R. Saunders - Underground and Radioactive

Sadly, my fabulous weekends in El Paso and Juarez came to an end when Ana Maria moved on to greener pastures.

Seeing her had been a wonderful break from the all-male world of the underground that I was living in. For my part I appreciated our time together and what seemed to me to be exotic adventures.

I was bothered by that breakup for quite some time—a little too long, as it so happened.

Al Friedt was yet another recent Grants High School graduate. He  had grown up in Grants, and I think there were others in his family working in the mines.

Al was full of enthusiasm of a kind I hadn’t seen underground. His aura was quite apart from the more basic motives of most miners. The good miners I knew went about their work driven by the need to earn a living first, then they got involved in competing with other miners to move up on the contract board, and then they became motivated by pride in their work. Al’s enthusiasm was different.

Al was a high-energy guy, a highly enthusiastic, happy young man who had no idea where he was going but was going to get there in a hurry. Maybe it was a consequence of youthful enthusiasm, but I think there was more to it than that. He epitomized Cal’s dual axioms of work like a mule and do something even if it’s wrong.

In lieu of any better idea, Al headed for the mines after graduation. Not being sure he wanted to work underground, he had started on the surface driving a front-end loader. Loaders had very large buckets and huge rubber tires and were used to load ore trucks, move sand to the sand-fill hopper, and clean up around the ore hoist under the headframe.

A lot of guys I worked with didn’t have any good stories of their time at Section 35 or didn’t know how to tell them, but Al already had some front-end loader misadventures to talk about.

Ideally front-end loader drivers would not drive up the sand pile but rather take sand gradually from the bottom. Doing it that way was easy, smart, safe, efficient, but evidently not much fun.

For some reason Al had decided one day to take his loader up the side of a huge sand pile. Apparently he was trying to be the pioneer of off-road front-end loader driving and wanted to test the limits of the machine. There was no other work-related explanation for trying that. But a big pile of sand was not the most stable terrain on which to drive a loader.

Loaders had large enclosed cabs with doors on either side that opened outward. Should a loader start to tip for any reason, it was easy for the operator to escape if need be by jumping out the door opposite of the direction the machine was tipping, thus avoiding being crushed.

As Al made his way up the sand pile, his loader started to slide sideways. Seeing that the whole machine was going to flip, Al jumped. He jumped out the wrong door, however, in the direction the machine was going to roll. Had the loader rolled over onto him, he would have been crushed, but he was somehow able to scramble away just in time, and it missed him. Both he and the loader continued rolling down the side of the mountain of sand.

It came to be a legendary story among the surface crew, but at the time of Al’s assignment to me I had heard nothing of it.

After that episode, Shotgun or Mel decided a better place for Al might be underground, and Al agreed, so he was transferred to me. Bill was the one who told me Al would be my new helper. Since I knew Al hadn’t been working underground, I asked around and heard some rumors about a loader incident. I heard it was bad but didn’t get many details other than Al was pretty stupid.

That worried me, because if he made a big mistake underground, we might not escape. Not having a choice regarding my new helper, I told Al it was great having him, but there was something I needed to know first.

“Tell me about the incident with the loader,” I said.

I was expecting a lot of excuses, denials, and misdirected blame, but what I got was a very funny story and the truth. I quickly learned that Al was far from stupid.

Satisfied and impressed, I came clean about the light in the stope. If it was going to be a problem, I needed to know right then.

“We have kind of an odd light that keeps showing up in the stope that you need to know about,” I explained. “Nothing happens and there’s nobody there, but it keeps showing up, so if you have a problem with that, let Bill know now. If not let’s go.”

Al’s response: “Oh yeah? What kind of light? I gotta see this. Let’s go.”

He seemed amused by my explanation of the mysterious light. I could tell he wasn’t buying the story, but I had the feeling if and when he saw the light it wouldn’t matter, so I felt much better about getting to work that day.

When we reached the stope, I still had drilling to do, so I picked that up while Al gathered supplies and stacked timber.

It was midmorning when the light appeared. I stopped drilling long enough to point it out to Al, but he had already seen it.

“Hey, there’s a light; somebody’s coming,” he said.

“No, that’s the light I was telling you about.”

“Nah, it’s too bright. That’s somebody.”

“It isn’t somebody, Al; it’s just a light that keeps showing up, but if you want to go see for yourself, go ahead.”

Just like all of us had done previously, Al took off to see who it was, and just like everyone else, he was back shortly, having been unable to see or find anyone.

“Does that thing show up all the time?” he asked.

“Nope, just a couple of times a shift at the most, and it never moves around.”

At that point he agreed that nobody was there. Unlike me, he thought the stope probably had a ghost, which seemed to amuse him greatly. He told me the ghost didn’t matter to him as long as it stayed put.

For the three months or so that Al and I worked together, we saw the light many times. It usually never moved but now and then would shift a little from side to side.

At some point we noticed that the light was no longer making its daily appearance. It was gone, and we never saw the light again.

The relationship I had with Al was much different than Cal and I had. Al was about five years my junior, which made a difference, so we had some banter that went back and forth, unlike with Cal. On the other hand, much like Cal, he didn’t find the humor in many of the things that happened underground the way that I did.

In fact, Al had just a bit of a sense of humor deficit. His serious side would come out from time to time in conversations as time went by.

While most miners would spice up every sentence with some profane pronouncement or other, I was more refined. Where many would say, “Fuck, that boss is a real asshole,” or “Shit, that fucking mucker never works,” I would say, “Boy, that boss is a real asshole,” or “Boy, that fucking mucker never works.” It was second nature to me and in some way seemed to add a more civilized tone to life underground.

Al and I had been working together a month when one afternoon, we had completed hoisting some very heavy twelve-foot timbers, and we were carrying them one by one back to the working area of the stope. I said, “Boy, these fuckers are heavy.”

Al dropped his end. As I was on the other end, it hurt when that happened because of the added weight, so I dropped mine too. He looked at me as serious as could be and said, “Stop calling me boy. You’ve been calling me boy every day for a month, and I don’t like it.”

I started laughing and couldn’t stop while Al stood there with a look on his face that said he was ready to do battle. Fortunately, I was so much bigger than Al that he didn’t attack me, although I’m sure he wanted to.

After I calmed down, I explained that “boy” was just an expression I added to most sentences. It took me a while, but I convinced him it wasn’t personal. His outburst persuaded me not to add “boy” to my sentences any longer, and since that day in the stope, it is a rare occurrence when I do.