Jimbo wasn’t hootin-n-hollerin on his third day, but I’ll get to that.
I went about five days without after my lamp went missing. Like I said earlier, there really isn’t much need for it on the machine. The whole tunnel is surprisingly well lit, and there’s always one or two guys with a light to help in the dark corners.
One spot where the lamp is essential is in the head itself. There are no lights in front of the machine, just solid steel baking in the dark, and the rock walls. I was barred from going forward because I lacked the light, and that suited me just fine. The last time I had gone up there was with Martin, and it nearly killed me. I wasn’t all too eager to return just yet.
So I played the gopher. “Impact,” they shout. Then I go on a wild goose chase for the impact wrench. I haul it up to the front, and there’s a problem with it. Blew a bearing. Need a another one. Where the fuck is that one?!
Find it, haul it to the front.
“Flathead screwdriver!”
Wha? Screwdriver? Why in the world would they need a screwdriver? There is nothing up front that requires anything lighter than loaded 29-gallon aquarium, and all the tools for them require two hands and miles of air hose. Asking for a screwdriver is like asking a hooker for a cuddle.
But I’m just here to follow orders. So I looked in every box I could find. I looked under them, and behind them. No hint of a screwdriver. Pat likes to call this machine a “rolling factory.” If that’s indeed the case, it is the most ill-equipped factory on the planet, because something like fucking tools are hard to come by.
I duck walk back to the front, my lower back tightening with every step on this my 30th trip (it would seem) from the trailing gear. I ask Amigo where the hell a screwdriver would be.
“Mechanic,” he says in his Mexican clip.
Great. I have to find Wayne, the same guy who, for no other reason than I was walking by, chewed my ass about his tools. “If I give you a tool,” he shouted with a pointed finger over the din of the Queen Bee, “you be god damned sure I get it back. Those are my fucking tools. I fucking paid for them.”
He gives one short, but intense nod, and stomped off. Nice to meet you too.
Now I had to seek this man out and ask him for a screwdriver.
He was attempting to repair the impact wrench with that bad bearing when I found him. It lay in five or six odd pieces, and he was staring at them like he were trying to find the corner piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
I asked for the screwdriver. He grunted, reached into his tool box, which he usually keeps locked when more than 20 feet from it, and tossed it to me. I took it up front. Ten minutes later, I was back, asking for a blowpipe. Five minutes later, a one-inch socket, the welder, the acetylene torch….. then I lost track.
Duck walking back and forth so many times, I lost track of where I was in relation the machine. Three times I stood upright a step too soon, and banged my head on the TBM. The third time was so violent it knocked me back a step. I actually removed my lid to check for blood on my forehead.
The head has 39 teeth, and the main choppers are what’s called the “quad cutter.” 35 cutters spiral inward toward the center point where the quad sits. A normal cutter weighs in at 300 pounds. That’s no shit. The quad, however, cashes in at over 900.
The problem they had this day was with the quad. At some point in the boring process, a 14-inch bolt fell loose. Then another and another. Then the whole god damned quad fell out, but not completely. It dangled there, and the head mercilessly rotated. The quad bounced around the front, until it smashed 13 different cutters, 20 so-called “bucket teeth”, and generally tore the shit out of the front of the machine.
The head weighs so much, and takes so much energy to get moving, that it can’t stop on a dime. Even in the most dire emergency, hitting the emergency stop button will not help much. It takes about two minutes before that thing runs out of inertia and stops. That’s what happened when the quad went to shit.
So Tim spent all day, eight hours, up there in a knee-deep water, fixing and fiddling. Well, that was just too fucking bad about my mining lamp, wasn’t it. Just a shame, I couldn’t go up there to help. I even tried, but Tim said no. I swear to god he actually said the words: “I prefer to work alone.” I don’t think he realized he sounded like every bad cop movie ever made.
Fine. Ride ‘em cowboy. You’re on you own.
I was more upset about the screwdriver. Tim used it as a makeshift patch for the cutter assembly. He cut it, then welded it to the beast. The screwdriver was no more, and I had to tell Wayne the good news.
“I got bad news about your screwdriver,” I said.
“The green one I gave you? You’re talking about the green one right?”
“Yeah. It’s gone. Tim cut it.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I knew that would happen. Don’t worry about them green ones. Those are the company’s. Fuck them. I don’t give shit. The shop will replace those.”
Several days later, I did get a new mining lamp. I resisted the urge to turn it down. But I was glad I had it when I did. Not two hours after the shift begin, Jimbo, the screaming the operator, “over-ampped” the TBM. A major goof.
Over-ampping the TBM, causes the whole system to trip breakers all over the place. Not just on the machine or in the tunnel, but topside as well. It takes over two hours just to reset them.
I was working with Pat’s crew when it happened. We were mucking.
Alejandro (Alex), one of the new hires, derailed the flat car, all eight wheels, on his loci about 1,000 feet down the tunnel, and Pat sent me his way to help him get it back on track. Out of sight of either the bridge where Pat’s crew toiled with the muck, and the TBM, Alex surveyed the damage while I pretended to know what the hell I was looking at.
Then the lights went out.
How many different ways has darkness been described? 150 feet below the surface, four and half miles from the nearest natural light source… yeah, it was dark.
But we had the mining lamps. No big deal, except that small tingle in the back of my neck. Every Alien rip-off move ever filmed tore through my brain. This is how bad movies start, I thought.
Then the water pipes made this horrible moaning sound. Or a creak. Rather a combination of the two. It was just plain getting creepy.
“What the hell is that?” I asked Alex, a miner with 20 years of experience.
He only laughed. “Just help me unload this flat-car. We can’t get back on without…..”
I stopped listening to Alex. There was another sound. This time I could identify it. It was the mine phones, which are spaced 1,000 feet apart. By my estimation we were smack between two of them.
A mine phone is basically a open line walkie talkie. To call someone, you hold both the button in the handset, and another button on the silver box and shout the addressee’s name. Something like: “Hello Tim! Hello Tim! Hello, hello, hello. Hello Tim!” With both buttons depressed, the phones act as a P.A. Once the other person picks up the line, only the button on the handset is used to keep the conversation more private, although anyone can pick up any one of the mine phones and listen in.
The mine phones were the only thing that still worked. When the electricity went out, it took with it the water pumps, the conveyor system and the air filtration system. All of it was bad news. Alex said it wouldn’t take long for the tunnel to flood. He had been in one that flooded 13 feet deep in a few hours. Everyone got out, he said, before then.
The air was already filling with dust and ribbons of fog.
As you would imagine, once the lights went out, the mine phones roared to life. Everyone in the tunnel wanted to talk to topside, and everyone topside wanted to talk to the Tim, the new Walker on the TBM, and Jim, his new operator. And everyone wanted to talk to Bobby, the electrician. And they all wanted to do it at the same time.
But Alex and I just threw air filter after air filter on our shoulders and stacked them as high as we dared on the back of the loci. Meanwhile, the minephones dimly sang in the background.
From where we stood, no particular voice nor what was being said was discernible. In fact it didn’t even sound human. It just made the whole scene that much more eerie. The envelope of darkness. Our beams of light hanging in the dusty air, growing thicker at every moment. Water dripped and rained and cascaded down the walls, and off the air tube overhead. It ticked on the back of my work vest and dribbled off the rim of my helmet in chocolatey milk drops.
And the phones groaned somewhere a million miles away, echoing off the curved walls until every word, every syllable lapped itself into an unintelligible tangle.
It was the most quiet moment I’ve ever had in the tunnel, although it wasn’t the first time the lights had gone out on me. The first was a completely different experience. I was in the relative comfort of the machine, my third day on the job.
No sooner had we arrived on the mantrip that the lights went out. But there are emergency lights on the TBM. I spent the time with Amigo and Jose up front at the drills eating sunflower seeds, hoping and wishing I could spend the entire day up there in the dim.
But there was no such comfort of TBM this time. Just me and Alex and a loci loaded up with fouled air filters. The 30-minute trip to the shaft felt more like an hour. As we rode the rails, we crossed through eerie wafers of fog that hung in wisps.
Eventually we rounded the last bend, and there was light. The shaft.
But that was no better. As we stood there, waiting for the power to come back on and top loader to carry up the 30 ton of muck we shoveled out earlier, I watched with mild fascination as the water rose above the toes of my boots. Then above my ankles, to my shins, my calves.
The rising water wasn’t noticeably deeper in the tunnel, because it is a slight upgrade. The water seeks its own level, and the lowest point is in the shaft. Rock from above hailed the 150 feet down the shaft, tinking our hardhats, and splashing the growing body of water.
Just before the water crested the top of boots and soaked my feet, we jumped aboard another loci, and back in. On the way, the lights unceremoniously blinked back on. The air filter whirred to life and the conveyor belted its old tune. The din returned, and we went back to work.
And Jimbo, he didn’t quite have that pep at the end of the shift. All that mess, all that lost time. It was his fault. He let the amps spike.
He did shout once.
“Man, what a shitty fucking day. Fuck!”
I was okay with that. At least he’s consistent. |
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| Willie's Silver Hammers |
[May. 25th, 2004|02:17 am] |
On Saturday, I got my first real long look at a “muckstick.” Topside they call that a shovel. Ain’t miners clever?
It wasn’t the first time Pat pulled me off the TBM to work with his crew.
The first was about a week or so ago. Pat’s crew is working about three miles in the tunnel, and I first joined them, they were building the foundations of a solid steel bridge that spans the tracks below from one wall to the other. The idea behind it is to protect the tracks, conveyer belt, water pipes, and the power line which carries something like 32,000 volts of juice from flying debris.
Once the bulwark is in place, blasting begins on a six-foot wide side tunnel that will run about 1,000 feet perpendicular to the main tunnel.
Before I took this job, I often marveled at work sites, usually driving by at 60 mph. I think you know what I’m talking about. Two guys shoveling, four guys watching. Or something like that. I have a greater understanding for it now.
What sounds a simple task, takes forever, and you can’t skip any steps to get from point A to point F. And steps B and D are one-man jobs, so everyone stands around until they’re completed, before moving on to the next step.
My first day with Pat’s crew demonstrated that.
We needed to sink 16 six-foot pieces of rebar two feet into the tunnel floor, eight on each side of the tracks. These would be the building blocks for steel girders which would become the framework of this bridge. But grabbing the sink hammer (a big rock-boring drill), and drilling away isn’t how is works.
First we needed a template. A curved hunk of metal that matched the sloping walls with holes. Those rebar poles had to be placed precisely, so we had to lug this template up and down the walls, and the god-damned thing weighed about 50 pounds. Like I said before, nothing in this hole is light.
We first had to drill four small holes in the rock, in order to bolt the template into place. That’s four holes per template, which held a pair of foot-long hollow tubes that would help guide the sink hammer on a true path.
With the template in place the real drilling begins, and that son-of-bitch rattles your teeth. The sink hammer is a lot like a jack-hammer, only with an industrial strength drill bit on one end that gushes water to keep it from melting down on the granite. It is perhaps louder, however, as the tunnel walls serve as an echo-chamber.
We drilled the holes, sank the rebar, and cemented them in place with a quick-drying epoxy. Sounds simple enough. It took us 11 hours to finish.
Less than a week ago, I was with Pat’s crew again. This time we were actually bolting into place the framework of the bridge itself, using the claw of an excavator as a makeshift crane. It hoisted precariously balanced steel girders, most of them nine or 10 feet long, and we wrestled them all into place. It took the better part of three days, before the entire bridge was complete. Decked in steel plates two inches thick, it is built to withstand the explosion of 36 sticks of dynamite.
That how many holes they drilled into the rock face above it. The holes went into the rock six feet. After they were packed with explosives, the day shift crew pulled the trigger.
Two hours later we showed up to one helluva mess. It was our job to clear out the debris. Muck work they call it. And the worst kind of muck work too. “Hand mucking.” That means grab the shovel.
We spent 11 hours down there Saturday night. Partly because I’m the new guy, but mostly because I’m fat and out of shape, I was easily the most exhausted person, and probably did half the work of anyone else, at best.
I would guess, of that 11 hours, I spent five of it shoveling small bits of rock and gravel off the platform and into muck cars waiting below. I asked Pat how much a fully loaded muck car weighs. He said just over 30 ton. We filled three of those fuckers with four shovels before I brassed out. (Brassing out is basically punching out, like a time card. Each person who goes into the hole is given two pieces of brass with a number etched on it. One of the brass disks stays on the miner, usually clipped somewhere on the helmet. The other hangs either on the “in” or “out” column on a large board topside. If there’s some kind of accident, they can look at the board and know exactly who is in the hole and who isn’t.)
The whole process was worsened by what Pat called a worst-case scenario cropping up. While every precaution had been taken to protect the conveyor belt, it wasn’t enough. The explosives tore open a larger hole than planned, dumping about 10 ton of rock on it. I was amazed that it didn’t pry loose from its anchors on the wall.
It held, but the conveyor was blocked and it needed to be cleared, or the Queen Bee wouldn’t be able to do her work on Monday. So the shoveling continued. But digging out the belt meant working in about three feet of space, between the top of the muck cars and the bottom of the bridge. There was no easy way to do it.
Pat’s shifter, Willie, reminded me of John Henry and his silver hammers. Willie got down on his knees, and worked that shovel like he was kayaking through a class 5 rapid. The pace and duration of his energy was amazing. I’d shovel for five or six minutes, and have to pause. But Willie kept going. For every breather he took, I had 10.
Pat said it best: “Willie’s 47 years old, and he’s kickin’ your ass.”
Willie shrugged it off: “That’s all right, Cha-lie. You’ll get it. It jus’ takes a rythm is all.”
I found out today that I’ll be back with Willie and his silver hammers Wednesday. The mucksticks will be waiting. |
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| Queen Bee, Pt. II |
[May. 23rd, 2004|04:21 pm] |
I got some bad news the other day.
Letters went out to all the walkers. The feds had a problem. Millions of dollars was piling up in bogus social security numbers, so HQ did a check, and many of my new Mexican friends are illegal. They got their pink slips, and I haven't seen any of them since. The ones that are left seem to be too relieved to pay the firings much heed. But it bothers me.
For starters, Tiger the shift boss, is among the victims. He was a hard worker, a "good hand" as they say. He spent a lot of time working with me, making sure I didn't kill myself or anyone else. About six times a day, he'd approach me, give me the thumbs up and ask with his spanish accent "How you doing, Carlos. Feelin' good?"
No matter what my screaming muscles told me, I always gave him my thumbs up, and he always nodded his approval before going off to the next task.
But what hurts most is the loss of Martin. Easily the hardest working guy in the whole crew. The guy was everywhere. It was my goal to match him. I believed the day I could keep up with Martin was graduation day.
The best I could do was a couple hours before I was totally wasted. That was a few days before the letters went out.
We had just finished laying a new segment of rail when the Queen Bee shuddered. Without being told, Martin headed forward, perhaps knowing what was wrong just by the sound. He pulled on his work gloves and sighed, "we go to the head."
Working forward from the rails is a duck walk, under the main beam. Above, on the upper deck's left and right, are the drills. As the Queen Bee bores her way through the rock, two drill operators sink six foot holes at 11 and 1 o'clock in the tunnel walls. Then two more at 10 and 2. Then they anchor in them rock bolts, which is basically rebar steel. The rock bolts are there to reinforce tunnel integrity, but the drills have been a problem since I've been there.
Everyday is a new probelm with them. Dwayne, the mechanic, says they’re “over-engineered.” And that all engineers are basic idiots anyway you look at it. There have been many times when the whole operation has shut down because one or both of those drills broke down. It happens at least once every shift.
One of the drill operators, Rabino, has a gold tooth. He doesn’t know my name so he calls me “friend.” I call him “amigo.” He was one of two who survived the round of letters.
Past the drills, walking along the tunnel floor, Martin and I come to the head, the forward end of the advance. The business end of all this work. We climb up a four-foot ladder into the bowels of the Queen Bee. It is beastly hot inside.
Martin flicks on his mining lamp and climbs in. The conveyor is about three feet overhead. It’s like crawling though a hot air duct littered with jagged rock. Following Martin I bellycrawl about six or seven feet into a larger chamber much like a large, steel bass drum. We are sitting on the opposite side of the cutting teeth, behind four feet of solid steel. One more tight fit, and I’ll be standing in front of the beast, with my back to the granite wall.
Getting up there, however, is where it gets tricky to the uninitiated. The small portal isn’t much bigger than I am. It feels about one inch smaller than my rather rotund circumference.
You can’t just put both arms in the hole and pull yourself through. One arm at a time is the only way to get the shoulders through. I think it was pride alone that got me through the first time. It would have been unbearably embarrassing to have been stuck in there, or to say I couldn’t do it.
So I did it, at a small cost to my now clawed elbows and forearms.
Once up front, Martin leads the way in removing the chewed up cutter, all 300 pounds of it. We use a winch and a come-along, which makes it easier, but the heat is what gets you. Standing in about a foot water, those heated cutters bake the sweat out of every pore. I soak my clothes through with sweat, although I’m sure some of it has to be water.
After nearly two hours, we change the cutter and crawl out. It felt like swimming to safety after treading water to exhaution. I went straight to the water cooler. Martin went back to the rails.
With about an hour left in the shift, Bobby’s pizza finally arrived.
After my third slice, the Queen Bee stuttered again.
Martin approached. His head was bowed. “We change cutters again.”
I moaned. The last slice of pizza felt heavy in my gut.
“How many,” I asked.
“Not good. Six.”
I moaned again. I wanted to vomit on the spot.
He smiled. “I go,” he said. Then pointed to my belt. “Light.”
I remoeved my belt with the attatched mining light. He said his thanks, strapped it on, and climbed back into the belly of the beast.
When the loci came at shift break, he was still up there, changing cutters. Three days later, he was gone. |
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| Queen Bee |
[May. 17th, 2004|11:19 pm] |
I wanted to tell you more about this Queen Bee, this magnificent Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM). Pat likes to describe it as a moving factory, but I prefer to stick with Queen Bee. Trying to fathom the scope of this beast brings to mind the old saying: Can't see the forest thorugh the trees.
Trudging on the tunnel floor, making my final approach up the ramp and watching my boots swirl the milky brown water, the Queen Bee wallows in a low rumble. Pushing forward an inch at a time with two million pounds of force per square inch. If you look very closly, you can watch the progess along the tunnel wall. Stare a crack, or a streak of white quartz screaming thorugh the solid granite, and then there's the subtle push. There. It moved. Half an inch maybe. Then again. Another half inch. By the end of the shift, our ride back to blessed topside has been made longer by 30 or more feet. Thirty or more feet seperating me from the sun and the stars.
Tim, the opererator, leaned over after the last shift, and yelled over the chugging whine of the loci with his Tennessee hill-billy drawl, "This goddamned ride gets longer every day." I nod and smile. I want to respond with something witty, something clever, but I just don't have the eneregy to shout over the never-ending din. I think I wanted to say something like, "no shit, sherlock?" or "Who made you the genius?" What ape-minded fool needs that cutting insight? But I smiled and nodded instead. That was easier.
He turned back to his cigarette, and I went back to counting the mine phones whirring by. There's 21 of those mine phones down there. One every 1,000 feet. It's a closed-circuit loop. No dialing nine for the outside line. Pizza Hut doesn't makes deliveries down there, although it can be arranged...
It happened Friday. Bobby, the electrician, bought the whole crew pizza. He said he bought 10 large pies. By the time the loci pulled up to the back of the queen bee, there were five. See, the loci driver certainly helped himself to few slices. So did everyone else who came within sniffing distance as they made their way through four-and-half miles of tunnel.
But the pizza was good. I regretted the third slice when the Queen Bee begged off her own meal. The beast wasn't happy. Her teeth needed changing. Perhaps the best or worst job in the mine, depending on whom you ask.
But I get ahead of myself.
Approaching the beast from the rear, she looks more like a collection of odd scaffold and eletric switch boxes.
At the back ramp, an old school mexican miner, his name escapes me (if I ever knew it), holds shop. We see here the first, or last, step in tunneling. The beast needs precious water to operate. Water to cool the head and drills and engines and pumps. A six-inch PVC brings it in from just under five miles out. Then the beast spits it all out, and whatever else the punctured rock bleeds. That requires a 14-inch pipe. One in, the other out, and Old School puts all the pieces together as we go-- in 15 foot sections at a time.
Bobby the electrician strings the power cables that keeps the whole operation afloat, mindful of bolting in that mine phone when the next 1,000 foot mark passes by.
Bolted to the opposite wall is the conveyor belt, eight miles of it when you count the top and bottom. It's loaded with sopping wet rock, mud and muck. We keep it wet for the same reason baseball parks water down the infield. Dust. Too much dust, or muck as they call it, and it creates problems for the machinery. The miners can't see, and much worse, breathe. So we deal with wet and soggy conditions, so we don't have to deal with the dust.
The conveyor system is also bolted in the wall as we go. One support rail at time, then the rollers. Drilling Hilti bolts into the rock. We are deeper into the machine now, standing with Gabriel as he keeps a watchful eye on that conveyor. If it doesn't line up properly, if it shifts just so much, then the belt could snap, and lock down the whole show for days.
I can remember Gabriel's name because he gave me a home-made burrito during a slow moment. He pulled out the foiled food and offered. I accepted. It was hard to tell preciely what was inside, but it sure as shit was tasty.
I asked what was in it.
"Taco," he said in clipped spanish.
"Taco, sure," I said. "But what's in it? Pollo (chicken), carne (beef)..." I trailed off forgetting the spanish word for pork. High school spanish was a long fucking time ago.
The blank look on his face never changed: "Taco," he said again.
So I nodded and smiled and shouted my "gracias" over the din. It was easier. He did give me his name when I asked for it. Gabriel, the angel who gave me food. It was easier to remember that way.
Standing at this point, looking around, it's still not clear that we are inside a machine. I stand on a griddle grate deck, and there is nothing but darkness through the holes. If you cared to look, peering through the grate would only reveal the murky water and the tunnel floor below it. The work space is about 10 feet wide, 60 yards long. Two rails are imbedded into the steel plated floor. Muck covers everything, and what it doesn't is sheathed in what appears to be ancient rust like the longest forgotten junk yard. Bolts, as long as your forearm, sink hammers, impact wrenches, acetyline torches, flying sparks, gushing water and muck all litter the oxidized metal beams, shelves and counters. Nothing wieghs less than 30 pounds. Everything is heavy, all designed to withstand these hard conditions. I wonder sometimes if we drones are the only things not designed for such conditions.
There is a deck above, and there another conveyer dwells. It's the "transfer" conveyor, and dumps the muck out to the tunnel ("main") conveyor.
Water, saturated with powdered silicia drips from above, coats my white helmet with a hard grey candy shell, like my head was some oversized peanut M&M. It runs down my back, under the collar of my ruin shirt. Somehow it sneaks past the foam plugs in my ears, defies gravity to find purchase in my hair. Inside my gloves. My boots can't stop the relentless onslaught. As long as the Queen Bee digs, her byproducts continue to litter everything and anything.
We hose it down from time to time. If we didn't stalagmites of grime and muck who reach up and grab that sonveyor belt, seize it in one final spasm and shut the whole operation down. And that can't happen. The Queen Bee must always be busy in her work.
Also above is the air filtration system. Large fans and tubes and that suck the air clean of any remaining dust. It's still an area of the monster I have not learned much about.
But below, further along now, 60 yards from where we first stepped foot in the beast are the rails. As the beast gobbles its course we lay the rails. The Queen Bee pulls this 60-yard stretch of her tail section (called the traiing gear) on rails as she inches along. In her wake are the locis, which ride those same rails with supplies for the beast and all the little worker drones who keep her happy.
Laying the rail is short but laborious work. Once two rails are held together by six or seven metal spacers, the 15-foot section is raised on a winch and pushed out through the front of the trailing section. It's louder here. Hotter too. We're closer to the head where those hungry teeth gnash at the solid rock. Cables, the thickness of a soda bottle, stretches from the forward segment to the rear where Old School and Gabriel toil.
As she digs, she pulls that rear section along with those cables. We lay the rails in the tunnel floor, bolt them together like the biggest Tyco train set you ever saw. The rails often need coaxing. Nothing ever snaps into place. That would be too easy. No, we need prybars and sledge hammers, and sometimes that acetyline torch to nurse the laid track into marriage with the new segment.
Moving forward still, the new stretch of rail behind us, the "brigde conveyor" now overhead. The bridge is the next segement towards the mouth of beast, and like the transfer, it too spills its sludge on whatever lurks below. Above are also tubes and wires and doo-dads coated in muck. There is no hint as to what anything's true color was when it emerged from the factory floor. Perhaps it was once a gleaming white with pinstripes and painted flames licking the sides. But I can only guess. |
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| Cutters |
[May. 14th, 2004|01:11 am] |
I was telling you about the cutters.
Just getting to them is unnerving. Under the belly of the beast a small hatch leads to the guts of the Queen Bee. The place where the chewed up rock passes through on its way to the conveyor system which leads somewhere topside. The hatch isn't much wider than I am, then it narrows to a wiggling belly crawl over jagged pieces of rock. Worming through the five or six feet is not difficult, but the heat just makes me want to go insane and scream like a baby, in that order. There's a smell too. It can't be described, unless you know what a combination of heated metal, dripping lubricant, ground rock, sweat and god knows what else smells like. The smell permeates everything. I'm sure it's in my car now. I wonder how long it will take to bring home, and if I smell like the hole myself without even knowing it.
Anyway, after wigglig the short distance, I come to an open area, a large hollow cylinder directly behind the cutting face of the machine. By large, I mean large enough to comfortably hold two men with only enough head room in a seated position. From here, there is another portal, this one smaller than the first. It leads to the front. The head, they call it. Squeezing my fat ass through that bitch, brought to mind my own birth.
Once through, I stood between the large machine's teeth and the rock wall. There is no deeper point in the tunnel. Standing on the tunnel floor and leaning against the wall, there is about a foot and half of space between me and the cutters, 39 of them sprial from a center point. Looking up is 18 feet, 4 inches to the ceiling. Sometmes water bleeds from the living rock, or it too is overcome by the magnicifent heat and sweats. Standing up front with Martin (Mar-teen) and Tiger, we measured the cutters. Replaced any missing bolts. It was an eternity.
But it could be longer. I've heard stories.
Stories about changing those cutters when they wear out. Pat said one of his proudest accomplishments was changing 18 of those bastards in eight hours. I can't imagine. A cutter assembly weighs near 300 pounds. That's more than I can lift in the best of conditions, but in that heat, in those narrow confines ... it worries me. It worries me because I'll have to it when the time comes.
Just climbng in and out for those few minutes, maybe an hour, totally wasted me. My clothes were soaked through with sweat. It poured out of me, like some valve was stuck open. I rained. Eight hours in there is just unfathomable.
But gaining the respect of the crew is all-important. It's not right that some green jackass from Iowa can cruise in and snatch up the operator job. I think there is some resentment among the crew. Not openly, but I sense it. Perhaps it's paranoia, but I know I would be pissed off if I had worked in that hole for a year and half hoping to train on the TBM, and some boss's buddy leap-frogged over me.
I made the decision last night. I'll have to pay my dues first. It's the right thing to do. Really, it's the only thing I can do.
Sure, I could learn to operate the machine, possibly in a matter of months. But to do it well, to do it with the safety of the men in mind, I have to know everything. I have to know everything from what every knob and valve and switch to where all those guys are standing at any given time. I even have to understand the tenor in their voices, and what certain vibrations within the beast mean.
A few weeks of training can't give me all that. Only toiling in the trenches can. And something else too.
That respect. I would only be as good as that crew of drones tending to that Queen Bee. And if they believe I'm chump, I won't last a week at the controls. When I'm ready, they'll know it. Only with their confidence in me, will I have the confidence in myself to do it.
I don't begrudge them their resentment. Their lives, quite literally, are in the operator's hands. One mistake can be fatal.
Tim, the current operator, said it's a lonely place in the control room. The lonliest place in the world.
Almost 12:30 now. Gotta' get going, back to the hole.
Jenn_xx: Those peaches are ripe enough for me. |
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| Just What the Hell I've Gotten Myself Into |
[May. 13th, 2004|11:14 pm] |
I was dazzling in my new digs. Roughly the color of a ripe banana. Bright yellow slickers like a fly-fisherman might use, neon yellow vest, and a shiny white helmet. It was pretty easy to spot the new guy. Even the small, red Coleman cooler I use for a lunch box (a "pie can" in miner parlance) was unblemished. Outfitted with a handful of ear plugs and protective eye glasses (like the ones I wore for raquetball) we climbed aboard a big basket, which was dropped about 100 feet down the shaft.
It was eerie, that first time going down. As the light dimmed, my heart raced. Not from fear or worry or alarm, but excitment. I was actually enjoying it, much like a carnival ride. And there was a "movie" quality to it all. The other guys in the basket all engaged in small talk, some of them old and grizzled from decades of mining work, and couple of young bucks too. One, Stu, long hair and kind of dopey looking pulled off his helmet and produced a pack of cigs and lit up. "So with the new guy, does this mean we get a fuckin' vacation now?" He said it with a laugh, the lit cig dangling from the corner of his mouth. And chuckles went all around.
The tunnel is just that. Virtually a straight shot four-and-a-half miles long and 18 feet in diameter. Small train rails take you in, then out again at shift break. The locomotives that ride those rails are called "locis" (low-keys).
Not three hours before I stepped aboard that cage, I had watched about 45 minutes of safety and training tapes. One major point was to never ride on the loci itself. There are transport cars the locis haul personell in. That went out the window less than five minutes after I stepped foot in the muck. (Muck is what miners call everything down there... Dirt, gravel, mud, rock...you know, all the muck. A shovel is a muck stick.)
The loci travels about 15-20 miles an hour, so it took some time to get to the business end of all the digging. Water cascaded from above, it poured down the walls, and there isn't a spot in the entire show without at least two inches of standing water. A conveyor belt runs the muck out on one side, electricity and water run in on the other side, and above a huge ventilation tube stretches into the abyss.
It is surprisingly well lit. I expected it to be darker thant that, so I worried that I wasn't equipped with the small helmet light. Even If I had one, there would have been little need of it.
As we rode in, the cool breeze on my face and occassional splashes of water was the direct opposite of what was happening to my ass. We were sitting right on top of the engine compartment of the loci, and as we delved deeper into the tunnel, the engine got hotter and hotter. At one point I considered I considered jumping, it burned so bad, but there was nowhere to go. The width of the machine leaves barely enough room to stand next to it. Maybe two guys can stand on either side of it, but it's a precarious dance traying to stand on a wet, curving wall with rubber boots.
We rounded a slight curve in the track and finally stopped. I actually checked my seat for burn holes in the plastic, but there were none. By the end of the day, I forgot about my sore ass, and worried more about my sore arms, back, legs, and shoulders.
Pat escorted me the last 300 yards to the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM), the whole reason why the notice was so short.
It is an immense creature. Over 300 feet long and 18 feet wide. I marveled at the men who work on the equipment. The modern miner. They climb and jump across this thing with such tireless agility I wondered if I could ever match them. There are far few walkways, and with so many moving parts, it's scary moving around it. There are so many different ways to get injured... spinning conveyor belts, hydraulic pistons, electrical wires, or losing hold of the beast and falling, bouncing off every pipe and cog along the way.
Naturally, my inclination was to only move when told. And that is how I largely spent my first day. Watching and trying to learn something. By the end I got a good sense of how to move around the machine, but only know a few of its many functions. It is quite clear the TBM Operator (which I hope to accomplish) is the cush gig. Aside from the pay scale, he rarely leaves his seat in the cab, and is the cleanest man in the hole.
But his job is overwhelmingly complex. It could be a year at least before dreaming of that position.
There is so much to learn, but the learning process is slow. It's loud down there. A deafening racket. Communicating just plain sucks, but most are hispanic, and none of them are exactly fluent in english. I doubt I could understand them if we were standing in the french poetry section of the public library much less in the din of the TBM.
One final thing before I sign off, the TBM can best be descrabed as the Queen Bee. There is no real shovel and pick work like in an old movie. It's mainly the drones tending to the Queen Bee. All scurrying about, tending her every need. The labor is in hauling my sorry fat ass up and down and around her many nooks and crannies.
The worst spot of the machine is in the front. If a man were caught up there while it was running, he'd be ground into hamburger. Nothing would come out the other end larger than a wadded tissue. But the the blades on the front end, called cutters, need to be checked and often replaced.
Believe me, every precaution is taken so that none of the one or two men who climb to the front are left behind.
Not 10 minutes after getting to the TBM, they sent me up to check the cutters with Tiger, the shift boss (shifter). It is an unholy hell up there. Those blades, grinding on granite, build quite a bit a heat, and climbing all over those heated blades (none sharper than the corner of a kitchen table) is a royal pain in the ass. But it's the heat that's worst. Over 110 degrees, easy. It takes your breath away. |
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| Day One |
[May. 10th, 2004|10:39 pm] |
Prolouge:
So, a few months go, my best friend, Bob, is finally marrying his fiance, Jennifer, of 9 years. It's in Hawaii and was a fantastic drunk. Another old buddy is there too, Pat.
I grouse and bitch and moan about my job. Sports writing just doesn't pay the bills. The college degree isn't exactly doing the trick, I work the shittiest of hours, and every dipshit who can open a newspaper thinks (rightly or wrongly) that I'm an idiot and any monkey can do my job better than I can. Fine.
"I should take up welding," I says to Pat. He doesn't blink once when he tells me I should come work for him. In Atlanta. In a mine shaft. I should be a miner he says. Double my income, for starters. I'll love it. He does. He can't stop talking about it for the next five days.
Fuck it.
I said I'd do it. Gimme' a call when something comes up.
Fast forward to the here and now.
Five days ago the silly bastard calls me up. We're on. Better yet, I'll be training to work some fancy piece of equipment that, with overtime, will quadruple my sports editor pittance. So I pack what clothes I can fit into my car, and put Atlantic, Iowa in my rearview mirror and head to Atlanta, Ga. as my grandmother lies on her death bed in Lawrence Kans. Talk about shitty circumstances.
But I've got to be in Lawerenceville Ga., like right now, so I hit the road, and a new adventure begins...
---
Last night we went out for dinner: newlyweds Bob and Jen their 9-y/o son Seth, Celinda (Bob's mother), her mother (the so-called "grandma Salsa") and myself. When driving out here, this place has the feel a of a suburbia far removed from the comforts of a major metro area... at least not worth the hassle of fighting through a nightmare of traffic and logjam. But it is here. Hidden among the hills and trees. Thick traffic, really, is the only major clue of a large population center, until you turn a corner, and find yourself trying something knew at a quaint Vietnamese restuarant. I wished my Jenny were there about 100 times, remembering our trip to Omaha, the Old Market and it's Indian Oven. Instead she lingers behind me, still in Iowa, a million miles away.
Tring those new -- and to this midwestern hick, exotic -- things are adventures I want to share with her, in person, not through 800 miles of ether and the glow of cathode ray tube. I miss her terribly.
But the sun still rose, and I made my first trip into Atlanta as a writer-cum-miner. I filled reams of paper with my name and still unknown address. I wrote my social security number perhaps 30 times, and under such mindless toil did my first day end, without so much as a particle of dust touching my hands. Tomorrow is the day. The day when I precisely learn just what the hell I've gotten myself into.
My best hope is to send another note, just to let you know precisely what the hell I've gotten myself into. But I fear I'll be too damn dog assed tired.
But I'm up to my neck now, and I look forward to the new challenge, and more to have her once again by my side and in my arms. |
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