The Long Tunnel: A Coal Miner’s Journal By Meade Arble Atheneum, 239 pp., $8.95 Bend down. Go on, I’ll wait. This review should be read under the kitchen table. Allow yourself 36 inches of clearance, no more than that. You can’t kneel: there’s icy sulphur water, three fingers deep, on the kitchen floor: water that’d burn skin off your leg. Count one scrape or bruise every time a shoulder touches table: the roof here is studded with brutish pins and hooks. Shovel, drag, lift, hammer: do something. You’d like to goldbrick, but work is antifreeze at 20° F., plus 30-mph windchill. And, given a geomorphic whim, the thunderous whole of Above could squash you flat as lichens. Stay in that position until you’ve finished these 804 words. Then project the discomfort through an eight-hour shift.
There are jobs that have all the ceremony of religion; or of a complex madness. Elaborate costume is one index. Miners prep and vest for work; they wear sordid regalia. Index Two is distinctiveness of place: mines are the under-sanctum, separate. Yet a third mark is shared risk: physical, psychic. Talk about getting the shaft. A coal miner lives in intricate jeopardy: finger, foot, hand, lung gone. And the mind, too, is sheared off, changed; ulcers pop and leak. Not just sociology: a complete anthropology is in order here. Miners are like men who have stood on lunar desert: different from us. Only the experience itself— almost in the evangelical sense of election, conversion, rebornness—can reconcile this difference.
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