Under Ground - Part 3
Carl’s third day on the job at the coal mine started off when he found out he’d be making a return to working with Jay Smith’s crew, which meant he didn’t get in any trouble due to anything George might have said to the mine foreman. The mine foreman position was second to the mine supervisor position, Carl had been told.
During the mantrip ride to Jay’s section, he wondered if Jay had some other task for him for which he could laugh at him at the end of the day, like the muddy, wet, post-moving task had provided him.
The short video below gives readers a feeling of riding in the mantrip.
Upon arriving at Jay’s section, Carl took his dinner bucket to the dinner hole to leave there until it was lunchtime, or dinnertime as the miners called it. He wasn’t “getting” why they insisted on speaking this weird language, where activities and things had the word “dinner” included as a part of their descriptions.
Miners were like a whole different class of people, he concluded.
Jay Smith informed Carl that his job that day would be to make sure that the ramp where the shuttle car would bring loads of coal to the rail car, didn’t get too full of the coal that would naturally fall on the ground while the loading was taking place.
It was manual labor in possibly its most basic recognized form, Carl thought; a man with a shovel, whose task it was to use the shovel to move dirt, gravel, snow, sand, or as in this case… well, you get the picture.
Carl met a new miner co-worker at the ramp, who turned out to be the father of a kid that Carl played football with in high school. His name was Vince, he had a great disposition, and he was the first older miner he’d met who didn’t act like an asshole.
His son, Carl remembered, (and whose name was also Vince), played on the line, as he was quite a big boy. Carl remembered that during summer football camp for his junior year, Vince got himself excused from the energy draining, two-a-day hot practice sessions the rest of them had to endure, because he had a cyst on his ass.
He took a lot of harassment and was the most epic joke of any football camp ever, but he didn’t care. All he had to do was watch all of his teammates practice, eat at chow times, and sleep. It was his training-camp heaven.
As they talked, Carl got the idea that Vince usually did what Jay had told him to do that day, and though Jay may have assigned him to keep the ramp clean, Vince seemed like he would have rather been doing it instead. It seemed he felt threatened by Carl doing it.
Soon, out came the first loaded shuttle car full of freshly mined, Bituminous coal.
Finally, he was seeing a part of the actual coal mining process taking place; the part in which the mined coal would be taken outside of the mine.
After the shuttle car returned to the face to get another load of coal, Vince told Carl to follow him, and they walked to a point where they could see the cutting and loading of the coal into the shuttle car. He could see the continuous miner, and the guy operating it; a guy that had to have been in his sixties. His name was Roy.
Vince pointed Gary out to Carl, who happened to be standing beside another machine. Vince told him that both Gary and the machine were called a roof-bolter. Gary the roof bolter didn’t have anything to do while Roy the miner operator was cutting and loading coal, and vice versa.
It was a very noisy operation and very dusty. Carl told Vince he’d better get back to the ramp to clean the dropped coal, but as they walked, Vince said that the ramp only needed cleaning up about every third shuttle car. Carl was grateful that Vince was such a nice, helpful guy, giving him good pointers on how things were done.
After about an hour and after about five shuttle car loads had been dumped, Jay came out and asked Carl how he was making out with keeping the ramp clean, and both he and Vince told Jay that he had the hang of it. Then Jay told Vince he had some work for him to do at the face.
For the next few days Carl worked with Jay’s crew, keeping the ramp clean, and he had also helped the crew one day to bring in new wooden posts. He knew they used the posts to help support the mine roof, but he didn’t quite understand why, since they had Gary the roof-bolter and his roof-bolter machine to hold the roof up.
Well, he didn’t really know much about those things, just what he’d been told and what he’d absorbed. He really didn’t understand how putting a long bolt into the roof would provide support, because it seemed to him that they were just bolting the roof to itself.
Here’s a short video of a roof-bolter and his machine, doing what roof-bolters do.
At any rate, Carl was glad that it seemed he would stay with this crew and he wouldn’t get moved around anymore. But he soon found out that that was not the case. When he came in to work one morning, he was told that he’d be working with a crew that had to unload supplies that day.
That day turned out to be another lousy day for him however. The “crew” assigned to the unloading of the supplies were all older guys in their fifties and sixties. They talked a lot that day about the TV show, All in the Family, and how stupid Meathead was.
Not one of them said anything to Carl, other than at the start of the unloading when they told him what to do.
Carl thought the show was stupid, and especially Archie Bunker. He thought that the Meathead was the character that made sense and Archie was the moron; much like his co-workers that day.
It was the exact opposite of what the old guys felt about two of the show’s main characters. It was a perfect real-life example of what was described at the time as - cue the background suspense music - “The Generation Gap.”
Under Ground - Part 3 © free-reign 2020
Sources for images used in this post:
Public Domain photos are from Wikimedia Commons:
A Coal Miner: Image by Tuna Ölger from Pixabay
Loading Rail Car: Image by ENERGY.GOV / Public domain
A Side Note - In the video showing the roof-bolter and the roof-bolter machine, if you notice, there is a big hydraulic jack at the front of the machine, that the operator moves to put upward pressure on the mine roof, while he drills the holes and then inserts and tightens the roof bolts. The jack supporting the roof keeps the roof safe above the worker, since there are no bolts yet in that area. Once the bolts are in, they lower the jack and then move ahead and do the same thing.