Down in the Mine: Black to Gray and Back
Cornwall, England
Story and photos by MJ Pramik (except where noted)
My thoughts raced in synch with the rumbling and rocking of the second-class rail car thumping me to St. Ives in Cornwall — that western finger of England poking into the Atlantic. Bright-colored British graffiti danced on the passing empty coal cars. I was traveling to meet friends in the beach town of St. Ives for a proper British holiday. Flipping through the Cornwall guide, I noted that visitors could go underground into the Geevor Mine, an abandoned tin mine in the far west of Cornwall, between the villages of Pendeen and Trewellard. This cinched my visit to the mine.
The syncopated clatter of the train and the image of the vacant rail cars sparked memories about my coal miner father down in the tunnels some 300 feet below the earth’s surface. I had always wanted to know how and what my father felt working in the bowels of the earth. He was a quiet man, not given to embellishments, favoring one- or two-word answers. I wanted to feel what he felt in the mine’s blackness.
The scent of machine oil caught at the back of my throat. Late afternoon light hung throughout the vacant Geevor Mine’s tin-washing room. A solitary fly buzzed in the yawning October air. The sharp smell of spent black grease brought up a vision of my father in our frigid basement unraveling his body from lubricant-immersed coveralls. Bent over and weary, muscles knotted from 12 hours in the coal mine, he’d peel off the black-and-gray-striped work clothes and toss them directly into the Double Dexter washing machine. His body sweat mixed with machine oil. The intermingling of these two smells was my father’s signature presence during my early years in rural Ohio.
The Wheal Mexico, Geevor Mine’s main dig, is estimated to be 250 years old. It operated as a tin-producing site until 1990, when the element’s price crashed, rendering the Geevor mining operation unprofitable. At that time, the mine linked 85 miles of twisting tunnels, requiring on average a million gallons of water to be siphoned out daily. Black tin still rests under the Geevor surface, too costly to remove. The mine now functions as a tourist venue. The land encircling the refurbished mine buildings stands bare, pocked with random chaparral ending at the Atlantic bluffs.
Descending into the Geevor mineshaft in the 21st century required little courage on my part. The mineshaft-turned-tourist-attraction’s smooth well-designed path alleviated any chance of my slipping or falling into an empty chasm. It almost seemed like a visit to Disneyland, with the Atlantic Ocean crashing off the cliffs.
I donned a burgundy laboratory coat and yellow hardhat to tour the Wheal Mexico. In the fully operating mine, the Geevor worker would descend via sets of long wooden ladders down 350 to 500 feet below the surface. However, I stepped through a passageway that dropped only ninety feet underground. Once inside the two-foot-wide shaft, my eyes quickly adjusted to minimal light. My body crouched only slightly in the short tunnel. The average height of the Cornish miner was recorded at five feet, two inches. My height.
Mine owners and the miners themselves considered it unlucky for women to enter the shafts. Females worked above ground. Known as Bal Maidens or Bal Maids, they smashed rock chunks into fragments and sorted ore from rocks by hand. Boys as young as five years old labored in the mine, though. Ten-year-olds loaded rocks into kibbles or large buckets, while 14-year-olds, considered grown men, could detonate gunpowder.
My father started his coal mining life at 14, leaving off high school as commanded by his strict father. This memory hit me in full force in the dim light and saddened me as it always did. My father had placed first in a statewide academic test. Not attending high school created a huge hole in his life.
In the Geevor shaft, I ran my hand across the cold, damp wall. I must remember to thoroughly scrub my hands because of the arsenic lacing the rock shaft, I reminded myself. Miners ate underground during their workday rather than climb hundreds of feet up wooden ladders to the surface. Squatting in a tiny cutout room, two men would grasp their meat pie — called a pasty — by the crust’s thickened end. They would discard this edge to avoid arsenic poisoning.
Tin mining required the men to work looking upward to hammer out the ore. They’d slither sideways through narrow shafts. Average life expectancy of a Cornish miner during the 1800s was 24 years. Accidents were frequent and many. In Hazards & Heroes in Cornish Mines, Allen Buckley told of teenager Jack Jarvis, who stepped onto loose rock and plummeted seven meters into a stope (a tunnel where the ore has been dug out). According to Buckley, “Jack lay there, fully conscious, but with a large piece of rock embedded in his skull and his legs and lower body buried by the rocks which had fallen with him.” After extensive effort, fellow miners hauled him out, and he returned to the mine six months later with a dent in his head that lasted his lifetime. Cornwall miners, young and old, faced death by gassing with carbon monoxide, explosions from gunpowder, and, later, dynamite, or sudden flooding of the entire shaft as storms pounded the sea against the tunneled cliffs.
Standing hunched in the black shaft lit by tiny bulbs, I thought of Jack Jarvis and tasted the tin dust hanging in the damp. Cornish men had eaten this dust daily.
So had Ohio miners. In March 1940, coal dust from an extreme explosion of methane gas devastated the Willow Grove Mine, five miles from my childhood home. Of 180 workers in the mine at that time, 73 died. Madeline Kanopsic, our long-time next-door neighbor, lost her husband Albert at age 33 that day. Madeline, pregnant with their first child, could never recall how she survived the ensuing months.
The Willow Grove Mine, owned by Hanna Coal Company, my father’s employer, boasted this “non-gaseous” mine was state of the art. Five years earlier, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had toured its underground two miles of shafts. After the explosion of black powder and invisible methane gas, with a force that tore hinges off steel doors and split girders as if matchsticks, all operating mines were then deemed gaseous. But 73 men lost their lives before any mine owners would admit the constant danger.
Like their Cornish counterparts in tin mine disasters, Superintendent John Richards and Outside Tipple Foreman Howard Sanders had raced into the Willow Grove Mine to rescue their coworkers. Several men dragged out comatose miners and revived them. However, Richards and Sanders searched further into the tunnels. They then collapsed, dying from “afterdamp “— unseen carbon monoxide gas. Twenty-three men survived the Willow Grove blast by losing consciousness on their three-mile journey to the mine’s entrance. Their faces lay on the ground near the “good air.”
Emerging from the Geevor shaft, I inhaled swiftly and deeply, unaware I’d held my breath while inside. I gasped, too, for the generations of Cornish men and boys who readied themselves each day for death — much like the Polish and Slavic immigrant miners did in eastern Ohio.
As writer Daphne du Maurier observed in Vanishing Cornwall, “Superstition flows in the blood of all three peoples,” and though she meant the Cornish, Bretons, and Irish, she could have been referring to the Polish Americans I know. Du Maurier continued, “Rocks and stones, hills and valleys, bear the imprint of men who long ago buried their dead beneath great chambered tombs and worshipped the earth goddess.”
My father, working in Ohio’s black tunnels as did his forebears in southern Poland’s underground labyrinths, wore a scapular medal — an amulet of sorts — to the Black Madonna, the Lady of Częstochowa, and other saints for protection from cave-ins, injury, and death. Methodism guided Cornish miners, while Catholicism brought the balm of community to my hometown.
Du Maurier might well have described my father when she wrote: “There is in the Cornish character, smoldering beneath the surface, ever ready to ignite, a fiery independence, a stubborn pride.” An early member of the United Mine Workers of America, my father was as stubborn as any Cornishman, laboring a long shift underground only to come home to hoe his quarter-acre garden in the summer dusk. And walking the picket line when forced to strike against unsafe and unfair labor practices.
He made his livelihood and cared for his five children by plunging into the underground daily.
He made his livelihood and cared for his five children by plunging into the underground daily. He left home at 11 o’clock at night on the midnight shift, his biorhythms inverted and askew. The Cornish miners most likely felt the same as they left the sunshine to their families above ground. In his waning years, my father recalled with crystal clarity his days down in the earth. “It was cool, quiet. You could do your work in silence. You’d hear only the hammer hitting the coal and rocks.”
Yet for him, like for all miners, the specter of death was always present. His Polish ancestors never wished for a quick death. They would pray: “From pestilence, famine, fire, war, and sudden, unexpected death, preserve us, O Lord.” The worst to happen was to meet death unprepared — away from home, lacking funds for a proper burial, or in a state of sin.
As I climbed out of the Geevor mine, my mouth dry and gritty, I thought of the Bible that served both the Cornish miners and my father’s people. The passage that said, “from dust we came and to dust we shall return.” Coal dust. Tin dust. Black or gray, much the same.
The Atlantic heaved and crashed against the boulders below. Sea air and sunshine brightened the late afternoon. I somewhat expected men and boys to pour out of the Geevor shafts and machine rooms, headed home to their families and a sturdy supper.
My first venture into Cornwall had brought to the surface neglected memories long submerged. The whiff of machine oil, a creak of a crank, dimness at 90 feet underground brought me to my father’s world. His work in the mines sustained him and his family.
My father has been permanently underground for seven years now. What would he think about today’s move away from coal, about the push to leave all fossil fuels underground? Or about his daughter’s signing every petition to keep coal locked below the earth’s surface. I now understand that mining — ripping open the earth’s innards to release carbon, fuel homes, adjust economies, and enrich the 1% — guarantees the destruction of the planet.
Verdant fields encircled the Geevor Mine site, adding to the poignancy of the moment. I gulped in the fresh sea air and felt my father standing beside me, surveying the landscape with his approving, crooked smile.
(A version of this essay appeared in Wandering in Cornwall. Mystery, Mirth and Transformation in the Land of Ancient Celts, Wanderland Writers, Oakland, CA, 2015.)
Reflection
With the climate crisis bearing down on the planet, chants of Keep It In the Ground! — meaning coal, oil, and natural gas — continue to reverberate in the public sphere, colliding directly with human greed and resistance to change. However, the United Kingdom, where coal use exploded in the early 1500s and continued its upward trend through the following centuries, has already committed to phase out coal power completely by 2024. In addition to helping the UK meet its net zero climate pledges, stopping coal use would benefit cleaner local air quality, reduce energy poverty, increase national energy security, and improve energy transport. When I first visited Cornwall in 2014, the ecological or human advantages of stopping mining, be it tin or coal, had been foremost on my mind. One country, the UK, has shown that such changes can happen fast.
