On a miserable morning of an otherwise glorious vacation, I stand in a damp, dark place shivering with cold. I’m several hundred feet below ground, wishing I were up above, where the brief summer of the upper part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is sticking at it, where flowers still bloom and red-winged blackbirds fly and monarchs feed on milkweed
But I stay underground because the story of mining grips me. This mine, in its day, was the deepest in the US and one of the deepest in the world. Miners descended its narrow shaft, and with only candles and carbide lamps to light the thick darkness, wrested copper from the rock.
Brutal work—early on using only sledgehammers and chisels and later, noisy pneumatic drills that spit fine rock dust into miners’ lungs. This new innovation earned the nickname of widow maker, albeit for death that was slow and suffocating, not sudden and sharp.
“Ten hours a day,” our guide says for perhaps the twentieth time, “six days a week.”
The deeper they went, the hotter it got. At the lowest level of the Quincy Mine, 6000 feet below ground, miners worked in a humid 95 degrees.
Ten hours a day, six days a week.
“And think of winter,” the guide says. “Up here in the North, we get snowfalls of over 200 inches a year with regular temperatures of ten degrees below zero.”
So at the end of ten hours of brute labor, as miners rode up the skipway, winter came new every evening—90 degrees, 85, 75, 55, 30, 20, 10, 0, -10. And at the top, miners made a mad dash through drifting snow and frigid winds to the changing house.
Cold, but glad to be alive. Quincy Mines had a casualty rate of 33 percent. This includes both deaths and injuries. But the death of a worker above ground didn’t count, even if injuries or the conditions related to death could be attributed to working in the mine.
Those who died were friends and fathers and brothers and sons.
I shiver. And from more than cold.
How can I begrudge these few hours underground?
“Ten hours a day,” the guide says again. “Six days a week.”
For a brief, inadequate moment, I stand there bearing witness to the miners. To the cost they paid to provide, what was at that time, 80 percent of the world’s copper. And to their families who far too often heard emergency-sirens, signaling that, once again, injury and death had come.
It’s one thing for me to read a story about mining in a comfortable chair. It’s another thing to listen to this story with my entire body. To stand where they stood. To feel the darkness and the dripping. To imagine the terrors of cave-ins, explosions, and toxic air. And to hear how miners were entrenched, not only in the earth, but also in economic struggles with large corporations.
To help us remember, we brought home a memento—a copper rose. The irony of the tragic origins of its beauty is not lost on me. But I take comfort in Toni Morrison’s words.
“Art,” she writes, “invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.”
Apple to Apple 