Inside Deep Mine 26

On a sunny March morning I drove north on Route 19 toward Deep Mine 26, Lick Fork, Lower Banner seam, in Dickenson County, at the extreme southwest corner of Virginia in the heart of Appalachia. There were coal-miner songs on the radio: "And when I die, dear Lord in heaven,/Please take my soul from the cold, dark mine." I passed through the tiny coal-camp town of Coeburn, where a sign read home of friendly people, and turned right onto a corkscrewing two-lane blacktop that led me past tired old farmhouses, dilapidated trailer homes and abandoned log cabins as I wended up into the mountains. Frequently I had to slow down to let 22-wheel trucks go hurtling past me, and every so often I had to stop to let children cross the road after the school bus dropped them off or to give a beaver a chance to scuttle by. While waiting I'd glance down the ravine at the rusted wrecks of cars.

Ten miles into the forest, by a set of railroad tracks, I turned left at a sign that read Deep mine 26 in. Up ahead in a hollow between two mountains I saw a line of Peterbilt dump trucks waiting their turn to park beside a towering pyramid of coal and have their cargo beds filled by shoveling bulldozers. I spotted a blue silo where coal was separated from rock and a conveyor belt that led down to a gaping black hole in the side of the mountain. To the left I saw a long, low prefabricated building with a sign on it: Paramont Coal Co., LLC, Deep Mine 26, a subsidiary of alpha natural resources, Abingdon, VA.

I had no interest in coal mines or coal miners until January 2, 2006, when 12 miners were trapped and 11 ultimately lost their lives in the Sago, West Virginia coal mine disaster. I began to think and read about coal miners, and now I was going to spend six days with them at Deep Mine 26. I would talk to miners 1,300 feet underground and at restaurants near their homes. I wanted to learn what I didn't know about coal mining. Most of all I wanted to know this: Who are these guys?

At seven A.M. 12 section foremen sat on folding chairs within the cheap pine-paneled walls of the mine superintendent's office. They wore hard hats, blue coveralls with glow-in-the-dark orange-and-silver stripes and steel-toe boots. Most of the men had beards, and their faces and hands were so filthy with coal dust that their eyes seemed to shine. They dipped Skoal from tin cans and spat tobacco juice into little plastic bottles while the superintendent, Henry Keith, 47, stood behind his desk and talked to them about safety.

"All this Sago stuff is drawing us so much attention, y'all gotta study this like a bible," he said. Jerry Bledsoe, 52, the mine-safety foreman, passed out paperback copies of Title 30 of the Code of Federal Regulations. "It ain't just the fines; it's the impression," Keith continued. "If we got 62 S&S violations, it'll give us a black eye, even if we know they're nothing." S&S stands for "significant and substantial"---violations that contribute to an accident or illness.

"God forbid we have an accident," Bledsoe said, warning about the media response. "They'll bring up our violation history. It's a knee-jerk reaction. The best time to beat a violation is before an inspector writes it up. They're human beings. Don't argue with 'em. Just put doubt in their mind."

Keith said, "Don't piss an inspector off. He's got you dead to rights."

"Fess up," Bledsoe said.

"If inspectors are told we've got a good reputation, that's what they see," Keith said. "If they're told we've got a bad rep, they're looking to write us up."

After the meeting Keith's assistant, Tim Vicars, took me on a tour of the building. I asked him if the Sago miners differed from those at 26. He said, "Well, West Virginia miners marry their sisters. But, hey, if your own family ain't good enough to marry, who is?" He led me into the locker room where miners shower after their shifts. One of the miners told me, "It's the highlight of my day to shower and put on clean clothes. My neighbor's a doctor. He leaves for work dressed up. Miners dress up after work."

We walked back to Keith's office. Vicars told me the mine is divided into thousands of rooms the size of a large bathroom. Miners cut out some coal going into a room, then cut out the rest as they retreat.

Keith's office door was closed, so I sat outside with a miner named Shaky Baker. He (continued on page 132)Mine 26(continued from page 56) would have looked like a young Wilfred Brimley if his face and hands hadn't been covered in coal dust.

"My grandpappy was a miner, my pappy was a miner, and now my boy's a miner," he said. "The more things change, more they stay the same." A miner for 26 years, Baker described himself as "an old former hippie trying to survive." Once, he told me, a rock fell on his back and crushed his feet while he was underground. "A man's gotta be stupid not to be scared," he said. "But, hey, my wife got six years of college, and I can make more in the mines than she can teaching in a prison." Miners make between $17 and $22 an hour. A person working in a retail store makes $5.15 an hour.

The door opened. "Come in, buddy." Keith went to a dirty window with a watering can. On the windowsill were Styrofoam coffee cups filled with dirt and frail green shoots straining toward sunlight. "Tomatoes," he said as he watered them. "When they're grown, I'll plant 'em outside. By July I'll have tomatoes for the guys' lunches." At home he grows apples, cherries, grapes, pears and bananas, as well as basil, peppers, garlic and tomatoes for a chicken parmigiana sauce. His maternal grandfather, Guerno Galosi, emigrated from Italy with his wife, Naz-zaranna, in 1928. During processing at Ellis Island, Galosi's name was changed to William Glass, his wife's to Miss Glass. A mine representative offered him a job cutting coal in Dante (pronounced dant), where Keith, one of six children, would eventually grow up. Keith's father died when Keith was seven. Keith went into the mines at 18.

"I watched those old guys go into the mines," he said, sitting behind his desk, "and that's all I wanted to be. I couldn't wait to take my lunch bucket down there and listen to their old war stories." Keith looks boyish for a man his age, his pink face clean-shaven, his blue eyes as mischievous as a child's. He started in the mines as a red hat, an inexperienced laborer, and progressed to become a black hat, an equipment operator. At 22 he became a white hat, a foreman. Mostly he's worked in union mines. "In those days," he said, "the union watched out for you. Today there's not much difference between union and nonunion mines except nonunion miners take care of themselves." Deep Mine 26, a nonunion mine, is well run and operated, says Phil Smith, the local communications director of the United Mine Workers of America, adding that nonunion guys sacrifice benefits for $1 or $2 more an hour in wages. The "tremendous difference" between union and nonunion, he says, is that when a nonunion miner goes to his foreman with a problem and the foreman doesn't agree with him, the miner has to call a federal hotline, which can take hours or days to deal with the complaint. At a union mine, a rep is on-site to deal with problems immediately.

Thirty years ago, everything in a mining camp revolved around the mines. "You socialized with miners," Keith said. "They were your family. Older guys taught younger guys." Unlike other jobs, coal mining instigated few rivalries because the close quarters demanded teamwork. Miners often lived in row houses owned by the mine company. They shopped in the company store, which had three sections: guns and tools on one side, clothes and dry goods on the other and groceries in the middle. "Everything was top quality," Keith said. "The best cuts of meat. You charged it, and the company took it out of your check. The stores vanished in the late 1970s because they'd become a headache for the mines to keep up." Also, Wal-Marts began appearing near small coal camps to take advantage of miners' disposable income.

Mining camps in the past had a strict social hierarchy, with nonmine workers at the bottom, miners in the middle and mine executives at the top. "When I was a boy I watched those big executives in their fancy cars, smoking big cigars," Keith said. "I realized that's what I wanted to be. A prestigious person who made decisions." Keith smiled. "Now I'm the guy I used to watch in Dante." Keith doesn't go down into the mines much anymore. He spends his days hosting the press, holding meetings, telling jokes.

"After Sago, you get some fear," he said. "Anything out of our control could happen. But if it's in our control, I can take care of you." Keith said miners know what to do when accidents happen, as they inevitably do. "There's a misconception that miners are dumb. We're MacGyver types. We can adjust to anything underground. Things change---the roof, the composition of the rock, moisture."

Bledsoe came in with miner's gear for me: a hard hat with a safety light, safety glasses, coveralls with red-and-silver stripes and steel-toe rubber boots. Over my shoulders he hooked a harness that held a 14-hour battery for my hat light; a self-rescuer, a canteenlike container that held enough air to last an hour; and a methanometer, which measures methane and emits a sirenlike noise if it detects too much. I didn't tell Bledsoe I was claustrophobic and feared being buried alive. I just signed the mine's safety form.

While Keith made calls, Bledsoe and I stepped outside onto the deck that looks out over the mine's surface. Miners covered in coal dust moved in and out of a Quonset hut that serves as a warehouse. They hovered over machines, repairing them. Part of Bledsoe's job is to ride in the helicopter to the hospital with injured miners to see that they get the best care, and then to go into the mine and investigate accidents.

Keith, in his clean miner's gear, came out onto the deck. He pointed to the sky. "Wild turkeys," he said. They soared over a patch of pussy willows and disappeared into the woods. Keith pointed down to an old miner covered with coal dust, bending over to pick up a log. "That's the old man, Carson Vanover," he said. "He'll be 65 tomorrow. We're gonna have a birthday party for him. He made $140,000 last year, working 100 hours a week. We cut him back to 80 hours so he won't get hurt. Yeah, you can talk to him, but the old man don't go to nobody." Keith called out to another miner, a heavyset man with a beard. "Hey, Shug, this here fella from Playboy wants to talk to you." Shug flung the back of his hand at me and walked away. Keith laughed. "He's a preacher."

Keith and I went down to the man-trip that would take us into the mine. It looked like the bottom half of a Bradley fighting vehicle. Sammy Adkins, the miner working on it, is a compact man who looks younger than his 52 years, even with coal dust covering his bearded face like war paint. We shook hands but only after he took a little sideways glance at the dirt on his. Then Keith and I got into the vehicle and rumbled toward the gaping hole in the mountain. We were to rumble slowly down into the mine at a six-degree angle for 2,700 feet until we reached the bottom, 1,300 feet below. On the conveyor belt were two signs: Day shift 337 days no lost time accidents and evening shift 28 days no lost time accidents. We passed another sign, finish each day injury and accident free, then another overhead, 2,500 Feet.

The sunlight vanished behind us. We turned on our hat lights, which revealed the mine shaft ahead of us like a gray crypt. A cool blast rushed at our faces from the huge surface fans that blow in fresh air and suck out dirty air. The shaft narrowed, and it was as if we were moving down a funnel. We had to lean our heads toward each other to avoid hitting our hats on the mine roof. The floor became muddy. The odor of burning diesel fuel became stronger as we moved into narrower and narrower shafts.

At 1,000 feet below, the mantrip began bumping and rattling over the muddy mine floor. Big electrical wires snaked against one wall. The mine seam, where the coal was exposed, was less than five feet high now, and the roof overhead was covered with corrugated tin to keep it from falling in. We had to contort ourselves to avoid the big bolts that hold the roof up. Then we were on the mine floor. Keith and I turned off our hat lights. We were in darkness, blackness. I put my hand to my face but couldn't see it. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Nothing.

We turned our hat lights back on, and they bathed the shale walls, which were ribboned with coal, in a hazy, eerie gray light. Up ahead the shaft led into darkness. Other shafts shot off to the left and right, like ancient catacombs. We rumbled forward past a medical station---a stretcher and some rolls of tape---and then we were even deeper into the narrowing shaft, heading slowly toward the farthest end of the 100-acre mine. Here, miles from the mine's entrance, men were cutting coal. Keith told me each of the four working mines has a 10-man crew: four roof bolters, two miners, one shuttle-car operator, one foreman, one electrician and one miner to clean up. Miners haven't used picks and shovels since the late 1940s, when a diesel-powered machine called the continuous miner was invented to cut coal out of seams.

Until the early 1900s miners carried canaries in cages down into a mine to help them detect methane, which is odorless. If a canary dropped dead off its perch, the miners hustled out of the mine. Today sensors have pretty much eliminated the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning; only when miners are trapped for hours, as in Sago, does it become a concern. If a detector senses too much methane in the mine, miners call up to the surface to have more fresh air pumped down. If the amount of methane becomes extremely dangerous, the detector automatically shuts off all machines, and miners walk or run toward the surface, which can take as long as an hour. "In a disaster," said Mike Quillen, CEO of Alpha Natural Resources, which owns this mine, "the rule is, Get out of the mine. Only as a last resort do you barricade yourself in a room."

Keith stopped the mantrip, and we got off. Almost immediately my hat hit the mine's roof, 48 inches from the floor. High coal, as the miners call it. Low coal is any seam less than 30 inches high. Keith tried to show me how to walk hunched over so that my upper body would be parallel to the floor. He folded his hands behind his back for balance, like an old college professor pacing in his classroom. I lifted my head up again and clunked it against the roof. "Like this," he said. He twisted his head sideways and glanced up as if sneaking a peek. I grabbed at a seam of coal and it flaked off in my hand like a piecrust.

Up ahead, flashing red-and-silver stripes moved against the black velvet darkness: The roof bolters were at work. "That's the most dangerous job because they go into a room first," Keith explained. They worked hunched over, using a big machine that operates like an upside-down jackhammer to drill five-foot-long holes into the roof rock. Into those holes they inserted tubes of resin to hold five-foot-long screws, which bolted roof plates the size of cafeteria trays above them. The noise was deafening; the men worked by gesturing to one another with movements of their hat lights or hands. They put up a plate every 50 seconds, working quickly, seriously. Keith introduced me; the men nodded but said nothing and continued working.

Father down the shaft in another crowded room were the big machines: a continuous miner, shuttle car and scooper. The continuous miner worked closest to the seams, the other two machines behind it. They moved forward, backward and sideways, missing each other by inches. Keith motioned to me to flatten myself against a wall to avoid them.

The public has a grisly fascination with miners' deaths when they occur underground. Such deaths speak to our most primal fears of being buried alive hundreds of feet under the earth. But in truth most miners' deaths are caused by the heavy machinery they use in the mine's confined spaces.

The continuous miner, a loud, infernal-looking machine, can gouge coal from the wall at rates as fast as 38 tons a minute. The business end of it has a large rotating drum equipped with curvy teeth made of carbide steel and tungsten, which give it a weird, menacing medieval look. As the teeth cut coal out of the earth, the machine's two metal arms swept it back to the shuttle, which scooped the coal, pivoted 180 degrees and rumbled down the shaft toward the conveyor belt. Later the scooper would clean up what was left over. The continuous miner's operator stood a few yards behind it to the side. He flicked switches and pushed buttons on a metal box that hung at his waist from a harness around his shoulders.

The room was cold, damp and windy. It smelled of diesel fuel. Coal dust hovered in the air, but the air was still light, breathable. My back began to ache. I turned my head sideways and glanced up at the roof. It seemed to be pressing down on me like those moving walls and ceilings in horror movies.

I asked Keith how many hours a day men work like this. "Ten-hour shifts," he said. When I had asked Mike Quillen if miners ever came to the surface during their shift to eat lunch or go to the bathroom, he said, "Only wimps come out."

I signaled to Keith that I wanted to go back up to the surface. The man operating the continuous miner smiled at me, his white teeth flashing in his dirty face. "Why don't you stay a couple hours more, buddy?" he asked.

"That's hazard pay," I said.

He said, "I know."

There was a crash behind us like falling rock. Keith and the miners whirled around. Keith moved cautiously down the shaft until he almost disappeared. He called back, "Aw, it ain't nothing. Just part of the roof." We started walking back to our mantrip. One of the miners called out after us, "Be careful."

The mantrip rumbled through the shaft. Keith pointed to pieces of wire hanging like string from the roof of the shaft every few feet. "There are numbers on them," he said. "That's how we guide ourselves out. If a miner's trapped, we can locate him by the number. Nobody ever touches those strings."

I saw sunlight up ahead.

I took off my filthy coveralls in Keith's office and went to the bathroom. My entire face was covered with coal dust except for my eyes, which had been shielded by the protective glasses. I looked like a raccoon. My hands and wrists were filthy too. I scrubbed myself clean. When I got back to my hotel room I took a shower.

•

At eight that night I sat at the crowded bar in an Applebee's with Sammy Adkins; his friend A.B., the designated driver for the evening; and Eric, a coal-truck driver. Adkins was playing hearts and flowers with the barmaid, Christine, who was from California. Eric and A.B. swapped war stories. Twenty-eight members of Eric's family have been killed in mines. A.B. mentioned the South Mountain mine explosion of 1992. "Killed eight," he said. "I helped people get out from under rock in my day. Most of the time you can't blame no one. It's a hostile environment. But I'm as comfortable in a mine as I am here."

Eric grabbed a waitress walking by and kissed her. She told me her father had been crippled in a mine accident. Everyone in the area seemed to have stories. They told them after work and over drinks but never at the mines---that might bring down the wrath of God.

A.B. ordered another Coke. Virginia has stringent drunk-driving laws, he explained. "If you blow a 0.4, you go to jail and lose your license." For A.B. and Adkins, who live in Jenkins, Kentucky, at least 30 miles from their jobs, this would be a kind of death.

A.B., 47, has been a coal miner since he was 20. "If you live in eastern Kentucky and you don't work in the mines," he said, "you starve to death." A.B. wore glasses, had a clean-shaven face and neatly parted hair and dressed like Bob Newhart. Adkins looked like a miner on the town: blow-dried mullet, diamond-stud earring, Harley-Davidson jacket that seemed brand-new. Adkins and A.B. are members of a motorcycle club. "Miners are the only ones with enough money to buy a Harley," A.B. said. "Makes us a prize catch for women." A.B. is happily married with children. He works in a Kentucky mine, although he used to work in Alpha mines, which he described as the safest mines around.

"I wouldn't be happy doing nothing else," Adkins said as Eric left.

Our food came, and we ate in silence for a moment. Then Adkins asked how I liked it underground. Too cramped, I said. He laughed. "Hey, buddy, you was in high coal. To understand mining you gotta be in low coal."

"That Bill Jim seam in Bell County, Kentucky," said A.B. "That's low coal. Them's tough old boys in Bell County. They work in 22-inch-high seams. They wear knee pads and elbow pads and crawl on their bellies, using their elbows like legs for 10 hours a shift. The boys shoot out coal with dynamite and then scoop it up with a 19-inch-high shuttle they call a low-coal Charley."

Why would anyone work under such conditions? I asked. A.B. looked at me. "The money," he said. "The lower the seam, the more companies pay." Even the lowest-paid red hat makes twice as much as most nonminers in mining camps can make. Miners in this area can earn between $40,000 and $80,000 a year, depending on how much overtime they work.

Out in the parking lot A.B. said, "You know, when you turn on a light, it goes on because of me. I feel I do some good." He looked around at the many cars and noted, "Must be the first of the month." We got in Adkins's 2003 Toyota. It was as spotless as it must have been the day he drove it off the lot. He held up his hands to show me a ridge of black inside his fingernails. "The only place we can never get clean," he said. Miners are so obsessed with cleanliness, Adkins told me, they even dress in their best clothes to go shopping at Wal-Mart.

The next morning I went to the warehouse to talk to Carson Vanover, the old man, before his birthday party. He sat on a dirty chair in a dirty office, his face and hands covered with coal dust, his blue coveralls gray with it. He hunched toward me, his hands folded in front of him like a schoolboy, a big robust-looking old man with a young man's blue eyes. The miners called him "a look-up-to kind of guy." His father took him down into a mine when he was five years old, then left him alone in the blackness.

"No, sir, I didn't cry," Vanover said. "By 14 I was no longer afraid. It was like being home. I was proud to follow in my daddy's footsteps, and his daddy's."

In those days miners cut coal with picks and shoveled it into carts drawn by mules. There were no roof bolters, just rotting timbers; no methane detectors, just a little flame in a peaked glass on a miner's hat, called a possum light. When it flickered or changed color, there was too much methane in the mine.

Some of the early mines Vanover worked in used dynamite. "We drilled 11 holes in the seams," he said, "then we stuck in the dynamite, lit the fuses and shot the coal out. You had to get out of there real quick. You didn't wanna be hit by debris."

I asked why he started in the mines. "I was 18," he said. "I wanted to buy me a new car, a 1960 Chevy, turquoise and white, with a 348-cubic-inch engine. I paid $108.56 a month for two years."

Vanover proudly showed me his work sheet. At 65 he worked 13 to 20 hours a day, week after week. It annoyed him when Keith cut back his hours from 100 to 80.

His last vacation came in 1984. After he married, his wife once asked him when he'd be coming home from work. He said, "When you see me comin'." She never asked again. She once accused him of having a mistress, Minnie the Miner. He seemed to have no real interest in the money he earned except to buy toys---a boat, a camper, tools---he has no time to enjoy. "Anything I want," he said, "I get."

He has no plans to retire. "Some people say it's a dirty job," he said, "but I figure when your number's up, you're done. How many people took boat rides after the Titanic? You just gotta pay attention is all, or you're history."

Vanover's birthday party began at noon in the warehouse, where methane detectors and self-rescuers were stacked on shelves, each labeled with a miner's name. Every miner is responsible for his safety devices. About 20 miners had come up out of the mine for the party, a rare occasion for them on both counts. Keith had laid out a birthday cake, chili dogs and chips on a counter, and an ice chest filled with soda sat on the floor. The filthy miners hovered around the food in the kind of awkward silence workingmen exhibit in certain social situations. Adkins took a bite out of a cold chili dog and said, "They take care of us, don't they?"

Keith led the miners in a rendition of "Happy Birthday." Vanover looked embarrassed.

The men stood around, eating, talking, razzing each other. Keith introduced me to a man with a big belly. "Now, don't say nothing about his belly," Keith grinned. Somebody called out to Shug the preacher and told him he had no ass. Shug turned and wiggled what he had in his baggy coveralls. The miner was right. Everyone laughed. It was like being in a baseball locker room in more innocent times.

Later that day I drove to Clinchco, to the home of a miner and preacher named Jimmy Ellis. Clinchco is an impoverished Appalachian mining camp of about 400 people. Railroad tracks ran behind a line of rotting company row houses, a redbrick old-folks' home and a Triple T convenience store. A sign read, ready or not, Jesus is coming. At the entrance to Mill Street a gleaming plaque was planted in the earth, a memorial to the coal miners of Dickenson County, dedicated to those who lost their lives in the industry. More than 300 names were on the plaque.

Jimmy Ellis's house on Mill Street was a spotless yellow bungalow with four veehicles, as the miners called them, parked out front: a Ford F-150 truck, a Lincoln Navigator, a white Jaguar XJ6 and a Kia sedan so immaculate it was impossible to determine its age. Ellis, a chunky brown-skinned man with a miner's easy smile, met me at the door, wearing a shimmering brown dress shirt and matching brown pants. He introduced me to his wife, Cynthia, who was perfectly made-up and dressed in a silk blouse and slacks. In their living room were dozens of angel figurines with the faces painted black, a scale model of an old whaling schooner and photographs in gilt frames of the Ellises' four children---all were now grown and had gone on to college---and their grandchildren. One prominent photo was of Jimmy as a reverend, in black robes with gold embroidery and two gold crosses hanging around his neck. His church had recently burned down, the result of a kitchen fire. Alpha Natural Resources gave Jimmy $5,000 to help rebuild it. Paramont gave him $7,500. Mike Quillen gave him $1,000. He was with Jimmy on the helicopter that flew him to a hospital after he broke his back in a mine accident eight months ago.

"Mike Quillen called the whole time I was laid up," said Jimmy. "He's a good person."

"I worry about Jimmy after the accident," said Cynthia. "Him being slower." She glanced at him. "Older, too." They both laughed.

At 58 Jimmy wasn't supposed to return to work as quickly as he had. "I'm healed up enough," he said. "If I'm able to work, I gotta work. I'm not old enough to retire."

"We kiss and say we love each other every day he goes off to the mines," Cynthia said. Her brothers worked in mines, as did Jimmy's father. But as a teenager in Clinchco, Jimmy had no interest in them. He worked on and off in steel mills in Ohio, served in Vietnam, then went back to the steel mills until he finally accepted the inevitable in 1970.

"The first time I went down in a mine, I said to myself, Lordy, what have I done?" he said. "The coal seam was 27 inches. But I've been there ever since. I bonded with the miners. They're like family. We share personal life, not like the steelworkers. If my daughter's sick, the miners ask about her. Miners don't see no prejudice."

When Jimmy first started in the mines, he estimates, 50 percent of the miners were black. Now it's about three percent. "I worked in union mines until 1974," he said. "In those days the Man got away with murder. But today I like nonunion better. If you want something done, you don't have to ask. You just have to sacrifice some benefits for higher salary. Miners spend; we don't save. Alpha's the best mine I've ever worked for. They take care of you like family."

Jimmy has worked many different jobs in the mines. He has served as a laborer and roof bolter and has mined coal with dynamite and a pick and shovel. Now he's a section foreman. "I'm proud of my job," he said. "I've achieved my goals."

After more than 36 years of mining, Jimmy said, he could never work above ground again---not even his broken back could deter him. His accident happened on June 14, 2005. A two-ton rock fell on him. He crawled out from under it without help; then his crew got him up to the surface in 15 minutes. Within 45 minutes he was at a hospital. "My men did a great job," he said. He still walks hunched over from his back injury and his years underground.

"You can always tell a miner," said Cynthia. "Even at the beach they walk bent over." Jimmy jumped up and gave me his miner's walk across the living room. Hunched over, his hands folded behind his back, he twisted his head and glanced up at an imaginary sun. Cynthia laughed. "Yes! That's it. He even walks like that in Lowe's."

Jimmy said he had lived a full life before he found Jesus and was saved in 1990. "Like Saint Augustine," I said. "You got your fair share." Jimmy and Cynthia roared with laughter, Cynthia making little waving motions at her cheeks as if to cool a hot flash. "Some people are Christians all their life," she said, "so they don't know how to live."

"Amen!" Jimmy said with a sheepish grin. Then he added more seriously, "One day God told me, 'Anything you touch, I'll tear it down if you don't serve me.' So I became a preacher in 1993. I have 27 parishioners, some of them white."

•

The next morning I was in a coal truck loaded with more than 50 tons of coal dust as it left the mine, headed toward the Toms Creek Preparation Plant in Coeburn. The driver was a man in his late 40s named Everett Hutchinson. He steered the big truck past the sign that read Deep Mine 26 out, across the railroad tracks and onto the corkscrewing two-lane blacktop. He flicked on his CB radio and reported his position to the office. "Passing the yellow trailer." Then he explained, "Let 'em know where I am." The twisting road is dangerous for the big 22-wheel, 18-gear trucks, which weigh 21,000 pounds empty and up to 160,000 pounds loaded. Hutchinson pointed to a culvert at the bottom of a switchback. "Three trucks turned over here."

It takes Hutchinson an hour to make the 20-mile trip back and forth from the mine to Toms. He gets paid $18 for each run. He shifted gears, slowing the heavy truck around a sharp curve. After struggling up a hill, we came to a flat stretch of blacktop and hurtled forward at almost 45 miles an hour; it felt as if the big truck had become a runaway train. "It takes a football field to stop these things," he said. He slowed for a speeding car in the opposite lane. "My biggest fear is cars," he said. Often a driver will try to pass the truck on a blind curve or a hill, and just as often another truck will be coming in the opposite lane.

Hutchinson spoke into his CB, "RBJ," the call letters of an abandoned mine. A few minutes later we turned left at the sign for Toms, moved slowly up a hill and came to a weighing station. Then the truck moved up the grade to the hopper, which is like an open-sided self-storage room. Hutchinson backed the truck up, then dumped the coal onto the waffle-grid floor. From there the coal is put on a conveyer belt to a silo, where it is washed clean of dirt and rock. Then bulldozers load it onto waiting railroad cars that ship it all over the country.

Driving back empty to Deep Mine 26, the big truck hit 55 miles an hour on the twisting blacktop. Hutchinson told me he used to be a long-haul trucker in Baltimore. "But my daughter got tired of going through metal detectors to get into her high school." So he moved to Coeburn in 1990 and began hauling coal. The laidback country life was better for his family. He has been married almost 30 years to his high school sweetheart. "I knew her when she was seven and I was nine." He laughed. "Yeah, I pulled her pigtails." He turned to look at me. "It's scary. You know, we buy each other anniversary cards, and we get the same cards."

The following morning I was sitting in Keith's office talking to Jason Stanley, a 25-year-old red hat from a family with four generations of miners. He is tall, lean and boyishly handsome, and he had already acquired the miner's habit of dipping Skoal and spitting tobacco juice into a plastic bottle.

"I never thought I'd go underground," he said. "I thought I'd break the tradition. So I went to college for two years. I thought I'd be something great. But I couldn't figure out what I wanted to be." He smiled.

Stanley quit college and took a series of call-center jobs, most recently with Travelocity, for $8 an hour. "Travelocity broke my Appalachian accent," he said. "The miners make fun of my generic accent. They call me a Yankee." Stanley wasn't disappointed when his job was outsourced to India. In the summer of 2005 he married Katrina Elkins, from Whitesburg, Kentucky. He told her the only way they could have a good life was if he worked in the mines. "She was scared to death at first," he told me. "I explained how my dad never lost time in 25 years." So in October 2005 he went underground. "I was fascinated by the rock formations," he said. "It wasn't scary. The guys took me under their wing. I realized if I screwed up, I screwed up for everyone. It wasn't hard adjusting to older people, because they looked at everything in a funny way." When he got his first paycheck, Keith told him not to spend his money on a new car but to buy a beat-up truck instead. The next week Stanley showed him his used truck and then, grinning sheepishly, told him he'd bought a new Pontiac Trans Am, too.

Stanley spat tobacco juice into his bottle and said, "My father tried to discourage me, but now he's proud. I could be a miner for 40 years." He smiled in wonder. "The other day I went to McDonald's in my dirty uniform. People let me get ahead in line." Then he asked if I wanted to meet his wife. A few minutes later I was following his truck to Clintwood, a much neater, more prosperous-looking coal camp than Clinchco. Jason and Katrina Stanley's trailer is at the top of a hill dotted with other modest homes and one sprawling ranch house with a manicured lawn, new tan siding and four cars in the driveway. That house belongs to Jason's father.

Katrina met us at the door. She was, as the miners would say, "a bitty little thing," barely 100 pounds. I told her she looked like Uma Thurman. She gave me a hard look and said, "Are you saying I have a big nose?"

Jason jumped in. "He means you got a distinctive look."

"Jason says I look like Reese Wither-spoon," said Katrina.

I sat on a sofa facing a small TV. Before I could ask a question Katrina began talking. She told me she was a "surprise baby" her mother had at 37, after having had two sons. Katrina.'s father died when she was two, and she spent a lot of time with her brothers, fishing and watching football games on television.

The couple met at a Super Wal-Mart when Jason was a freshman in college. "Wal-Mart is like our Hollywood," Katrina said. "We drove around the parking lot and yelled at whoever we thought was cute." When Jason asked her out, she refused at first because he was 18 and she was only 15. Finally she succumbed to his entreaties. "He was so intellectual," she said. "I fell in love with his mind. Now he's my best friend."

"She watches football, I watch the Discovery Channel," Jason said. "I spend a lot of time thinking." He smiled sheepishly. "I'm trying to figure out the world.

"He can play the piano," said Katrina. "We both love classical music. He might be a miner on the outside, but he doesn't limit himself. I'm just enlightened listening to him. He's got a great heart. What I lack, he has; what he lacks, I have." Jason already has an old man's contemplative nature. He thinks before he speaks, whereas Katrina admits she may never have had a thought she didn't express. Jason said he hopes to be able to put Katrina through college so she can get a job she would like, maybe something with animals. "She had poodles," he said, "but I wouldn't let her bring them into our house because we had new furniture."

"He's like his father," said Katrina.

"If you drop a crumb in my father's house, you'll hear about it," he said.

I asked Katrina if she planned on having children. Her eyes grew steely. She said she had seen too many of her girlfriends get pregnant at 15. "I don't want to be an average person. I want to be something special. God created this beautiful world, and I want to see it all."

"I'm gonna take her to Virginia Beach," said Jason.

Katrina looked down as if embarrassed. "I've never seen the ocean."

When he first told her he was thinking of going down into the mines Katrina had cried, "Oh my God! Lord, you're going underground!" Then after Sago she was terrified to see him head to work.

"It's hard not being with him," Katrina said. While Jason works a shorter, red-hat shift from 11. p.m. to seven a.m., Katrina prowls her trailer, forcing herself to stay awake so that after he returns she can get in bed with him at two p.m. when he goes to sleep. When I commented that he must be tired a lot, she looked at me knowingly. "Oh, don't you worry," she said. "That's gotta happen."

Jason smiled at his wife. I remembered Carson Vanover, who never saw his own wife. I asked Jason about him. He said, "I asked Carson why he worked so much. He said work was his hobby. But that ain't it." He leaned over toward me, his elbows on his knees. "When he's in the Wal-Mart, he's just an old man. When he's in the mines he's the Old Man."

"Since Jason's been in the mines, he's become a man," said Katrina. "Some men are not even grown at 30." She smiled at her husband. "He even walks bent over like a miner in public. See the way he dips Skoal right from the tin? That's because his hands are dirty with coal dust." She sat there a moment, her hands folded on her lap. Then she said, "Jason values life more now. Death is gonna come, so you have to appreciate life more than be scared of it."

•

Later I stopped by the Paramont offices to say good-bye to Henry Keith. "I got something for you, buddy," he said. He handed me my dirty miner's coveralls.

When I got back to Florida I showed the coveralls to my wife, and she offered to wash them for me. I told her not to bother. I hung them on the back of my office door. The next morning, when I went back to the office and sat at my desk, I saw them.

10 Things to Know About Coal

Every Day 42,000 miners go underground to produce an average of six tons of coal an hour.

Underground mines accounted for 96 percent of all U.S. coal 50 years ago. Today surface mines account for 60 percent.

Two Thirds of underground coal extraction is performed by machines called continuous miners (pictured at right).

One Half of the nation's electricity is produced by burning coal in power-generating plants.

This Year 26 miners have lost their lives underground, seven on the surface. Last year 22 miners died.

The Deadliest underground mine disaster occurred in Monongah, West Virginia on December 6, 1907, when 362 miners died.

The Most plentiful energy resource in the U.S. is coal. Experts say reserves are 44 times larger than those of oil, and coal is cheaper to extract.

Burning coal, though cleaner than ever, still pollutes. Each year coal-fired generating plants release 1.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (the chief culprit in global warming), about six times more than natural-gas plants emit.

The Total number of coal-fired power plants in the U.S. is about 600.

Trade-Offs and hard choices are at hand. Next-generation coal-burning plants can trap more CO2, but only a dozen or so of the 140 new plants will use the new technology. Will the government mandate CO2 emissions limits---or not?

"We drilled holes in the seams, stuck in the dynamite, lit the fuses and shot the coal out. You had to get out of there real quick. You didn't wanna be hit by debris."

A two-ton rock fell on him. He crawled out from under it without help; then his crew got him up to the surface. Within 45 minutes he was at a hospital.