“In the sweet bye and bye, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.”
I last heard that old hymn at my father’s funeral and thought I had made my peace at last with the specter of death that had haunted my childhood. I thought so until Monday, Jan. 3, when a coal mine exploded in West Virginia, and in my heart.
Suddenly, I was 8 years old, a third-grader in the six-room schoolhouse two streets away from where the Le Visa fork of the Big Sandy River cuts a narrow band through the hills of the mid-Appalachia range in eastern Kentucky. I was frozen in my seat, my heart lurching into its familiar drumbeat – “Not my Daddy, please Lord, not my Daddy.”
The room had been momentarily paralyzed, as was the small town of 300 (“countin’ chickens and stray dogs,” my Daddy always said), and another town a mile up the road at the face of the mine, by the blaring, grating siren that meant only one thing in a coal camp: an explosion or cave-in.
It could not be my Daddy – a part of my mind understood that. My Daddy worked in a mine 40 miles away. But the sweat ran in a steady stream down my sides, and my stomach started trying to heave this morning’s eggs and biscuits up into the back of my throat. I swung my legs around and put my head down between my knees. The teacher had taught me that trick the last time a miner friend of my father’s had knocked on the schoolroom door. The minute I saw him, the room had started turning black around the edges.
In some deep part of me, every day of my life growing up, I knew that someday that knock on the door would be for me, that the teacher would walk down the aisle and put her hand on my shoulder and I would know my Daddy was dead.
But my father died at 89 years old in his bed, at the home my parents had made with my baby sister in Texas. His lung tissue was so blackened and dead from coal dust that each doctor (the latest ones so young they had no idea what a coal mine was) would shake his head in wonder. “He’s amazing,” they would say. “He has the strongest heart and will I’ve ever seen,” they’d marvel.
And the picture would come to me as clearly as though it were yesterday: my father in his late 60s, crawling up the concrete steps of my family’s house (I was visiting from my job in another world), his face completely black so that only the whites of his eyes and of his teeth showed as he smiled.
“I proved I could still do it,” he said. “The younger ones were taking bets that I couldn’t, but I showed them. I can still crawl out of a mine with a 180-pound man on my back.”
My father had served on one of the two best mine rescue teams in the United States for most of his adult life. He wasn’t stupid or arrogant enough to put another miner at risk – he had already promised my mother he wouldn’t go again if called. But he couldn’t bear to give up that card that said “certified in mine rescue.”
He had, as he had told us many times, “coal dust in my veins.” Yes, I would say to myself in anger when I was in my teens and 20s and 30s, and it will kill you some day – if falling rock or a methane explosion doesn’t get you first. I despised the place and the work that claimed so much of my father’s soul and that I knew without a doubt would one day claim his life.
I tried to fight the demon by getting to know it. I started demanding when I was 11 to “go inside.” My father would patiently explain, again and again, that although he knew it was simply a myth borne out of ignorance, most miners believed that a woman in the mine would cause the disaster all of us feared.
He brought pictures home and tried to explain what was so compelling about lying flat on his back, running a machine along a pitch black tunnel down deep under a mountain, tons and tons and tons of rock inches from his face. It was needed work, he said. It provided fire for people’s houses and for the steel mills up in Pennsylvania, so we could have cars and trains and the big buildings in the cities I loved to read about in books.
His friends all worked with him, he said. They took care of each other. And when I would cry and yell about why he couldn’t run a store like my friend’s father and go to work in a suit and not get all black and ugly, he would say sternly, “It’s honorable work. It’s what I know how to do. It puts food on our table.”
I always believed – and finally that belief outweighed the fear – that my father was the best man I ever knew. I came to know he was right about the honor of the work he did and that he had a right to do what he loved. I know he made mining an easier and less threatening job through his lifelong battle for mine safety.
But in this grim time, I cannot close down the pictures he drew when he came home from a rescue mission (nearly always in tears because there was so rarely a miracle). He knew what it was like from the stories of the few survivors of the few victories.
The explosion still beating against their eardrums, the men would do what they were trained to do. They would retreat to the farthest reaches of the mine. They would hang the special cloth that, with luck, would filter out the worst of the lethal dust. They would sit as quietly as they could, and take the shallowest of breaths, and hope that the rescue workers beat the air running out. And they would know that the odds were not good.
They would need to talk and would do so in short bursts to conserve oxygen. They would tell about miracle rescues they’d heard about and remind each other with absolute certainty that as long as their buddies above drew breath, they would never leave them down here. When too much time had passed, one or the other would start to sing, and then, remembering the need to save the air, would whisper the words. “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “The Way of the Cross Leads Home.” And, when the first one of them didn’t answer the roll call they were taking regularly, “Precious Lord Take My Hand,” and “In the sweet bye and bye, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.”
Sharon Sherman is managing principal
of GBSM, a
management
strategy, corporate
communications
and public
affairs consulting
company. She is a former Denver
Post reporter.
