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"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.

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