‘Where danger is double and pleasures are few’ – a young life lost in the coal fields

“Oh come all you young fellers so young and so fine
Seek not your fortune in a dark dreary mine
It’ll form as a habit and seep in your soul
Till the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal
Where it’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where the danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls the sun never shines
It’s a dark as a dungeon way down in the mine”

“Dark as a Dungeon” – Johnny Cash

 

By Jim Muir

Like many area residents I had that ‘kicked-in-the-gut’ feeling Wednesday when I learned that there had been a fatal accident at the Viking Mine near Thompsonville.  Like the old Johnny Cash song says so correctly … ‘where the danger is double and pleasures are few.’

muir-mug-ihsa-150x150Adding more grief to that familiar feeling was the fact that the young man was only 25 years old.  In terms of life … just a kid.

And it was with a unique perspective that I started following the story. It’s always the way I follow tragedy in the coal industry. Even for a guy that strings words together for a living it’s hard for me to explain how I feel. For want of a better explanation, it’s like every story that involves coal mining grabs me and won’t let go. Sometimes I do what I am doing now, sit down and write and try to sort my jumbled thoughts out.

You see, as I watch these stories play out, I realize that I know these people and the lives that this now-grieving family live. I know their lifestyle, their desires, their tenacity, their faith, their endurance, their ingenuity and their fears. I’ve never met the young man that was killed or his family … but I know them.

I know about riding a ‘cage’ 600-feet into the ground and about the feel and smell of the damp, dark recesses of a coal mine. I know about swing-shifts, rock falls and about trading the ability to breathe fresh air for a paycheck. I know what it feels like to change clothes next to a fellow miner at midnight and laugh and talk with him only to learn that he was killed in a rock fall three hours later. I know about the eerily quiet, subdued feelings that are present when miners return to work on the shift following a fatality. I know what it feels like to work in the exact same section of a mine where only hours before a young life had been snuffed out.  I helped in the recovery of miners killed in roof falls so I also know what it’s like to hide my fears and tears and to hope against hope, even if it’s only a fleeting hope.

Again as I follow another tragedy, I am reminded that occupation-wise I’ve lived two lives. I spent 20 years as a coal miner that nobody knew and the past 20 years as a reporter, broadcaster and columnist that a lot of people know.

To many, it might seem logical to embrace my current job status and visibility and to shun my previous life as an underground coal miner. But, that will never happen because that’s where I came from, that my roots. While it’s been 20-plus years since I worked my last shift in an underground coal mine those days are like yesterday, never too far away.

Again, I don’t know anybody involved in this story personally, but I do know them well and my heart breaks for them. They are just like the people I worked with every day for two decades. As my mother used to say, ‘they are the salt of the earth.’ These people are hard-working, faithful, loyal, outspoken and certainly not afraid to stand up for what they believe. As I watched this current tragedy unfold I am also reminded once again that I am who I am today not because of something I learned in a classroom but because of my previous ‘life’ and because I ‘know’ these people. Even if I wanted to (and I don’t) I will never shed my blue-collar mentality.  It’s just part of my fabric and makeup and always will be.

In the coming days the Viking Mine will reopen and loved ones will worry and fret as miners will grab their dinner buckets and trudge off again into the bowels of the earth to mine coal. But those miners will go because, speaking as the son and grandson of coal miners, ‘it’s a way of life, it’s all we know.’

God Bless this grieving family and the miners at Viking Mine.

 

 

 

 

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