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My grandfather was a coal miner.
He would occasionally tell stories about the mines, but I was too young to really understand what he meant when he described the low hum of the earth, the suffocating presence of several thousands of metric tons of rock above and below you, the shivering warmth of your fellow men, cooped up by dozens in an elevator as you descend deeper and deeper into the dark.
You’re contracted to go underground, to extract something precious from underground, and you leave something else--equally precious--underground.
One of the few things I vividly remember about my grandfather's stories is how he’d exclusively refer to the tunnels as . How oddly it struck me. Does he mean the mineral oozes? Didn't people make these tunnels?
He retired in the eighties when they closed the a few years after a coal dust explosion that killed twenty workers, most of them young men brought in as part of a state incentive to re-open coal mines to boost the economy after the petrol crises in the seventies. It was the worst disaster in the history of coal mining in the region.
After two centuries of extraction, the veins had dried up. My grandfather said that after generations of blood, sweat and piss as offerings, the entrails were finally satiated.
