The Deep Dark (25 page)

Launhardt wondered how it was that the readings could be so high.
Why had no one any inkling?
That afternoon he heard a story relayed by graveyard-shift employees who said they'd smelled smoke at shift's end. Maybe there had been a warning, after all. Launhardt filed a note about the incident, and started a file that would grow by inches every day. He didn't know whether the report was significant or just the result of the power of suggestion and the need for the miners to offer up something in order to be helpful. He mulled over the scenario. Did the scent of smoke and the fact that miners reported headaches indicate the fire had been smoldering and releasing CO for some time? He looked in the direction of the shifters' shack. Several ambulances had lined up with back gates open. Stretchers and woolen blankets quilted the ground. All were waiting for men. By then he knew the fatality count was already high enough to be the worst disaster in the Coeur d'Alenes since 1936, when ten miners had perished at the Morning Mine. That mishap hadn't been a fire, but a mechanical failure that occurred when a flat hoist cable rope broke apart where it had been spliced together, a practice long since abandoned with the advent of wire-rope cables. By far the worst mining disasters occurred in coal mines. Industry estimates had it that since 1900 more than 90,000 coal miners worldwide had died on the job. A 1942 underground fire in Manchuria left more than 1,500 dead. The deadliest on American soil occurred in Monogah, West Virginia, when an underground fire killed 361 in 1907.

The most devastating metal-mine catastrophe had occurred near Butte, Montana, in 1917. The North Butte Mining Company's Granite Mountain Mine shaft caught fire when an assistant foreman's open-flame carbide light accidentally ignited oil- and paraffin-soaked insulation material on an electrical cable. That fire took the lives of at least 167 men.

A
FTERNOON,
M
AY
2
Interstate 90, West of Kellogg

T
WO YELLOW BUSES CARRYING THE
K
ELLOGG
W
ILDCATS TRACK
team were just outside of Coeur D'Alene, after losing a three-point squeaker against the Post Falls Trojans, when an Idaho State Police car, red light flashing and siren screaming, signaled them to the shoulder. Some kids thought one of the drivers was getting a speeding ticket—and that would have been cool.

“We need to get the kids back to Kellogg, back to the school,” the cop said. “Don't send them home. The administration will make an announcement there.”

“What's going on?” someone asked.

“There's been some serious trouble at Sunshine.”

3:30
P.M.,
M
AY
2

Big Creek Neighborhood

L
IKE A POTENTIAL LOVER ON A BARSTOOL AT CLOSING TIME,
Kellogg looked best, many thought, in the last hours of the day. The town's smelter stacks and grimy storefronts were always a little unforgiving in the light of a sunny day. But at night, Bunker Hill operations blazed through the gauzy air of the smelter. Pete Chase was ten when his father, Sunshine Mine manager Marvin Chase, brought him from Seattle to check out the place they'd call home. The boy was awestruck by nighttime Kellogg. The smelter was a big battleship buried into the hillside, and floating on a sea of smoke. Nothing, he thought, could be cooler than that.

Although fresh from Boeing in Seattle, where he'd spent a decade working as an engineer and support manager for the aerospace company's spare-parts division, Marvin Chase's interest in mining was hardly transitory. From rockhounding on the modest apple orchard in eastern Washington where he grew up to earning a degree in mining engineering, Chase had always been deeply interested in all facets of the industry. Over the years, he'd worked at zinc, silver, and lead mines. At the Atomic Energy Commission, he'd served as chief of ore reserves for the government's interests in uranium mines. Even so, to some around the district he was just “the Boeing man from Seattle.”

Marvin Chase was quietly ambitious, a little different from most of the mine managers in the district. He didn't define himself solely by his position. He was a homebody who went to church and didn't cheat on his wife. Some of the men who ran district mines were flashy—players who picked up women while their wives stayed home in houses with wall-to-wall carpeting and wrought-iron patio furniture. After a day at Sunshine, Chase was content staying home with his family, playing with their Airedale, or working on his stamp collection.

Marvin and Viola Chase had six children—four girls followed by two sons. The age gap between siblings was such that the oldest were out on their own and it was a family of five and a dog that made the move to the district. Mary, an eccentric teenager who played the zither, was certainly like none of the other girls at Kellogg High. Rob and Pete rounded out the still-at-home brood. The children found themselves high on the pecking order. On their first day in church at St. Rita's, the priest introduced the family to the congregation. The boys were embarrassed by the misconception that came with their father's new job. Some kids thought that because Marvin Chase managed the mine, that meant he owned it. One boy asked if they had gold bricks or diamonds stashed somewhere in their big white house on Big Creek Road.

The district didn't have a trace of what Chase considered “fringies” such as there had been back in Seattle. No hippies, no college students waving cardboard signs. The Vietnam War was raging, and though the young men of the district were on the battle lines, the political turmoil that surrounded the war was nearly absent. It was like stepping back to the 1950s. It was hard for a newcomer to wrap his mind around it. Part of it was that there were indisputable connections among the district's people; many even shared family histories as marriages occurred and dissolved over time. But there was something at work that kept the fabric from being woven too tight. People came, went, and returned. That was certainly true among tramp miners, who zigzagged from one district to another. There was also quite a bit of migration among the upper echelon. All of the moving around made it simple to renew old bonds. Men connected at the Wallace or Kellogg Elks, executive wives at bridge clubs, kids at school.

More reserved than his older brother, Rob, seventh-grader Pete Chase had a difficult time adapting to Big Creek. Though a pack of teenagers lived on the creek, only one or two boys were his age. He was too young to tag along with the older boys—though they sometimes took him fishing up at the mine bridge. But the afternoon of May 2 had been the best day of his life. His class had its annual picnic along the frothy banks of the south fork of the Coeur D'Alene River, and for the first time in a long while, the Chase's youngest felt that he belonged to the group. When he heard there was a fire, he figured everything would be all right and never gave it a second thought. When Pete got home, he shot some baskets until his mother came outside. Her face was the picture of anxiety.

“Come inside,” she said quietly. It was disrespectful to play a game with a tragedy taking place right up the road. “Some people have been killed up at the mine.”

It was sunny and clear when Rob Chase got off the bus in front of the big white house. He had never seen so many vehicles headed up to the mine and parked along the road. Many were hastily double-parked. As the teenager made his way into the swell of onlookers, an afternoon shift worker yanked him aside.

“Bob Bush and some other miners are dead,” he said.

Rob knew serious injury and death came with the extraction of ore. The phone rang late at night enough times in the big white house to make it understood that things occasionally went wrong underground. He went up the hill.

A young Sunshine worker still in his teens said 3100 was an inferno. Rob, completely stunned, stayed mute. He had no idea what to say.

If that's true,
he thought,
how are we going to get those guys out?

About that time, a man who had trained to be a priest, but had ended up at Sunshine, asked the mine manager's oldest son to help keep reporters out of the yard. He was stationed at the bridge over the creek.

“Just tell them no one's allowed in,” the man said.

B
UNKER
H
ILL HOTSHOT
H
ARRY
C
OUGHER
'
S CREW WAS TAPPED
FOR
another attempt at 3100, following Launhardt's failed effort. Of the five on Cougher's team, only graveyard shifter Ray Rudd was a Sunshine employee. Rudd was a good choice. He made it his business to keep tabs on who was coming and going at
his
mine. Miners called him “Mother,” which was as much shorthand for “motherfucker” as for his tendency to keep them in line. He'd trained half the crew, including Wayne Allen and Charlie Casteel. Rudd and former partner Duwain Crow also shared a bond—they'd survived a serious cave-in in 1961. Rudd had sustained broken ribs, shoulders, and vertebrae, requiring him to wear a body cast from armpits to waist for five months. Crow had been so shaken he had needed tranquilizers to get by.

Tethered together by a nylon link line, Cougher, Rudd, and crew worked their way down 3100; CO readings were deadly. Charlie Casteel was standing upright, stiff and lifeless, just where Hawkins had seen him. By Cougher's estimation, Casteel was only a hundred feet short of fresh air. Cougher puzzled over a self-rescuer, which he presumed was Casteel's. It was in the muck fifteen feet from his body, toward fresh air.
Why is it in front of him? Maybe it slipped from his hand as he was running toward fresh air. Or maybe he turned back for some reason.

Moments later, deeper down the smoky drift, the crew discovered a clutch of bodies where men had collapsed where they stood. Rudd called out each man's name as he pointed wildly around the drift.

“That's Crow!” Rudd said through his mask. “That's Allen over there . . .”

The sight distressed the crew, though not one would have admitted as much. None wanted to say what weighed heaviest on their minds, that the others deeper in the mine could be doomed.

“Oh, to hell with it, pard,” Rudd said, giving into growing doubts. “Let's get the hell out of here. There's nobody alive.”

Cougher wouldn't hear of it. His light swept over the faces of the crew. “They told us to go back to the station,” he said, pushing forward. “We need to get back to the hoist room.”

The link line went taut as they moved down the drift. They could hear the hoist's rectifier sounding the alarm that the hoist was having mechanical problems, or had gone down altogether. The noise droned, growing louder and louder, mocking hopes and reminding them with each step that there didn't appear to be a soul to answer the alarm.

A
FTERNOON,
M
AY
2

Osburn

I
N
O
SBURN, WHERE
H
OWARD AND
S
USAN
M
ARKVE LIVED NOT FAR
from
KWAL'S
blinking tower, the Osburn Club, with its worn-out jukeboxes and card tables, was a regular hangout for miners coming off shift at the Silver Summit or Sunshine. Markve stopped in on occasion, but not on Tuesday afternoon, though now, more than ever, he could have used a drink. His lungs hurt like hell and his limbs felt shaky. Susan, twenty-two, a beautiful woman with red hair and pale, flawless skin, had seldom seen her husband home so early. She'd
never
seen him in such a state. His face was blank. He was an automaton. When he said there was a fire at work, she assumed that it had been a brushfire on the mountain.

“No,” he said, “underground.”

She studied his face, but there was nothing, just the flat affect of a man in shock.

“Is it bad?” she asked.

He indicated so with a slight nod.

“Did Dad come up?”

This was Louis Goos, the fifty-one-year-old miner working with Markve's partner's son, Bill Follette, twenty-three.

Markve said he didn't know and asked her to brew a thermos of coffee. He was going back up to Sunshine.

A flicker of worry came over her face, and Susan Markve phoned a sister in Montana. In minutes all six Goos girls and their mother, Delores, were en route to the district. While she waited with her two babies, Susan answered call after call as women phoned to ask if
she
knew anything. She told them she only knew what her husband had told her, and what she had heard on KWAL.

Later, when Markve returned from the mine, Susan met him at the door.

“Well, did you see my dad?”

When he told her that he hadn't, Susan insisted she wanted to see for herself.

“There's nothing for you to do up there,” he said. “You have to take care of the kids.”

“I
need
to go up there,” she said. “He's my dad.”

Susan loved her dad, though he hadn't been the best father—not by a long shot. Louis Goos had been one of the better gyppos at Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota, and he'd made a lot of money. He was an outgoing, take-no-shit, hard-drinking cuss who unfailingly put his own needs ahead of his family's. In mining towns, legends were built as much around drinking tales as around mining prowess. Goos benefited from all kinds of stories. One had him getting hammered in a Wallace bar. When a cop told him that he was too sloppy to drive home and needed to take a cab, Goos agreed. So he stole a taxi.

“You told me to take a taxi home” was his sheepish reply to the officer who caught up with him.

Whenever Goos drank, however, his mean streak worsened and his blue-green eyes, magnified by thick eyeglass, filled with rage. Susan, the fourth of his six girls, knew that whenever their daddy came home late at night, her mother, Delores, was in for trouble. In the years since her childhood, Susan would scour her memories for pleasant ones, but few stood out. Those that did were twisted. One time her mother had caught her looking for a high-heeled shoe in her parents' bedroom closet. Delores smacked her so hard with the other heel it drew blood. Seeing that, Louis blew up and lit into Delores, berating her for hitting their daughter. And though her head was hemorrhaging, Susan held on to that moment as a happy time.
My father really loves me,
she'd thought.