“BEFORE I HAD BEEN down a mine I had vaguely imagined the miner stepping out of the cage and getting to work on a ledge of coal a few yards away,” writes George Orwell in his classic account of British coal miners at work in the 1930s. What he found instead was that after exiting the primitive and sometimes dangerous elevator that had conveyed them deep into the earth, the miners had a long walk to get to the coal seam ”” if one can call it walking, through those low, narrow tunnels.
“[I]t is a tough job for anybody except a dwarf or a child,” Orwell writes. “You have not only got to bend double, you have also got to keep your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders and dodge them when they come. You have, therefore, a constant crick in the neck, but this is nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs.” After one to five miles of this ordeal, the miner reaches the seam and only then begins his workday ”” the part he gets paid for: 7½ hours of backbreaking labor, with perhaps a 15-minute break sneaked in to eat whatever bit of food he has brought with him.
The mines aren’t like that anymore, though they can still be deadly, as we are painfully reminded from time to time when we see the pictures of families waiting and fearful of what the rescue workers will find below.
We have what used to be a zinc mine here in NJ that someone bought and now schools and other organizations pay for guided tours through the mine. They have improved it from a safety and lighting perspective, but otherwise it’s pretty much exactly as it was left on the last day it was still used — miners helmets and clothes hanging up etc. I went on a tour their last year. I had absolutely no idea what it really meant to be in a mine until then. Not only was it dark and closed in, but the temperature never rises above about 55 summer or winter and there are pools of standing water everywhere on the ground, and dripping down from the ceiling. When the miners would come up from a shift, their clothes and boots would be soaking wet and they would hang them in the “drying room” to dry out. After 1 hour down there I couldn’t wait to get up to the light of day, notwithstanding that it was actually winter up top and the wind was howling. (Fresh air!) That’s not even getting into the back breaking and dangerous activities the miners were engaged in. I simply cannot imagine what it would be like to go down there day after day, month after month, year after year in order to be able to feed your family, buy a small house, and provide them with the bare minimum of a decent life. My respect and admiration for miners has been stratospheric since that experience. I recommend it to everyone. (Visiting a mine, that is, not being a miner.)
Tur the Lackawanna Coal Mine near Scranton. The tour is conducted by retired coal miners or relatives. It’s an eye opening experience. It’s really startling to realize that Southern apologists for slavery used the argument that Northern industrialists treated their workers much worse than the Southern slave owners. I never realized the power of that argument until I went down in that coal mine.