Underground

The cool blast will be the first thing you feel, at least if you’re there in the summer time.  It’s not so much a blast, perhaps, as an assertive but gentle woosh of cool air.  You’re riding in what they might have called a man-trip, an open and low-slung electric train pulling you into the mine.   The thing moves at a pace of a fast walk and you enter the mine with a transition of cool wind as you sit and the next thing you notice will be the condensation running off the glistening remnant coal and rock a few inches above your head.  We are in the Exhibition Coal Mine near Beckley, West Virginia, and it is a deep mine in the heart of Raleigh County, West Virginia. 

There have been disasters nearby over the past century: explosions, cave-ins, and other accidents.  The last one was in 2010, at Upper Big Branch, which killed 29 miners.  This is, therefore, not just a phenomenon from long ago. The picture below is from a far earlier time…just imagine working with a low rock ceiling and a soft cap on your head.

Lights string out along the path of the mine as the machine carries you directly into the earth.  The train is nearly silent, other than the hum of the motor and the clanking of the linkage behind the engine and the car you ride in.  This isn’t the place for you if you’re claustrophobic; if you find yourself suddenly becoming claustrophobic, you haven’t seen anything until you go further back in and the guide shuts the lights off, enough for you to experience the darkness that comes from being so far from any sunlight.

It is complete.  You cannot even see your hand in front of your face.  You want to give it a few more seconds for your eyes to adjust, but there’s nothing to adjust to.  It’s just plain black.  This is the utter absence of light.

Perhaps the ironic thing about it is, at the same time, you’re actually surrounded by sunlight of a sort.  This is what coal is.  A few hundred million years ago, the bituminous region of West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania was the site of a shallow inland sea cum swamp and coal is the remains of millions upon millions of tons of compressed plants that soaked that sunlight up all those eons before.  When coal is burned, for steel, for home heat, for electricity generation, the energy that those plants collected from the sun is released.  That’s the light and the heat from a different star shining on a different planet. 

The plants, best described perhaps as ferns but also horsetails and strange, otherworldly, scaly-sided lepidodendron, an ancestor of today’s mosses, make up the herbaceous life of the Carboniferous period.  Especially, as we will proudly call it here, the Pennsylvanian period.  You are now riding into an ancient swamp…a coal swamp.  It is here that nature locked away sunlight to power industry hundreds of millions of years in the future.

That is not to say that it hasn’t come away with its own costs, as most will recognize today.  I’m writing this now amidst a smoky pall cast over the mid-Atlantic by wildfires in southern Canada and northern Minnesota.  This is a real problem for everyone, and an especially dangerous problem if one has anything like high blood pressure, asthma, or allergies…which, lets face it, is a pretty sizable portion of the population – and there’s an argument that climate change will elicit more of these phenomena.  The ancient coal forests stoke other fires today.

At the same time, I’m well aware of a paucity of truly good, efficient alternatives…especially any that aren’t entirely laden with political baggage.  The purpose of this blog and, indeed, my writing, is to do my best to circumvent politics and address problems and challenges by noting where solutions –even if imperfect—might be had, and at what costs. 

The men (and some women) who worked in these primeval coal forests fueled a nation on a trajectory of growth and development that had never been seen in all of human history.  That voyage continues today; we are aware of the challenges and are working our way toward solutions.  Demonizing and politicizing – two close parallels – will cause solutions to be smaller, more measured, more deeply compromised.  Maybe that’s just the way it will have to be.

It’s when sitting in the mine at Beckley that one begins to appreciate exactly how difficult and dangerous this work was and is.  Of course, it’s not the same as a hundred years ago, but when one is underground, vision is at a premium, and the enemy can be both invisible and moving at many times the speed of a human’s fastest run.  It’s an uncomfortable realization – you have nowhere to go, and even if you did, you won’t make it.  It’s not by accident that miners could be a superstitious lot.  I’d carry as many good luck totems as could be borne, and I’d be scared shitless.  I’d make for a horrible coal miner, in any era. 

I give thanks to physics and chemistry of making the coal which transformed the modern world; I also give thanks to the brave people who brought the forests to the surface.  I’ve reaped many of the rewards, and many of them have given their lives for it.