Skip to main content

"He was a bold man that first eat an oyster."

"He was a bold man that first eat an oyster."
                                              --Jonathan Swift

There is an ice cave on Ice Cave Road in Decorah, Iowa.
That means that water seeps into the chamber in the winter
and freezes.  When spring comes, the outside earth and air
warm up, and the ice remains in the cave for months before it melts.
It is something like an old-fashioned ice chest, made of dirt
and rock rather than wood and tin and sawdust.

While out running one summer, I thought to crawl into the ice cave.
I never made it all the way in.  The cave, far better called a hole,
very soon shrank to an opening about the size of my body,
and it seemed to my rational and frightened mind, that only a fool
would squeeze into a place like that.  I backed out.

Those miners in Chile took elevators down into the earth,
and blasted tunnels off to the sides, following minerals.
Two thousand feet of rock hovered above them, not icy,
but hot with the pressure of mining company ambition.

He was a bold man that first crawled into an ice cave,
or who followed ore two thousand feet down a shaft,
listening to the rock above him groan while trying to shift itself
to relieve the pressure of everything above, testing the
cracks caused by the collision of ocean and continental
tectonic plates heaving against each other; one down,
the other up.  The tunnel collapse was inevitable, it being
a fragile wormhole under a mountain of heaving rock.

It is an occupation that should not require human sacrifice.
If it cannot be done without burying men, stuffing their lungs
with soot and stuff that kills them more slowly, it should stop.
If machines cannot retrieve those minerals, we should find
other ways to make the things we want to make, and to heat
our homes in winter.  The minerals and the coal will not last
forever, anyway.  It is to feed on our own carcasses,
to keep warm by burning the house, to piss in our pants
to avoid freezing.  It is worst when investors argue that
the real problem is too much mine and safety regulation.

Those are the people who should have to go down
to the seam in elevators.   Let them hear the earth groan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more