Silver Valley Look #2

Here's Ron Hileman, one of the nine survivors of the Quecreek mine flood of July, 2002. If I had seen the four people in this picture, say, at the Coeur d'Alene Casino near Worley, Idaho, I would have immediately thought they were from the Silver Valley. They aren't. Nor are the families and miners and structures in these pictures, taken in Harlan County, Kentucky. The men seen above, attending the funeral of miner John McCoy, who died in the Sago, West Virginia mine disaster of January, 20o6, they aren't from the Silver Valley, either. But that look, that look that comes from being in the face of forces beyond understanding, the forces of gravity, of carbon pressed for millions of years, of the heat of the earth as one moves more deeply inside it, and, most of all, the force of death, that look prevails. Miners and mining towns live in the company of death all the time.

This fact is largely ignored. For example, it's common, especially in the world of sportscasting, to romanticize and glorify the blue collar guy, the lunch bucket worker. To call a basketball player like, say, Ben Wallace, a lunch bucket guy is absurd. Unlike NBA basketball players, lunch bucket guys don't just work hard, they often put their lives in danger. They work on assembly lines, in front of blast furnaces, in the company of huge falling trees; they pull boards off moving belts, descend deep into mines, breathe paint fumes, coal dust, sulfur dioxide, bleach, and other toxins. Many of the blue collar guys I worked with in Kellogg, Idaho were constantly doing something to escape being conscious of their work: alcohol, weed, speed, acid, peyote buttons, snowmobiles, motorcycles, horse races, gambling: most of it done away from the work place, some, like the drugs, at the work place.

The Silver Valley Look does not belong to the Silver Valley. It's just where I first came to know it. Look deep into every luxury we enjoy, automobiles, electrical appliances, the production of electricity itself, batteries, slot machines, our paved freeways, rubber rafts, the books and newspapers we read, look deep into them and the Silver Valley Look will look back at you. It's a look that can be admired for all the labor and production it stands for, but it's also a look that reflects the careless nature of the American workplace, where dangers are ignored or compromised in service to the profit margin, but at the cost of some workers' lives and of many, many workers' souls. And maybe yours and mine.