The Deep Dark (10 page)

The Launhardts settled into a nice, comfortable life. Janet ran the household while her husband worked underground as a pipe fitter up the road at Sunshine. She learned to deal with the dull ache of worry when she felt the rumble of a rockburst. Sometimes it felt as if a mini-earthquake shook the house, tinkling the dishes in the sink drainer and jostling the floorboards. Living in Big Creek gave Launhardt an even stronger dose of the daily rhythm of the mining life. Riding the bright orange Sunshine Mining Company buses with men from Wallace, Osburn, and Kellogg also provided the young pipe fitter with a better look into the lives of others caught up in the rhythm. Younger miners tended to drive to work, so the miners on the bus were often older down-and-outers, or those who just plain didn't own a car because they spent their money elsewhere. A few got in at one of the whorehouses in Wallace and Kellogg, indicating how they'd spent their nights. Boozy breath and talk of screwing some barmaid or waitress filled the stagnant air and shocked the former theology student. It didn't fit with his memories of Talache gold miners. The Sunshine crowd was nothing like those homebody miners. The men on the bus were seasoned tramp miners, and their lives were like their military or jail tattoos, ragged and colorful as hell. After shift, the men would leave Sunshine's parking lot, trails of cigarette smoke and cranked-up country music trumpeting the end of the day. And one after another they would slow down and rejoin the horde in front of the Big Creek Store. Launhardt pumped his brakes to squeeze past traffic, but he never stopped inside.

Bob Launhardt was a family man. In December 1957, his son, Rob, was born. Almost a year and a half later his daughter Julie followed. In 1962, baby Jeannie arrived. By then Launhardt had moved up the union ranks to chief grievance committeeman and finally president of the local. He was a good organizer and leader, and he did the paperwork that others couldn't be bothered with. When offered the safety job at the mine, he said yes.

On the morning of May 2, 1972, his inspection complete, Launhardt caught the cage to the surface and made his way to the showers in the shifters' dry. The cleanup was needed. Grime rolled around his collar, and his black hair clung to the nape of his sweaty neck. The trip underground had been extraordinarily swift. It was the only time he'd made it back topside before lunch.

10:50
A.M.,
M
AY
2

5000 Level

T
HE LATE-MORNING ROUTINE ON 5000 WAS INTERRUPTED WITH
an altercation between Butte transplant Ace Riley; his partner, Joe Armijo; and their shift boss, Bob Anderson. Riley and Armijo were angry that the stope they had been working was a loser, and they wanted another—one that would give up sufficient muck to pay out decent gyppo money. Riley, thirty-two, wasn't shy about making his point known, and his boss didn't care much for his attitude. Anderson refused to commit to getting them out of that stope without having to lose any pay. Riley and Armijo wanted action right then and there, but Anderson was more concerned about the day's production. He wanted them to get back to work and shoot their round. They'd talk about another stope later.

But Riley, a man with a deep bullfrog voice and an admitted hot temper, wouldn't let up. “There's no sense in taking that round today, or in doing
anything
more here.”

Anderson turned away. Riley, his dark, wavy hair and long sideburns dripping with sweat, got angry and switched on his drill and turned his back. It was a kind of “fuck you, boss” stance that miners frequently employed. No man can argue when he can't hear a word.

Anderson paid it no attention and left just before 11:00 a.m.

11:00
A.M.,
M
AY
2
4600 Level

T
HE DAY
'
S TEMPO TOPSIDE WAS A LOT SLOWER ON THE
MORNING OF
May 2 because it was the day of the company's annual shareholders' meeting. Most of the big bosses were gone. The men at the geology and engineering department took a little longer with their coffee and newspapers in the break room of the dull-yellow and blue building across from the administrative offices. They lingered, waiting for the paperwork to arrive from the shifter's shack with instructions about which stopes needed sampling.

Larry Hawkins, twenty-eight, was one of several Sunshine rock technicians, or “rock rabbits.” A big man at six feet and 220 pounds, he considered his job every bit as vital to the fortunes of the company as mining ore. The company, which frequently scrimped on development work, needed to know where the highest-grade ore was coming from and how much it could expect. Hawkins's job was to map the specific location of ore bodies and to retrieve samples from corresponding headings. That required charting the length and depth of the stope and the width of the vein on graph paper. The angle of the ore body was also recorded. A little hammer chipped off samples that he put in a little white canvas bag and ticketed for the assay office.

Rock rabbits weren't always welcome. Some miners figured they'd become experienced enough that they could see or even
taste
the quality of ore in their stopes. They didn't need a damned scientist to tell them they were working a second-rate stope—or one that was going to make them a buttload of money. Most gyppo miners were annoyed that they had to stop to let the technician do his work. Stopping cost them money. A few were always ready to catch a smoke break.
Just one cigarette, though.
Any longer and they'd get aggravated, too.

When the paperwork came, Hawkins, dressed in diggers, went down to 4600 to climb down the raise to 11 stope on 4800. The morning was a little quiet, oddly so. It seemed that the miners on the station at 4600 had kicked back a little early. A couple of the guys had removed work belts laden with tools and cap-lamp battery packs. Another was sleeping. There wasn't much bullshitting going on. Hawkins tied up the cords of a sample bag and looked around.
Seems like some of those guys must have had a rough night,
he thought. It was a little early for napping, as some men did every day during lunchtime, from eleven to eleven-thirty.

Hawkins finished and rode the cage up to the so-called blue room on 3700. Nobody who worked at Sunshine was really sure about how the foremen's hangout came to be painted a hue somewhere between baby blue and the bottom of a swimming pool. Some thought the color scheme went back to the 1950s, maybe earlier. Whenever it was, it was clear that someone had had some extra paint and decided that nearly every surface of the blasted-out room should be coated in pale blue. A substation, cordoned off with chain link, took up one end of the fifty-foot space. At the opposite end was a fourteen-foot-long desk with several benches—painted blue, of course. Shifters met there, ate, and did paperwork. Fluorescent and incandescent lighting kept the whole thing illuminated with a cool glow in one of the hottest sections of the mine. Gene Johnson, Harvey Dionne, and the Bush brothers, Bob and Jim, were among the men talking and drinking coffee when Hawkins arrived. It was a ten-minute ride on a Mancha Midget, a small, passenger-only, battery-powered train used to travel through much of the mine. Running a motor brought a little rush. It wasn't the life-and-death excitement of mining a stope or running a shaft, but it wasn't completely devoid of danger. Reeling down a track at fifteen miles an hour was fun—like a Disneyland ride on eighteen-inch gauge rails. At the Jewell, Hawkins took the cage to the surface, the brilliant light of day pouring in from the portal.

11:30
A.M.,
M
AY
2
3700 Level

S
HAFT REPAIRMAN AND MECHANIC
J
ACK
H
ARRIS AND HIS PARTNER,
Keith Breazeal, finished tightening bolts on the head frame of a new borehole on the 3700 level and returned the length of the drift to the station at 10-Shaft. Some of the passageway was barely six feet in height, suitable for a mine car but not for walking without affecting a Quasimodo stoop. It was lunchtime at the mechanics shop, where a bunch of miners, motormen, and other laborers assembled to eat and talk about their mornings. At almost fifty, Harris was one of the older men underground. Harris had been a mucker, a motorman, a cager, and finally a shaft repairman on graveyard, then day shift. It was a good life, and for the most part, time flew underground. Time to start, time to eat, and time to go home. He and his wife and their houseful of eight kids lived just down the road from the mine. Big Creek and Sunshine—everything a man needed—was right there. A sentimental fellow, Harris never removed a ring that his mother had made out of a steel nut when she worked at a Seattle shipyard during World War II.

After eating, Harris and Breazeal waited for the chippy to load up with timbers before the ride to 4400 for offloading. Cagers Randy Peterson and Roger Findley finished their work, and Harris, Breazeal, and Delbert “Dusty” Rhoads, a mechanic, stepped on. Breazeal pulled a cart with an acetylene torch and an oxygen canister. When they reached 4400, Harris noticed a light wisp of smoke coming down the shaft.

“What the—?”

Peterson and Rhoads got off to source the smoke, and Findley, Harris, and Breazeal continued down to 4500 to see if it was coming from there. It wasn't a working level, but it was used by shaft repair crews as a staging area for timbers and supplies needed on lower levels of the mine. The smoke didn't appear to be coming from there, and Harris didn't think it was all that bad. He'd been in smokier places. It never dawned on him that the influx of smoke in the shaft could be coming from
above
them. They decided to go up to 3700 to continue their shift. A mine car there needed welding.

But when Harris pulled the bell cord for the chippy hoistman to raise them to 3700, nothing happened. It didn't move. The smoke started to thicken so much that the men began to choke. Findley sought relief with a deep drag off the oxygen line from Breazeal's little cart before ringing the bell for the double-drum hoistman. The chippy signal, he thought, was out of order. He belled a second time, but no answer. Not even the response—two long buzzes—the “take five” signal that indicated the hoistman couldn't move the conveyance just yet. Two buzzes always meant “Sit tight and I'll be right at you.” Just dead silence. The men waited a few minutes before going over to the other side of the shaft, where the double-drum ran up and down in its separate compartment bringing in supplies from above, taking out muck from below. They planned to take the double-drum to 3700 to see what the hoistman was doing. They were willing to cut him a little slack. It was possible that the bell was out.

Harris squawked for the cage. A second later the cable began to move in that fast, reeling pace of a machine that at times seemed alive with its strength and force.

Cager Peterson appeared in the haze and pushed open the heavy steel-plate gate.

“What's going on?” he asked.

“We've got a fire somewhere,” Harris said. He and his partner got on, shoving the cart with their welding gear into the rear of the cage. “Ain't down here.”

A
BOUT THE TIME ROCK RABBIT
L
ARRY
H
AWKINS HEADED TOPSIDE,
foremen Gene Johnson, Bob Bush, and Harvey Dionne were guzzling the last of their coffee in the blue room when electricians Arnold Anderson and Norman Ulrich called out “Smoke!” from down the drift. The three foremen grabbed their lights and left to investigate. Smoke was coming from the 910 raise, a three-hundred-foot cut through old workings, long since mined out. Jim Bush and Harvey Dionne hurried to locate its source. Gene Johnson and Bob Bush went the opposite way, to 10-Shaft, to alert the crew.

Dionne climbed up a lumber pile to peer over the heading of the raise, a clearance of no more than eighteen inches. He twisted his head and fixed his cap light onto the dark gap. Nothing but black. He strained to see behind the wall. It was like staring into the empty blackness of a schoolkid's slate. He finally saw smoke—an enormous, undulating cloud—boiling behind the timbers. The source of the smoke was coming from the 910 raise. It had to be. Dionne climbed down, and he and Bush jumped on a couple of motors and went west down the drift, away from the smoke toward the Jewell. They met a muck train coming, and sent its driver back to close air doors while they continued on. Things were under control. Everything would be just fine.

11:30
A.M.,
M
AY
2
Sunshine Offices

P
ERSONNEL OFFICE ASSISTANT
B
ETTY
L
ARSEN, THIRTY-NINE, WAS A
short, round woman with auburn hair and nerves of Jell-O. At lunchtime, Larsen and other office women left the administration building for the employee break room in the immense green sheet-metal-clad building in the middle of the mine yard. It was a quiet morning, with all the bigwigs at the annual shareholders' meeting. Not that anyone took advantage, but they savored the freedom nevertheless. The women noticed smoke coming out of Sunshine Tunnel, on the mountainside north of the mill complex. Smoke also came from the big blue steel stack over a seven-foot-wide borehole called Big Hole. It exhausted air from the 1900 level to the surface.

“I've never really paid much attention,” one of the women said. “Maybe there's always that much smoke?”

Larsen didn't think so, but she wasn't quite sure. She looked up at the smoke, puzzled but unworried.

Larsen, whose sole office skill was typing a brisk 105 words per minute, was another of the South Dakota newcomers of the 1950s. Like so many, Betty and Duane Larsen went on hope and faith from the surging sea of prairie grasses to the dingy towns of the Coeur d'Alenes. Betty thought Kellogg was a dump, a smelly place with no lawns, unpainted houses, and dirt that wasn't even pretty like the black soil of the Dakotas. Even the Miner's Hat drive-in, a replica of a hardhat with a working lamp as its omnipresent beacon, sat in a cloud of dust along the highway. Larsen also noticed that the scruffy men were pale-skinned. Farmers back home were clean-shaven and tanned from outdoor work.