“I guess so” was all he said back to me.
None of Frankie’s diatribe upset me much. I was just thrilled to have survived, and, although completely soaked, I otherwise seemed uninjured.
As Frankie had been storming down the drift, I’m sure if he could have fired us he would have, but since we were still alive and the mine was desperate for bodies, we still had jobs. Although we’d survived I always felt certain that had we drowned, Frankie would have fired us posthumously, telling everyone, “You know, I’d have fired those motherfuckers.”
Back at the station, Anthony and I called the hoist-man for a man-trip back to the surface, where word of the incident had already preceded us into the office of Mel Vigil, who was awaiting our arrival.
Over a month had passed since I had last been in Mel’s office. As I stood there in the doorway, soaked from head to toe, dripping water onto the floor, the sight could have been no less amusing than that first day I had appeared before him, dressed in my new clothes with shiny gear in hand. Sure enough, there on his face, I noticed, was the same bemused look.
I never once considered that either I or Anthony might be fired, and in fact, Mel didn’t seem nearly as upset as Frankie had been. All he asked for was an explanation and a few details of the incident.
I told him how, by the use of the powder, we had managed to successfully open the ore chute door. We had been unable to stop the flood once it started, and Anthony and I both had gone underwater. Mel, having undoubtedly seen far bigger knucklehead moves during his career, did not seem particularly upset by any of it and told us to dry off then report to the Dry foreman, who would put us to work. Finally, he told us to be ready to go back down, meaning back to work underground, the next morning.
After the incident with the 907 chute, I didn’t expect to get many good assignments from Frankie. On the other hand, I had been filling in latrines and hadn’t gotten a job that might be considered pleasurable up to that point anyway, so whatever he had in mind for me, I was ready for it.
Thankfully, Frankie didn’t hold any grudges, and the following day he greeted Anthony and me both as if nothing had happened. In fact, it was this day that I got my first assignment to work with an actual miner.
Progress
As Frankie approached me in the lunchroom the following morning, I was ready to hear more on the subject of what I had done at the 907 chute and how worthless I was. Instead, I was surprised to find that he seemed to be in a better mood. “Listen,” he said, “Schultz is on vacation for a couple of weeks, I put Riordan’s helper on opposite shift, so I’m putting you with Al Riordan. Catch a ride on Bordan’s motor. He’s going back with some stuff for Riordan. Tell him he’s giving you a ride. Don’t fuck up.”
Inwardly ecstatic, I told Frankie I wouldn’t fuck up and headed out of the lunchroom door to the dump station looking for motorman Jim Bordan, who would give me a ride down the main drift to the termination heading where Riordan was working.
Incidentally, Oscar Schultz was one of the toughest men I ever saw at Section 35. He was German and had worked in mines all over the world and really knew his craft. A very friendly guy, he was superior at working track drift mining.
A shortcoming of his was that he broke almost every single safety rule there was. He did wear a hard hat, but that was about it.
I once had to deliver some supplies to him at the heading where he was working. As I approached the area, I could tell there was no ventilation. Wherever he had stopped hanging vent tube, it wasn’t anywhere close to where he was now. The thing that really got me, though, was he was taking a short break sitting on boxes of powder with a cigarette in his hand. It wasn’t the last time I saw a miner doing that, but it scared me something fierce, and I got out of Schultz’s heading as fast as I could get rid of the supplies I was delivering.
The miner I was assigned to, Riordan, was the track drift miner working the opposite shift from Schultz. Track drift miners lengthened the main drift by drilling, blasting, and then laying down rail for the motors to run on. It is an arduous job where some of the strongest, most experienced, and technically proficient miners working at Section 35 could be found.
In addition to drilling and blasting unusually large rounds, track drift miners had to lay the ties and twenty-foot sections of steel rail that the motors ran on. Blasting for track drifts required precision drilling so that the floor was flat enough to lay the ties and rail.
Track drift miners installed various types of ground support for the back and ribs of the drift, hung ventilation tube and water and compressed-air pipelines, and operated the largest mucking and drilling machines in the mine.
Miners working track were paid for the number of feet of progress they made each day. A range of $100–$150 an hour was not unusual.
It was good fortune that I would be getting to work on a track drift as a temporary miner’s helper. It could lead to other things, perhaps even an assignment as a full-time miner’s helper.
One way to quickly get around the mine was to hitch a ride with a motorman as he made his rounds pulling ore or delivering supplies. When I found Bordan by his motor, he told me to hop in a car and he’d take me right to the end of the line where Riordan was.
The ride back to Riordan at the main drift heading, called the face, took about fifteen minutes. Borden stopped the train, and I hopped out of my ore car, thanked him, and started walking toward the end of the track where Riordan was waiting.
I was very happy to find that Riordan had gotten some ventilation into the heading and decided that if I did nothing else, I would be sure that vent tube kept up with our progress.
Getting assigned as a miner’s helper on the track drift carried with it a certain level of prestige among the laborers. Some track drift helpers averaged more per hour than a stope miner might make. That was possible because of the contract system that miners working for Kermac were paid under.
Rather than pay an hourly wage, Kermac paid a miner for everything he or she did. Everyone else was on an hourly wage. Each task, no matter how small, had a set price that the miner was paid. Be it setting a single rock bolt, driving a wedge, producing carloads of ore, or constructing timber sets, all the tasks performed during a two-week period were added up and then divided by the number of hours a miner worked to come up with an average hourly contract rate. Miners then had the option of keeping all the contract hours for themselves or giving some of those hours to their helpers.
Contract rate varied from day to day, and the helper, who was usually doing the brunt of the heavy labor, had a big part in this. Some miners were stingy with their contract time and would give only an hour or two per day to their helper, but the good miners always gave the maximum four hours per day.
There was a lot of incentive built into the contract system, because the more you did as a miner, the more you got paid.
Not every mining company in the Ambrosia Lake area used a contract system, with many paying a straight hourly wage. I heard a lot of complaints about other mining companies’ hourly wages from some new hires that showed up at Section 35.
I never knew a miner to lie about what he had done, and only once, when a miner reported a $2,500 shift, did I see a shift boss question what a miner accomplished in a day—and that miner was me.
As with many of the most experienced and highly paid miners, Al Riordan was in his prime. Thirty-three years old, he was a rough, sinewy, hardened guy with the heavily muscled forearms and strong, thick hands and fingers I often saw on miners. Dark complexioned with jet-black hair, Al always seemed to need a shave, which gave him an especially rugged appearance long before that look was cultivated by the fashion conscious.
Al was one of the chain smokers at Section 35 who never seemed any more concerned with regulations than he was with blowing himself up, or about the proven connection between radon and lung cancer, about which, we had all been repeatedly warned. The way he always smoked when working with powder scared the crap out of me. In that respect he and Schultz were alike.
I hadn’t spoken much to Riordan, but he knew who I was and seemed friendly enough. As I approached him, I had no illusions of getting any contract hours, but this was certainly an opportunity to prove that I could work hard, keep quiet, and follow instructions, all of which I intended to take advantage of.
With a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, he greeted me. “Ready to get to work?”
“Yup.”
“Let’s get to it then.” And with that my real education in mining began.