The Deep Dark (22 page)

The two-hour life of the self-contained breathing apparatus only allowed for about forty minutes into a rescue before a man needed to return to fresh air. With 10-Shaft more than a mile from the Jewell, it meant the fresh-air base starting at the Jewell would need to be moved forward, closer to the shaft. Launhardt insisted they start moving methodically down the drift, sealing leaks as they went. It would be slow going, but it was the only safe way to get to the men trapped in the mine.

Rudd didn't buy any of it. Until a few moments ago, all he'd known was that he'd been called out of bed and told to get his ass over to the mine. A veteran shifter with helmet training, his neck veins plumped like night-crawlers on a rain-soaked pavement.

“We're not going to do that,” he said, his voice rising. “Were going back to look for people!”

He didn't say so, but Rudd blamed Launhardt for nearly killing Larry Hawkins, who, married to his niece, was family. Launhardt, Rudd thought, had made a huge error in judgment. Hawkins and Beehner didn't have training. And that's Launhardt's fault. Launhardt took those guys down there. It was a mistake. And a goddamn big one.

The ill-fated rescue effort on 3100 had cost one and almost two lives.

A
N HOUR AWAY IN
S
POKANE, WORD SHOT THROUGH THE SMALL
bureau of the United Press International that a fire was burning in a Kellogg silver mine. Reporter Jerry McGinn immediately claimed the story. Though only twenty-six, the flame-haired and mustached McGinn had a better grasp on the culture of north Idaho's mining district than most reporters. He'd been covering the valley since he was a student stringer. He'd learned that the best places to call for sports scores were the district's hook houses. The madam would hold the phone to her breast and call out for the scores.

In fact, if there was anything other than silver, zinc, and lead that put the Coeur d'Alene Mining District on the map, it was the whorehouses that had catered to the men of mining and lumber camps for decades. Kellogg had shuttered the houses in 1966, but some entrepreneurial women still worked above a couple of the downtown bars. Wallace prostitutes, however, serviced a steady clientele in 1972 in the Oasis, the Lux, the U&I, or the other houses that served all-American helpings of sex. The Horseshoe Bar, below the Oasis in downtown Wallace, was a favorite waiting spot for dads who'd brought their teenage sons. They'd check in their boys with the madam and wait with a whiskey shot or two. “Brought my son up to initiate him. His birthday's this week.” The son would call for his dad from the doorway, a boy not old enough to come inside for a drink, but ready to go home with a good story to tell.

If the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold cliché had any genuine basis, it was in Delores Arnold, a Wallace madam with a powder-puff-coiffed white poodle and a practice of giving back to the community in tangible ways. Gutsy and enterprising kids always made a beeline to Arnold for school fund-raisers. But beyond band uniforms, a police cruiser, and scads of other things she gave openly, she also provided a service that local cops felt benefited the district in much bigger ways. The transient workforce of miners and loggers needed a sexual release. Arnold's girls were the tonic. Every sheriff's deputy thought so. Wallace-born movie star Lana Turner was the district's prodigal daughter, but Madam Delores Arnold was its beloved and eccentric aunt.

Besides Nevada, no other part of the country had whorehouses as visible and accepted as Wallace's. Their existence wasn't the last vestige of the Old West, because in the district, the Old West still thrived.

Reporter McGinn happily reported the quirky tales of Idaho eccentricity, yet in all his pieces he wove in a thread of empathy. Mining district people were living and dying by the price of silver much the same way farmers lived and died by the weather. McGinn knew that they had good times and bad times, and that the worst and best could happen in the same week. And no matter how rough some had it, they'd left something worse to migrate to the district.

McGinn drove east from Spokane. Miners' lives were wrapped up in uncertainty because that was the nature of the business.
You go down there and risk your life, and if you live long enough, you get paid. If there isn't a strike, if there isn't a rockburst or a drop in the metals market or if your wife doesn't leave you, you just might be able to pay your bills that week,
McGinn thought.

The fire was just another obstacle for people always hoping for the best.

E
ARLY AFTERNOON,
M
AY
2

Bunker Hill Mine, Kellogg

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY AT
B
UNKER
H
ILL, IN THE
spring of 1964, college student Harry Cougher opted to camp overnight in his car rather than give up the bucks for one of Kellogg's famous rent-by-the-week rat-hole motel rooms. The smelter's seething black stacks dwarfed the town and smudged the mountains that dropped straight, and all at once, to the valley floor. If it was no longer the richest mine, Bunker Hill was certainly the district's biggest operation. Cougher stayed up half the night as heavy equipment lumbered along and workers dropped heavy kettles of processed ore, one after another. Working at Bunker Hill was more than just a summer job. His professor at the University of Idaho had set it up, saying Cougher had better get his butt over to Kellogg to see what he was going to do with a mining engineer's degree.

The first day at Uncle Bunk's, Cougher donned a white hardhat, letting every old hand know he was a trainee—the lowest rung. While Cougher could curse with the best of them in a bar or underground, his better-than-a-gyppo's vocabulary and professional aspirations gave him away. He sat next to an old-timer for that intimidating first ride down the mine's incline shaft. The old miner's dinner bucket sat squarely in his lap, and his eyes were fixed straight ahead. Cougher did the same. They were the only two people in the world as the cage went into darkness and low-hanging timbers whizzed overhead.

If he can do it, I can do it,
Cougher thought.

Eight years later, Cougher was Uncle Bunk's chief planning engineer—one of the youngest ever. He was in a meeting when the mine manager brought news of big trouble at Sunshine.

“A
helluva
fire,” the manager said. “There's black smoke rolling out of Sunshine Tunnel.”

Cougher was among a handful of Bunker managers who had completed extensive “hotshot” training on breathing apparatuses superior to Sunshine's equipment. There was a reason Uncle Bunk invested in advanced instruction. Other mines had bad country, with falling rock and rockbursts; still more regularly sent miners to the hospital for heatstroke. Bunker Hill had fires—about one a year. Old timbers and an antiquated electrical system that occasionally shorted out were the main culprits. Slushers were notorious for sparking, too. And at least once the shaft caught fire.

The Bunker Hill manager put the brakes on sending anyone to the rival mine.

“Let's wait until they call us.”

The wait was brief, and Cougher and several others—an engineer, a geologist, and a maintenance foreman among them—packed up their gear for Big Creek.

2:10
P.M.,
M
AY
2
Sunshine Mine Yard

O
N HIS WAY TO GRAB A BEER BEFORE HEADING HOME,
D
ENNIS
C
LAPP,
the skinny longhair who had escaped the mine after alerting Flory and Wilkinson, stood in the yard, mystified.

“Goddamn,” he said, looking at the hoist's massive cables. “How come they ain't moving? Shouldn't they be getting those guys out of there?”

“Ain't nobody left alive down there,” Ray Rudd answered, his face ashen and stony.

“Oh, come on,” Clapp said.

“No, I don't think so.”

“Oh shit.” Clapp lingered a moment before leaving. It couldn't be that bad. There were too many still missing. Among them were Clapp's cousin and Ron Flory's best friend, Mark Russell, twenty-nine.

Rudd stayed where he was. All that he'd been in his life—baker, rancher, sawmill hand, miner—couldn't have prepared him for May 2. He'd been a district fixture since 1951, when he'd answered the call of a colossal banner stretched across the old highway:
WANTED 500
MEN
,
BUNKER HILL & SOUTHERLAND
. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

D
OWN THE ROAD FROM THE SMOKING MINE, THE
B
IG
C
REEK
S
TORE
seethed with mounting dread. The watering hole had become the nerve center for women from all over the district. Sunshine's switchboard operator told callers that she didn't know anything, and referred them to the store. The place was overflowing, and Big Creek Store owner George Dietz was in fine form. Dennis Clapp, having just been given a reality check about the seriousness of the blaze, asked to use the phone. He wanted to let his wife know he was all right.

Dietz flatly refused. “Emergencies only.”

Clapp wanted to deck him.
Asshole,
he thought,
if this isn't an emergency, I don't know what is.

Cager Randy Peterson was also among those who showed up at the bar. As cold beer streamed down his throat, Peterson overheard another miner say he'd seen Jim Bush lay down his dying brother Bob on 3700.

“Then the rest are all gone,” Peterson said. “All that's out is all there'll be.”

“You don't
know
that,” said Dietz, acknowledging anxious faces around the bar.

Peterson looked over at the women. One was sandman Bud Alexander's wife, Celia. Mrs. Alexander's face was twisted in panic. Bud hadn't made it out. She tried to console herself that Peterson, a kid she'd watched grow up on the creek, didn't know what he was talking about. Others shot names through the air, but the twenty-three-year-old clamped down. It wasn't his place to tell some woman that only an hour ago he'd seen her husband buckled at the knees, hugging a T-shirt to his face. When a buddy pushed him for news about his own father, Peterson told a compassionate lie: “If he got back there in the fresh air and built a bulkhead, I think he'd be fine.”

In reality, the Sunshine men drinking at the Big Creek Store were as trapped as their buddies underground. They weren't going anywhere until it was over—one way or another. All they could do was stare into the bottoms of their beer glasses as if answers could be found there. Women watched the door. With every new face in the doorway, silence fell and hearts jumped in unison.

Miners sequestered away from wives and girlfriends repeated the same questions over and over, as if truth could be found in the juiced mind of the fellow one barstool over. They wanted to know what their pals were facing underground, what they
had
faced already. Were guys stomping each other to death over a self-rescuer? Or were they helping each other out? What the hell had happened? And why? Sunshine's safety program came up frequently in their rants. Some held Bob Launhardt responsible for not teaching the crew how to use the self-rescuers. Many more blamed Sunshine management for not getting people out fast enough. Ace Riley was among the angry and bitter. By then he'd sifted through the day's events, and his distress had turned into resentment. He was sure the apparent delay in giving the evacuation order was a chief reason the fire had turned into a disaster.

“If they hadn't been looking for that fire,” he said, “they'd have been out of there. The bigshot was in Coeur d'Alene, having that big meeting. All them bosses were scared to death they was gonna lose their jobs.”

And just as the idea that something very bad, something very
newsworthy,
was occurring, members of the local press had already entrenched themselves in Sunshine's personnel and accounting offices. A Spokane TV station's fifty-pound film cameras jostled aside adding machines and Dictaphones as reporters and camera crews rearranged desks to their liking. No one could figure out how reporters had made it to Big Creek that fast.

I
T WASN
'
T MUCH TO LOOK AT, A FLAT-ROOFED, LOW-RISE BUILDING
of painted cinder blocks, but KWAL radio (“Silver Dollar Radio, 620 on your dial!”) was Communications Central for the district. Just off the highway in Osburn, KWAL was not only the third-oldest station in the state, but the only one that disseminated the valley's news. Whatever was going on made it to the ears of sales manager Paul Robinson, thirty-two. Nothing, Robinson knew, escaped his listeners. Between the mélange of tears-'n'-beers country music, rock, and Golden Oldies tunes of his playlist, Robinson infused the airwaves with district news and high school sports.

When calls about the fire came, Robinson, a compact man with sparkling eyes under heavy black brows, was completely perplexed. He'd been underground at Lucky Friday, and considered it the world's largest steam bath. Sunshine, he'd heard, was the same way.

It would take a thousand gallons of gasoline to start a fire,
he thought.
Water's everywhere down there. Dripping off rocks, timbers.

Robinson made two phone calls: first to Sunshine, where he learned that no one knew much, except that the situation was serious and it was going to take some time to get the men out; and then to the Federal Communications Commission. Robinson asked for permission to stay on the air past the normal 11:00 p.m. signoff. FCC approval came straightaway.

Over in Wallace at the elementary school, the intercom had the timbre of a walkie-talkie. Fidgety kids grew still, however, when the announcer said the after-school basketball game was canceled.

“There's a problem at Sunshine Mine,” the voice said. “Some of our coaches won't be able to make it today.”