Notes for "Down into the Mine"


Mines collapse my dreams.

It’s always the same. I stand outside a mine shaft. People I love are inside—trapped behind rock and dirt. I am alone, and I have a shovel. I dig and dig, but I know I will never reach them. I wake up crying.


From father to son
The blood runs thin
See faces frozen still
Against the wind

The seam is split
The coal face cracked
The lines are long
There's no going back
Through hands of steel
And heart of stone
Our labour day
Has come and gone


A real memory: I was teaching an American literature class at Marshall University in West Virginia. We were discussing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and focusing on the passage where he writes "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The group of students, mostly 20 year olds, were barely inching close to articulating an understanding of this statement when an older, returning male student—probably in his fifties—spoke up. We had never heard his voice before, so when it came, we all turned to look at him.

“Look at these” he said through the gravel in his voice. His large frame squeezed into a student desk, he held his hands out in front of him, fingers spread. They were tremendous hands, with big, thick knuckles. Dark hair sprouted from the backs of his hands and fingers. Scars cross-hatched the skin. If I had seen only his hands, I would have thought him an 80-year-old man. He tried to move his knarled fingers, and they barely wiggled.

“I know what this guy means,” he continued. “I spent most of my life down in a dark pit in the ground. I know what quiet desperation means. My grandfather died in the mine I worked in. My father died from black lung he got working in that mine. I expected to die down, too. That is just what men in my family did.”

He looked around at the younger students. “You don’t know what this means yet. You might even think I look silly here, while you plan your parties and make your dates. But my mine shut down, and I am here to do anything…anything…. to make sure I don’t ever go down in any other black hole again.” He fought back tears.


The glass is cut
The bottle run dry
Our love runs cold
In the caverns of the night
We're wounded by fear
Injured in doubt
I can lose myself
You I can't do without

A real story: My father’s father, my Papa, Michael Hudak, was born to immigrant parents from Solvakia. They lived in Exeter, PA, where my great-grandfather, Joseph, worked in the coal mines. When my grandfather, Michael, was ten years old, he was one of those little boys you read about in the muck-racking stories of the day who picked coal out of shale as coal cars ran underneath him. Many of these boys fell and lost limbs or died. However, he was glad to get the work at the same mine as his father. As new immigrants to America, the family needed the money.

That is, until the day that the mine caved in, trapping many miners, including my great-grandfather, Joseph, beneath the surface. My grandfather Michael waited outside with his brothers and sisters and his mother, only to learn that all had died down below.

Miners’ families were soon thrown out of their company provided homes once the main laborer died. Michael’s mother, pregnant with her eleventh child, went into labor early, and died soon after. My great-uncle, Johnny, married the girl next door, Helen, and they raised the rest of the children.


Yeah you leave me holding on
In Red Hill Town
See lights go down, I'm...


Hanging on
You're all that's left to hold on to
I'm still waiting
I'm hanging on
You're all that's left to hold on to


A story of a story: My Papa, Michael, grew up with a drive to get out of the mines, and he did. He painted houses and became a semi-pro basketball player. He told me about how basketball was played in his day. He said “It was five separate wrestling matches.” But more than that, it was an excuse for the explosion of anger that had no other expression. The organizers of the games placed nets around the court to keep the fans--mostly miners--from storming the players. At the end of each game, they would turn out the lights, hoping to stop some of the fights. After the buzzer would ring and the arena would go dark, my grandfather would climb the nets to try to get out of the worst of the fights. Hanging high in the air, he would laugh about the poor fools who got left on the ground. Others weren’t so smart.

Even though my father, uncle, and aunt did not work in the mines, they grew up in Appalachian mining culture--which they fought to escape. My uncle Michael, or “Oz,” played football at the University of Miami, then later for Kansas City and the New York Jets. My aunt went to college to become nurse. And my father got recruited to the best football and basketball programs in the country. He chose basketball (now not as violent) at UNC over football at Notre Dame because he visited his big brother, broken and bruised in the hospital, who told him “Whatever you do, don’t play football.” He didn’t. He played at UNC, then went pro for a short time, then became a dentist.

He got out.


We'll scorch the earth
Set fire to the sky
We stoop so low to reach so high
A link is lost
The chain undone
We wait all day
For night to come
And it comes
Like a hunter child


A real moment: S. spread a blanket on the rough ground, a small soft spot in a barren moonscape. We stood on top of a mountain stripped bare, its bedrock exposed to the air. We looked out over Mingo County, WV. His family owned that mountain and had mined it before he was old enough to understand what that meant. He had brought me here to show me, the outsider liberal protesting mountain top removal, what insiders know: there is no recovery after mining. “Over 10 years ago,” he said, “I planted those trees over there with my family.” They were the only really green things in sight other than this strange, straggly, weedy type of grass that the coal company planted.

No soil. No water but rain water that ran off immediately. No hope.

Later, I worked in a food bank run by the women of Big Laurel, handing out government issued cans to thin women with children waiting in banged up station wagons. Mingo County is one of the poorest places in the US, with high domestic violence rates, high murder rates, high child mortality rates. People don’t live long here. Movies such as Matewan and October Sky were set here. I could see why. The outsiders have drained these people as well as the earth, then blamed them for their own poverty.

A woman my age came in. She looked tired, run down. Four kids with her. She showed a card to the nun working the Food Bank, who wrote something down in graceful script on an index card. I looked over her shoulder-- “mine widow” it said. I watched her struggle to keep the children together, quiet, and respectful.

I put in a few extra cans into her food box when no one was looking.

On the way back home, S. stopped by an active mine shaft. I looked at the entryway, and I couldn’t breathe. “I could take you down,” he said, challenging me, looking straight into my eyes. I averted my gaze and shook my head. I couldn’t go down. I watched others go. Not me. Not ever me.

Hanging on
The lights go out on Red Hill
The lights go down on Red Hill
Lights go down on Red Hill town
The lights go down on Red Hill

Now: I listen to this U2 song, and I hurt for those in my family who died because of mining. For my students at Marshall University who were getting an education to escape the mines. For my friend, S., whose family owns some of those mines, and who attempts to pay back the world for those wrongs. For the women of Big Laurel, who make Mingo County a better place. And for my father.

Because, you see, my father is going down into the mine after all. Not one of rock and steel, but of chemicals and radiation. This weekend, I saw the tattoos on his chest that the doctors will use to steady their aim. They will bring him as close to death as they dare, trying to kill the cancer without killing him. Like his father before him, who died of cancer housed in genes tainted by the mines, my father goes down, too.

From father to son
The blood runs thin
See faces frozen still
Against the wind

Ultimately, we all have to go down,
and face what we must.


You can find a revised version of this story here.