William Krueger - Vermilion Drift

In the book, the photographs of the early years showed tough little men in shirts and overalls caked with mud, wearing leather mining caps, pushing ore cars. These, Cork knew, were muckers, the unskilled workers. They were Welsh or Slavic or Irish or Finn or Swede or German and came, many of them, directly from their homelands to work the mines. Others had come earlier, lured by the wealth of timber in the great north wilderness, and, as the forests retreated, had turned to mining. The towns they built-Chisholm, Hibbing, Eveleth, Coleraine, Winton, Kinney, Crosby, Mountain Iron, Bovey-were a patchwork of immigrant neighborhoods: Swedes on one side of the street, Finns on the other, Italians a block to the south, Welsh a block to the north. They were friendly in their work together, but in their neighborhoods, in their marriages, in their religions, they clung to the language and traditions of their own homelands and were suspicious of the others.

The mines grew in number and wealth, and the towns grew with them. Ore from the Range was carried by rail to harbors on Lake Superior and shipped all over the world. The Range became famous, the greatest supplier of iron ore on earth. The money from the mines built excellent hospitals in the communities and fine civic structures, and the Iron Range was known to have some of the best school systems in the nation.

To every blessing there was, Cork supposed, a dark side. The mine pits ate at the earth, ugly as cancers, and the tailings rose in red mountains that sullied the rivers and streams. And in the end, the demand for ore declined and the mines began to close one by one, leaving a population without recourse. The men were miners, bred from generations of miners, and the work they’d prepared for all their lives had vanished, with nothing at all promising on the horizon. A lot of people simply left, and life went out of the towns. Aurora had gone through this. When Cork was a teenager, after the Vermilion One closed, the town struggled to redefine itself. Iron Lake and the proximity of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness helped. The town began to court and to cater to the tourist trade and slowly reshaped itself around the heart of that new economy. Other towns didn’t fare as well and stood nearly deserted in the shadow of the great red mountains of ore tailings.

Cork closed the book and stared out the window. He could see the rugged, forested hills of the North Country stretching away like a beautiful, turbulent sea. With all his heart, he loved that place, which had been his home for most of his life. Although he couldn’t see the protesters beyond the trees that walled off the Vermilion One complex, his heart was with them. He told himself that what he was doing wasn’t about helping the mine become a nuclear waste dump. It was about ensuring the safety of the people who worked there, people he knew, and so was a different issue. Still, a part of him felt like a traitor.

He heard footfalls in the hallway, and Lou Haddad walked in, carrying a briefcase, which he set on the conference table and opened. He slid from it a single schematic, very old looking, drawn on material that had the feel of canvas.

“What did you find?” Cork asked, joining him.

Haddad said, “This is a map for Level One. This”-he put his finger on a tunnel outlined on the page-“is the Vermilion Drift, the first of the excavations dug when the mine went underground, in 1900. Everything looks normal until you get here.” His finger followed the lines of the tunnel drawing until it came to a place where the solid lines ended and were replaced with dotted lines.

“Why the change in how the lines are drawn?”

“Officially, the Vermilion Drift was closed back in the early part of the last century. A cave-in. The dotted lines show where the tunnel used to run.”

“So the tunnel’s blocked?”

“That’s what the map says, but I’ve been thinking about that. Some of the underground mines had real problems with cave-ins, but not Vermilion One. The rock here is simply too stable, one of the reasons for the DOE’s interest. And something else isn’t right, this drift beyond the cave-in. According to the schematic, it takes a sharp turn and heads east.”

“So?”

“The ore deposit runs the other way.”

“So the drift goes away from the iron?”

“That’s what the map shows.”

“You don’t buy it?”

“Not for a minute. Take a look at this, right here.” Haddad tapped the paper at a point a short distance beyond where the tunnel veered east. “That’s where the Iron Lake Reservation begins. The ore deposit runs directly under reservation land, I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think that, in those early years, they mined ore that didn’t belong to them.”

“How could they get away with it?”

“Probably just went about it quietly.”

“And when they were finished, they sealed the tunnel to hide what they’d done, claimed there’d been a cave-in, and altered the maps?”

“That’s my speculation.”

“This extension doesn’t appear on any of the more recent schematics?”

Haddad shook his head. “When the last survey was done, just before the mine shut down, the tunnel had been sealed for years.”

“Sealed how?” Cork asked.

“Timbered off. Which would explain why the newer maps simply show the tunnel ending. As far as anyone knew, it did.”

“But maybe it doesn’t?”

Haddad straightened up. “Let’s go see.”

On his way to Vermilion One, Cork had stopped at his house and picked up a sweater to wear in the mine, a cardigan his kids had given him for Christmas six or seven years earlier. It was red, with a white reindeer embroidered on the left side. He put it on in the cage as they descended. When Haddad saw it, he laughed and said, “Ho, ho, ho.” He wore a fleece-lined windbreaker. They both wore hard hats, each with a light mounted in front. For backup, Cork had brought the Maglite he kept in his Land Rover. Plott, the security guard on duty in the Rescue Room next to the framehead, had given Haddad a Coleman electric lantern.

It took no time at all to reach Level One. They stepped into the cage station area, which was only dimly lit. Haddad indicated the dark tunnel directly ahead. “The Vermilion Drift,” he said.

Bright sun, blue sky, green trees, sweet air, abundant life-all this was only a hundred feet above his head-but the solidness of the chill rock around him made Cork feel completely cut off from the world he knew. As he stood facing the dark throat of the Vermilion Drift, everything human in him cried out to back away, to return to the light, and for a moment he couldn’t make himself go forward.

“Claustrophobic?” Haddad asked with real concern.

“No,” Cork said. “It’s not that.”

“Alien, isn’t it?”

“Like I’m on another planet.”

“Imagine spending your whole life in a place like this, Cork. A lot of men did, my old man among them.”

In that moment, Cork felt a greater respect for Lou’s father and the men like him than he ever had before.

“You okay going on?” Haddad asked.

“Yeah. I’m right behind you.”

They walked slowly into a dark that, if their lights failed, would swallow them completely. The floor was flat, the tunnel itself a ten-by-ten-foot bore whose walls showed every scar of its creation. Cork had expected the rock to be red here, but it was dull gray-green.

“Ely greenstone,” Haddad explained. “Waste rock. They had to get through this to reach the ore. That’s what this drift is for. And see that?” Haddad pointed toward a short tunnel that cut off to their right. “A crosscut. The ore deposits didn’t flow in neat fingers. Sometimes there were offshoots, and crosscuts were used to get to them. Here, let me show you something.”