They promised, and I thought telling them was safe enough, them being through-travellers and all. Also, I thought the little boy would like to hear about it, him being so crazy about Bonanza and all. And, as I said, it never crossed my mind until later to think he already knew about it. Why would it, for God’s sake?
“That’s the old Rattlesnake Number One,” I said. “At least, that’s what we think it is. We uncovered it while we were blasting. The front part of the Rattlesnake caved in back in 1858.”
Jack Garin wanted to know what was inside. I said we didn’t know, no one had been in there on account of the MSHA regulations. Mrs Garin (June) wanted to know if the company would be exploring it later, and I said maybe, if we could get the right permits. I didn’t tell them any lies, but I did skirt the truth a bit. We’d gotten up the keep-out tapes like MSHA says to do, all right, but that didn’t mean MSHA knew about our find. We uncovered it purely by accident-shot off a blast-pattern pretty much like any other and when the spill stopped rolling and the dust settled, there it was-but no one in the company was sure if it was the kind of accident we wanted to publicize.
There would have been some powerful interest if news of it got out, that’s for sure. According to the stories, forty or fifty Chinese were sealed up inside when the mine caved in, and if so, they’d still be there, preserved like mummies in an Egyptian pyramid. The history buffs would’ve had a field day with just their clothing and mining gear, let alone the bodies themselves. Most of us on-site were pretty interested, too, but we couldn’t do much exploring without wholehearted approval from the Deep Earth brass in Phoenix, and there wasn’t anyone I worked with who thought we’d get it. Deep Earth is not a non-profit organization, as I’m sure anyone reading this will understand, and mining, especially in this day and age, is a high-risk operation. China Pit had only been turning a profit since 1992 or so, and the people who work there never get up in the morning completely sure they’ll still have a job when they get to the work-site. Much is dependent on the per-pound price of copper (leachbed mining is not cheap), but even more has to do with the environmental issues. Things are a little better lately, the current crop of pols has at least some sense, but there are still something like a dozen “injunctive suits” pending in the county or Federal courts, filed by people (mostly the “greens”) who want to shut us down. There were a lot of people-including myself, I might as well say-who didn’t think the top execs would want to add to those problems by shouting to the world that we’d found an old mine site, probably of great historical interest. As Yvonne Bateman, an engineer pal of mine, said just after the round of blast-field shots uncovered the hole, “It would be just like the tree-huggers to try and get the whole pit designated a historical landmark, either by the Feds or by the Nevada Historical Commission. It might be the way to stop us for good that they are always looking for.” You can call that attitude paranoid if you want (plenty do), but when a fellow like me knows there are 90 or 100 men depending on the mine to keep their families fed, it changes your perspective and makes you cautious.
The daughter (Louise?) said it looked spooky to her, and I said it did to me, too. She asked if I’d go in it on a dare and I said no way. She asked if I was afraid of ghosts and I said no, of cave-ins. It’s amazing that any of the shaft was still up. They drove it straight into hornfels and crystal rhyolite-leftovers from the volcanic event that emptied the Great Basin-and that’s pretty shaky stuff even when you’re not shooting off ANFO charges all over the place. I told her I wouldn’t go in there even on a double dare unless and until it was shored up with concrete and steel every five feet. Never knowing I’d be in there so deep I couldn’t see the sun before the day was over!
I took them to the field office and got them hard-hats, then took them out and showed them all around-diggings, tailings, leachbeds, sorters, and heavy equipment. We had quit a field-trip for ourselves. Little Seth had pretty much quit talking then, but his eyes were as bright as the garnets we are always finding in the spoil-rock!.
All right, I’ve come to the “little scare” that has caused me so many doubts and bad dreams (not to mention a bad case of conscience, no joke for a Mormon who takes the religion stuff pretty seriously). And it didn’t seem so “little” to any of us at the time, and doesn’t to me now, if I’m to tell the truth. I have been over it and over it in my mind, and while I was in Peru (which is where I was, looking at bauxite deposits, when Audrey Wyler’s letter of enquiry came in to the Deep Earth post box in Desperation), I dreamed of it a dozen or more times. Because of the heat, maybe. It was hot inside the Rattlesnake Mine. I have been in a lot of shaft-mines in my time, and usually they are chilly or downright cold. I have read that some of the deep gold mines in
S. Africa are warm, but I have never been in any of those. Andthis wasn’t warm but hot. Humid, too, like in a greenhouse.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I don’t want to do that. What I want is to tell it straight through, end to end, and thank God nothing like it will ever happen again. In early-August, not two weeks after all this happened, the whole works collapsed. Maybe there was a little temblor deep down in the Devonian, or maybe the open air had a corrosive effect on the exposed support timbers. I’ll never know for sure, but down it came, a million tons of shale and schist and limestone. When I think how close Mr Garin and his little boy came to being under all that when it went (not to mention Mr Allen Symes, Geologist Extraordinaire), I get the willies.
The older boy, Jack, wanted to see Mo, our biggest digger. She runs on treads and works the inner slopes, mostly digging out benches at fifty-foot intervals. There was a time in the early “70s when Mo was the biggest digger on Planet Earth, and most kids-the boys especially-are fascinated with her. Big boys too! Garin wanted to see her “close up” as much as young Jack did, and I assumed Seth would feel the same way. I was wrong about that, though.
I showed them the ladder that goes up Mo’s side to the operator’s cab, which is almost 100 feet above the ground. Jack asked if they could go up and I said no, that was too dangerous, but they could take a stroll on the treads if they wanted. Doing that is quite an experience, each tread being as wide as a city street and each of the separate steel plates that make them up a yard across. Mr Garin put Seth down, and they climbed up the ladder to Mo’s treads. I climbed up behind them, hoping like mad nobody would fall. If they did, I was the one who’d most likely be on the hook in case of a lawsuit. June Garin stood back aways so she could take pictures of us standing up there with our arms around each other, laughing. We were clowning and mugging for the camera and having the time of our lives until the little girl called, “You come back, Seth! Right now! You shouldn’t be way over there!”
I couldn’t see him because up where I was on Mo’s tread, all the rest of the digger was in the way, but I could see his mother just fine, and how scared she looked when she spotted him.
“Seth!” she yelled. “You come back now!” She yelled it two or three times, then dropped her camera on the ground and just ran. That was all I needed to see, her dropping her expensive Nikon like a used cigarette pack. I was back down the ladder in about three jumps. Wonder I didn’t fall off and break my neck. Even more of a wonder Garin or his older boy didn’t, I suppose, but I never even thought about that at the time. Never thought about them at all, tell the truth.
The little boy was already climbing the slope to the opening of the old mine, which was only about twenty feet up from the pit-floor. I saw that and knew his mother wasn’t ever going to catch him before he got inside. Wasn’t anyone going to catch him before he got inside, if that was what he meant to do. My heart wanted to sink into my boots, but I didn’t let it. I got running as fast as I could, instead.