Assign 1 Adventure on a Shaded Stream
Jeremy sat in the car’s back seat and frowned at the trees and fields. “Do we have to go to this dumb old farm?”
“We are visiting your uncle, aunt and cousins, buddy,” his dad said.
“Yeah but it smells bad and all the cows and sheep do is stand around and eat grass. It’s boring.”
“You can play with Jill and Cory,” his mother said.
His father turned off the road and onto a long gravel driveway between plowed fields. He parked near the farm house. Uncle Dennis came out of the barn with two children. Cory was Jeremy’s age, eleven, with red hair and freckles. Jill was a year younger with long blond hair. Both smiled when they met Jeremy.
He visited them two years ago. They didn’t play video games much and all they talked about was animals and the farm. None of this interested him in the least. He was sure he would not like them any better today.
His dad said, “Why don’t you run along with Jill and Cory for awhile, buddy? Have a look around the farm.”
“Yeah, come on, Jeremy. We’ll show you some neat stuff,” Cory said.
Jeremy doubted it.
His cousins giggled and raced toward the barn. Jill looked back and said, “Come on, slow poke. Our dad tried an experiment and we want to see if it worked.”
“What experiment?” Jeremy asked.
“He put an orphaned duck egg under a chicken,” Cory said. He had a big grin on his face.
That didn’t sound very interesting.
The tractor rutted dirt outside the barn door. “Look. They must have just hatched,” Cory said. A chicken came out of the barn followed by four chicks. “The duckling’s the last chick.”
The duckling veered off, waddled to a small pond and splashed into the water. The chicken flapped her wings, squawked and ran around in circles on the waters edge.
Jill laughed. “That chicken is losing its mind.”
Cory laughed.
Jeremy didn’t want to laugh, but he did. “Why is that chicken acting like that?”
“Because she doesn’t know one of her chicks is a duck. She’s upset because it went into the water,” Jill said.
“Why?” Jeremy asked.
“Because she thinks it’s a chicken and chickens don’t go in water,” Cory said.
“Animals are really dumb,” Jeremy said.
Cory frowned. “It’s a chicken. She does what chickens do. Come on, Jeremy we’1l take you to the most peaceful place on the farm.”
They walked down a dirt path between pastures where cows and sheep grazed on grass. Cory led the way to a stream shaded by trees. The water rushed over rocks into pools. It sounded like a gentle breeze rustling leaves. Birds chirped, fluttered from tree to tree, and darted along the path.
“We come down here to fish,” Cory said.
“How do you fish?”
“You’ve never fished?” Cory asked.
“No. We don’t have streams like this in the suburbs.”
Jeremy shook his head.
“Shhhh,” Jill said. “Look.” She pointed to a large, gray bird with a blue back standing in the shallows. Feathers hung off its blue head like a tuft of greased hair.
“What is it?” Jeremy asked.
“A great blue heron,” Jill said. ““I think it’s a beautiful bird. They eat fish, snakes and lizards. Watch what she does. This is neat.”
The heron stood so still it looked like a plastic lawn statue. Without warning, it struck at the water, stretched its neck to the sky and gulped down a fish.
“That was fast,” Jeremy said.
“That was real fishing,” Cory said. All three laughed.
The heron looked at the children, spread its wings and rose into the air. It glided down the stream. “I love watching them glide through the air,” Jill said.
Jeremy wished he could explore the stream and go fishing. That would be fun.
Jeremy, Jill and Cory laughed and made a ruckus when they entered the house for dinner.
“Dad, can we come back again?” Jeremy asked. “I want to explore the stream with Cory and Jill. And I want to fish.”
Uncle Dennis smiled. “Your father and I were wondering if you might want to come out here for a weekend later in the spring.”
“Yes, I do. I really do. Jill and Cory showed me a lot of neat things.”
His father smiled and said, “Then it’s settled.”
Assign 2 The Mysterious Oak Tree
“I can’t wait to see the cavern in the trunk of the oak tree.” Sam said from behind Josh.
“Yeah, me too,” Josh said. He used exposed roots like steps and grabbed hold of sapling trunks to ease his way down a steep hill.
“We’ve stared at that tree from your parent’s deck for three years, since we were six.”
Josh said, “It could be the mouth of a cave that goes deep into the earth where little people or elves live. Like those elves in the cookie commercials.”
“Maybe we’ll get free cookies,” Sam laughed. “I’m glad we brought a flash light. Maybe we’ll find a leprechaun’s pot of gold.”
They made it to the bottom only to face a marsh matted with tangled, yellow grass and golden cattail stalks. Josh tested the dried vegetation and it held his weight. Halfway across the marsh they broad jumped a stream together, broke through the matted grass and sunk into mud.
“Oh, man,” Josh groaned, “I hope this is worth it.”
“Really.”
They came to a small pond where a pair of mallard ducks scooped at the muddy bank. The ducks muttered irritable quacks and moved away.
Josh climbed another hill. At the top, he sprang back when something flashed in font of him. A rabbit darted down the path and disappeared around a tree.
Sam laughed. “Wow. That scared me too.”
“Hey,” Josh said, “maybe it’s an entrance into another dimension.”
“Yeah, we might enter another world. Boy, would that be an adventure or what?”
“Really,” Josh said.
An old, rusty barbed wire fence greeted them when they broke out of the tree line. They weaved their way between the top and bottom strings and trudged up an old abandoned pasture. An oak tree stood alone on the hill. Its bare, gnarled branches twisted into the steel gray November sky.
“There it is,” Sam said. “We made it.”
They reached it. Two adult men couldn’t circle their arms around its massive trunk.
“Ah, I can’t believe it,” Josh said. “There’s no cavern. It’s just stained dark at the base.”
The weight of his disappointment dragged Josh to the ground. He took off his backpack and leaned against the tree. “All for nothing,” he said.
Sam joined him. “Yeah, three years of staring at it and thinking it might be something really neat and it’s a bust.”
Josh pulled two granola bars from his backpack. He passed one to Sam. They chewed on the tasty bars and stared at the top of the woods. “It was fun coming here.”
“Yeah, it was,” Sam said.
“I’ve never come this far into the woods before,” Josh said.
“Me neither.”
“Hey, there’s the legend of Rufcus the old hermit’s cabin being somewhere in these woods. People say he was kind of wizard or something like that. We can look for it on our way home.” Josh smiled. “That’d be fun.”
“Yeah.” Sam’s eyes lit up at the promise of a new adventure.
Testing Tom Cory's Manhood
Coal crumbled from the top of the ribs with a loud crunch. Tom Cory instinctively flinched and flashed his head lamp at the ribs and roof tinged the dark gray of old tombstones by a light coating of rock dust. Supposedly the crushed line stone mixed with coal dust suppressed the power of explosions.
Only the most optimistic of souls believed they stood even a small chance of surviving an explosion, with or without rock dust. Like spectral shadows in an ancient graveyard, the many possibilities of an untimely death haunted the dark corners of Tom’s mind. He pushed them into a memory bank he rarely visited.
Hoek laughed exposing a missing canine on the right side of his mouth. “Don’t worry, buddy, it’s just a squeeze. The roof pressing down on the blocks of coal puts a lot of pressure on the ribs. Hand me another bit.”
Tom pulled a bit out of an old ammo box and handed it to Hoek. “Haven’t worked the ribs for a couple years,” Tom said. “Did it back a few years ago as a utilityman when I first came into the mines. Been on the solids since then. Wanted top rate so I bid on this miner’s helper job.”
“The solids are tame. This is where the action is, buddy.” Hoek used a pair of pliers to snap the ring clamp on the bit and handed them to Tom. He put them in the ammo box.
Hoek traced the path of a clay vein along the roof with his head lamp till it disappeared into a block of coal across the intersection. The strip of jagged, dull gray rocks that overlapped themselves like scales was the remnant of a stream that ran through an ancient jungle millions of years ago Clay veins were unstable at best. Chucks of rocks could fall from them without warning. “That’s a problem. With three blocks out and no roof fall, that clay vein is a natural break line.”
“Let’s see what’s happening behind that canvass.” Hoek’s shoulders pulled his squat, sturdy body forward on bowed legs.
He pushed his way around the side of a yellow canvas at the end of the entry. Tom followed.
Layers of massive broken rocks filled the entry behind three posts. Tom frowned at the stark reminder of the forces they challenged.
“Let’s check the other side, buddy.”
They went behind the canvass on the cross cut side of the block. Their head lamp beams revealed a vast cavern stretching the length of a football field with stumps of coal and abandoned posts before the blackness swallowed the light.
Hoek spit tobacco juice. “That’s three blocks of nothing with a clay vein behind us. The roof out there in the gob is interlocked with this roof,” he pointed up, “and pulling down on it. That’s why we got this squeeze going on. See how those posts out there are bent like bananas and sweating sap at the top. There’s a lot of pressure on them, buddy.”
Tom heard a buggy’s whining tram motors behind them.
The rustling of the canvass jolted Tom and he spun his head to look for danger. Ronnie the boss forced his way around the side of the canvass and joined them. “Got posts and crib blocks to unload.” He scanned the empty gob. “Going to be a hell of fall when it comes.”
“Yeah, hopefully without one of us under it,” Hoek said.
“Tom, we got to get you some experience running the miner. Hoek will fender out the backside of the block and you’ll fender out the back quarter. Hoek will take out the front quarter. It’ll be the toughest. Might as well break your cherry.”
“Okay,” Tom said. These two appeared immune to the fear that rippled through him.
“Come on,” Ronnie said.
When they immerged from the canvas, the buggy, a large rectangular hopper on four wheels with a conveyor belt up the middle to the boom and a steel canopy over the operator’s compartment, sat in the intersection. The crew stood around it waiting for orders.
“Okay,” Ronnie said, “get those posts out of there and stick them over here. Put those crib blocks over there. Let’s go. I have to check the returns.” He disappeared into the darkness.
“Hey, Tab, you going to help,” Toad the lead utilityman asked as he pulled a post from the buggy. He had large eyes, a wide mouth and a pock marked face – he looked like a toad.
“Now you know better than that, buddy,” Tab said in slow drawl from the buggy’s kitchen. “I don’t leave this seat except to piss and eat lunch. There’s only two things I’m willing to do, run this buggy and retire soon.” The crew laughed.
Tom smiled. Tab was the oldest man on the crew. Like all the miners of his generation, he left school and followed his father into the mines to help the family during the depression. He started in the mines when they used picks and shovels and watched the evolution of the industry from early mechanization to the new continuous miners.
Ronnie came back as Tom passed the last crib block over the side of the buggy to Toad. “Tab, get that buggy out of here. Toad, Suitcase, Tapeworm, you take the new utilityman – what’s your name?”
“Billy.”
“Billy - and tear down that canvass at the end of the entry. Set six posts in front of those three posts there. You, guys,” he pointed at Hoek, Tom and Goober, tear down that canvas on the cross cut and do the same. And put the canvas back up. I’m going to see how Meatball’s doing greasing Goober’s buggy.”
Tom measured the distance from the roof to the bottom with two old five foot roof augers. They took turns on a two-man bow saw to cut the post. Goober set the post in place, Hoek put a small cap block on top and Tom drove wooden wedges under it with the flat end of an ax to tighten it against the roof.
Meatball the mechanic joined them.
“What, you can’t sleep?” Hoek asked. “We making too much noise for you?”
Meatball inspected the post they set with a mischievous glint in his eye. “Hoek, you can’t use more than two wedges on a post. You know that. If an inspector comes along and sees three wedges on this post, he’s going to write your ass up.”
“Hey, Meatball, in five hours that post is going to be under hundreds of thousands of tons of rock. Ain’t no inspector’s going to see how many wedges I have on it.”
“Suit yourself.” He held up his hands in mock surrender. “You want to break the law, that’s your business.”
“Hey, if all you got to do is aggravate me, I can tear up that miner in this next cut and give you something useful to do.”
“Why they call you Meatball?” Tom asked while he took measurements for another post.
Hoek let out an evil chortle. “Because when he first got married all his wife knew how to make was spaghetti and meatballs. He ate so many meatballs he started to look like one. So we named him accordingly. And only a real meatball would come up here aggravating a man about how many wedges he uses on a gob post.”
When they finished their jobs, the crew gathered at the intersection. Ronnie came around the corner a few minutes later. Toad, Billy, you guys put up a canvass at the end of the entry - from here.” Ronnie walked the length of the cross cut. “Turn it here and run it up to the face about a foot from the rib. Suitcase, Tapeworm, help them. We want air to flow to the face and sweep the dust into the gob.
“Tom, Hoek, Goober, you guys start building a crib here.” Ronnie stood at the corner of the block. Alright, let’s go.” Ronnie disappeared around the corner.
Tom scraped the bottom clean with a wide coal shovel. Hoek and Goober dropped three foot, six by six inch crib blocks beside him. He positioned two cribs parallel to each other, set two across them and stacked them to the roof. When he finished, it looked like a vertical crib.
While they tightened it against the roof with wedges, Tom asked, “Why do you guys call the bolter and his helper Suitcase and Tapeworm?”
“Suitcase Joe.” Hoek said with a broad grin. “He went out and got all drunked up one night and came home to find a suitcase on his front porch.”
“He’s divorced?”
“Nah, his wife let him back in - but he had to beg. And now, whenever he goes out on a drunk, he finds a suitcase on the front porch and has to beg his wife to let him in again.” Hoek laughed.
“And Tapeworm - his wife packs him three sandwiches, a bunch of twinkies and who knows what else. He stands a little over five and half feet tall, can’t weigh more than a hundred and forty pounds and eats like a continuous miner hogging out coal.”
Toad, Billy, Suitcase and Tapeworm joined them. The crew gathered around the crib like a family around a freshly decorated Christmas tree.
Billy asked, “What are we doing here?”
“Mining coal,” Suitcase said. “Man, you are green.” The crew laughed.
“I meant . . .”
“I know, Buddy. I’m just messing with you. They call this the ribs opposed to the solids. In the solids, you drive in the entries and cross cuts to make blocks one hundred by one hundred feet square. In the ribs, we take the blocks out.”
Goober, a country boy with a thick drawl, said, “You want to walk down the middle of the entry. There’s a lot of pressure on the ribs, the walls of coal. In a squeeze like this, they can blow out and crush you.”
“We split the block in half parallel to the crosscut and then split the front half parallel to the entry so it looks like a T,” Hoek said. “Then we take out the fenders and it all comes in behind us. We set the posts as temporary roof supports. We’ll remove the ones that don’t have too much weight on them so we can use them again on the next block. That crib there, it’ll hold as much weight as thirteen posts.”
“You think it’ll fall tonight,” Toad asked.
“Hope so,” Hoek said. “Those knuckleheads on afternoon got the block T’d. Then the miner broke down so they couldn’t take out the back fender. That’s alright, we get this block out and start on the other block, afternoon will have to move the equipment across the section to start the block between entries one and two.”
“That means we don’t have to move. Man, I hate dragging all that cable across the section,” Toad said.
“That’s if they don’t break down or decide to rob the barrier. They rob the barrier and that’s going to be a couple cuts,” Hoek said.
“Isn’t robbing the barrier against the law?” Tom asked.
“Of course it is. The law says you have to have a hundred foot barrier between sections - untouched. It keeps black damp, air with no oxygen, and other gasses in an abandoned section from seeping into a working section. The barrier also keeps water in an abandoned section from flooding a working section. But, when everything falls in, who’s going to see if you robbed the barrier?
“If you're going to rob the barrier, you want to do it down on number eight. It’s a bad idea to rob the barrier on number one where you got an abandoned section on the other side.”
“Why?”
“If you got bad luck, you stand a real good chance of robbing the barrier where someone robbed it on the other side. And nobody has worse luck than that poor bastard Mike Rovkavich.”
“What happened to Mike?” Goober asked.
“Daylight left us the front fenders on the block between number one and two entries. Mike decided he wanted a few extra cars of coal so he told me to rob the barrier on the left side of 2 Butt 18 Face. He figured he had a hundred foot barrier so a couple cuts would leave plenty of coal in it. Halfway into that second cut the face burst open and tidal waive of water rushed out of the abandoned section. It looked like the Poseidon adventure. I jumped off the miner and started running with the rest of the crew. The water was half way up our calves before we reached the dinner hole. Mike came splashing after us screaming, ‘Get sand bags. Get a sump pump.’”
“What’d you guys do?” Toad asked after he got control of his laughter.
“Hey, that poor bastard was on his own as far as we were concerned.
“The company doesn't ask too many questions as long as the coal's coming out the section. But when you need a canoe to get from the dinner hole to the miner, they got a lot of questions.”
The laughter was infectious and uncontrollable.
“I’m hoping this here Ronnie guy is smarter than that. But when you get right down to it, they’re pretty much all the same.”
Ronnie came back around the corner. “Hoek, fire up your miner and load coal.”
Hoek climbed under the steel canopy and into the kitchen. He flipped the switches and the miner hummed to life. He eased the tram levers forward and it clip-clopped down the center of the entry on steel tracks. Tom followed behind the boom to keep the three inch cable and water hose against the rib. Hoek swung the boom to the left, turned the corner and started into the cut.
He swung the boom to the right and angled the head against the coal face and turned on the water sprays Dampened, layers of black coal and thin ribbons of gray slate glistened in the miner’s halogen spot lights. The rotating head rumbled to life.
Hoek forced the whirling head into the coal face. The miner bounced and lurched, dust billowed, sparks flashed and the sound of steel covers rattled.
Tab eased his buggy under the boom. The conveyer sprung to life with a metallic clattering and mounds of coal spilled into the buggy’s hopper.
Hoek brought the head half way up the cut, lightly touched the tram levers to push the head in further and brought it down. After he filled Tab’s buggy, it lumbered off to the loading ramp to load coal cars. Goober’s buggy replaced it. Hoek drove in to the cut about four feet.
With his head lamp, he signaled Tom to watch his cable as he backed out of the cut. He attacked the upper cut and continued the process till he broke through to the fallen rocks of the gob.
Hoek backed out of the cut and turned the miner off. Toad took measurements with augers, Suitcase, Tapeworm and Tom carried posts and Billy and Hoek cut them with a bow saw. They set two rows of three posts in minutes and Hoek went in for another cut. Hoek finished the last cut on the back fender before dinner.
After dinner, Ronnie said, “Okay, Tom, into the kitchen.”
The power of the of the thirty-five foot machine crawling over the bottom, its steel tracks crushing the loose coal under it, vibrated through Tom. He maneuvered into the cut, turned on the sprays and head. The violence of the head ripping at the coal rushed through his body.
With the cut almost finished, he felt antsy when a buggy didn’t pull under the boom for a couple minutes. He scanned the roof with his head lamp. The miner’s pump motor hummed. He caught movement on the rib beside him from the corner of his eye. Black coal dust slid down the rib in fine ripples like oil. The ripples glittered and danced in his head lamp’s light.
He raked his memory banks for the meaning of it. Terror jolted his body when he realized it announced an impending fall. He grabbed the tram leavers and slammed them into reverse. Instinctively he turned and flagged Hoek with his head lamp. Hoek grabbed the cable. Suitcase, Tapeworm, Meatball, Toad and Billy ran to help. They looked like a tug of war team.
A buggy swung around the corner. Everyone flagged him off with frantic shakes of their head lamps. It disappeared.
Tom spun his head to the gob. The roof sagged. Like a thousand volts of electricity, terror surged through his body. His heart raced. He swung the boom to keep it from plowing into the rib. His hand released a tram lever and the miner swung around the corner. He jammed both tram levers into full reverse to make the miner crawl faster. It didn’t. He heard a loud roar and a gust of wind smacked his.
A thick, murky cloud of dust absorbed his head lamp beam. It slowly cleared to reveal layers of flat rocks piled high in the entry. The roof had broken off at the clay vein and wiped out the quarter block of coal, the crib and the intersection. Tom sat motionless and stared at the fall.
He jumped when a hand slapped him hard on the shoulder.
Hoek stood beside him grinning. “You saved her, buddy. You got her out – good job.”
Suitcase stood next to Hoek. A smile spread across his face and his eyes gleamed with amusement. “You need any shit paper there, buddy.” Hoek and Suitcase laughed.
Tom smiled. “Nah - I’m okay. Man, that was a close one.”
“Yeah but you hung in there, buddy, and brought her out like a guy born on that seat,” Suitcase said.
Ronnie came up. “Good job, Tom. Now that’s what I call breaking your cherry.” Everyone laughed including Tom.
“I need a drink of water,” Tom said. He left the miner and walked to the dinner hole. He pushed his way through the slit in the canvass. A block wall that separated the return where the dust and gasses blew out of the mine from the rest of the section closed off the far side of the dinner hole. Three posts with boards nailed to them at the top to hang lunch pales on and half way down as back rests ran down the middle of the crosscut. Benches of boards on cinder blocks lined the ribs and either side of the posts. Tom took his igloo thermos off a nail from a top board and gulped cool water.
His adrenalin came back to normal and he started to tremble. He plopped on a bench and leaned against the back rest. He felt tired. He closed his eyes, sucked in a deep breath and exhaled.
The crew came through the canvass for a drink. Ronnie followed them.
“Okay, after you get a drink, Toad, Billy, move that fan around and start setting up the next cut. We have to start T’ing the next block. Suitcase, Tapeworm, you help them. Then get your bolter moved around. Hoek, Tom, get the miner moved over to the next block. Let’s go.”
Tom followed the crew out of the dinner hole grateful he didn’t have too long to ponder surviving his first roof fall.
