There is a long, flat sweeping curve along Route 334 that, if you were going slow enough to look, opens up into a beautiful panorama of the surrounding desert. Few miners were interested in savoring beautiful vistas while on the way to or returning from work. The speeds at which commuters traveled the long curve in the road put a good deal of centrifugal stress on both vehicle and occupants. I was always holding on to something in an attempt to stay seated through this curve during my time commuting with Boots, for example.
After my shift one afternoon, it so happened that Al was right behind me as we left work and drove down 509. He was still there when we made the turn onto 334. I would usually make the trip at a conservative eighty to eighty-five miles per hour. Al’s truck could hardly make eighty-five miles per hour, but he had managed to keep up, and as we entered the long, sweeping curve, he was still behind me.
Halfway through the turn, I looked in my rearview mirror, and there I saw Al’s right front wheel bouncing off down the road, over a small hill, and onto range land, where it continued in high arching bounces until it bounced out of sight.
To my amazement Al was still right behind me, cruising along at eighty miles an hour on three wheels. I was laughing so hard it was blind luck that I didn’t run off the road. He never stopped. He had enough weight on the left side of the truck to keep it upright, so he kept on coming all the way around the curve but then had slowed considerably, and I lost sight of him. I couldn’t let this one go, so I turned around and went back.
Al’s truck, now off the road on the shoulder, rested on what was left of the right front axle. The axle had broken off. That will happen when a wheel turns on bearings that have been screaming for grease for a month. Al said he didn’t know what the noise was, so he’d kept on driving.
Al was a level-headed, even-tempered guy who rarely got upset about anything. The twelve-hour shifts were exhausting week after week, but he never complained about it. As in any job, if you get tired, you make mistakes. Mining is one of the occupations in which mistakes can carry a high price tag, so we all tried to keep them to a minimum.
I was doing a good job looking after Al, but he worked so hard and fast it was difficult. Considering the combination of fatigue and the speed at which we worked, something was bound to happen, and it did.
Our stope was looking good. We continued to enlarge it until it was four stories of timber sets. We were filling the chute on a regular basis and making decent money. I always gave Al four hours of contract time, so he was happy, and I was happy with my thirty dollars an hour. All in all, we had a good working stope going.
Remembering how Cal rarely let me drill, I made it a point to teach Al as much as I knew about drilling, letting him drill rounds now and then. He picked it up quickly and loved it as much as I did.
One day we were working on the third level. We had blasted out the ore on the first two levels but hadn’t mucked it because our chute was full, and as usual I was having a hard time getting a motorman to pull it.
We had a large muck pile going, having blasted out two stories’ worth. In the meantime, we could still go up to the third level and keep drilling and blasting.
We were in need of a large number of supplies, but rather than have Al go back to the station, I decided to let him drill while I made the supply run. I figured I’d round up the stuff, find a motor, and deliver it to our stope myself. I could also use the then empty cars that had been full of supplies to pull some of the ore that was backed up in our chute.
We set up the drill, and Al started in on the round. Talking being impossible through the din of the machine, I signaled Al that I was leaving.
I made it back to the station but couldn’t find Bill. Seeing a couple of laborers hanging around by the station, I gave them my list of supplies and told them to stack up the materiel and have it ready to go when I came back with a motor. It would take them a while to get everything ready, so I went back down the track drift to our stope to check on Al’s drilling progress.
As I neared the manway, I heard the machine going. I knew Al was OK and still at it. I climbed the manway and then went up the ladder to the third level of square-sets.
As I looked toward where Al should have been drilling, I couldn’t see him. I heard the drill going but didn’t see Al where he was supposed to be.
I wasn’t concerned until I got close enough to where he should have been, and still I saw nothing. But the drill was going, so he had to be there. Where was Al? What I found ranked right up there with the funniest things I would see underground.
I walked up to the edge of the set and saw the blasting holes he had drilled and, still hearing the drill going loud as ever, looked down.
Having somehow lost his balance while wrestling with the machine, he had fallen over the edge of the set and dropped down just a few feet. There below I saw Al on top of the muck pile on his back, jammed between the still-running machine and some previously blasted ore, feet sticking straight up in the air.
Al lucked out. Had we been mucking and filling the chute, it would have been a sixteen-foot drop, and he could have been seriously injured or worse. But he had fallen on top of the muck pile just a few feet below.
Had the machine fallen on him rather than beside him, that could have been serious too, but it had missed him. I jumped down, shut off the machine, and pulled him out, laughing the whole time.
Al and I did a lot of productive mining during the time we were together, and a lot of the credit for that went to him. I had never seen anyone work as hard or as fast or take his work more seriously. We had a good stope with good ore and a good system working, and we made a lot of money. We shipped a lot of ore, and the bosses were happy. It was too good to last, I guess.
Three months later Mel Vigil called me into his office at the end of my shift and asked if Al was ready to mine on his own. I didn’t think I was the best judge of that, but seeing an opportunity to give a hard worker like Al a break, I said he was good to go.
Al was on his own.
Beginning of the End
Shortly after Al was promoted to miner, Mel told me I would no longer be working twelve-hour shifts. I had enjoyed the money, but the cumulative effect of working so many hours was exceptionally draining, both mentally and physically so, I was pleased to be assigned strictly day shifts and overjoyed at the prospect of seeing the sun every now and then.
Then Mel gave me some disturbing news.
“The geologists say there is still some high-grade stuff in the 502,” he said. “What we want you to do is start digging the sand-fill out. Start at the manway, take the bulkhead out, and start digging. Go in straight about a hundred feet. Don’t worry about left or right; just go in straight until you get to the face, and that’s where you’ll be drilling. It might take a while.” I was stupefied.
This would be my third time working the 502 stope. First I was mining it with Cal when the stope collapsed. Then I was put in charge of sand-filling the place, and now I was to take the sand out and start mining it again. It sure made me wonder what was going on. There had to be some incredibly high-quality ore in there and a lot of it if the plan was to remove tons and tons of sand to get at it.
I had a lousy weekend after that talk with Mel.
When I arrived in the lunchroom on Monday, Bill had assigned me yet another partner, and it was my buddy from the stuck ore chute fiasco, Al Gonzalez.
The one tiny bit of good news was that we would be getting paid a small contract stipend for each ore car of sand-fill we removed. I think it was around ten dollars a carload, but at least it was something. It was definitely motivation to get a lot of sand out in a hurry.