The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in America’s Richest Silver Mine

By Allen M. Jones, 6-29-05

An unfortunate (and obvious) truth: Book publishing is an industry of fads. For every breakout success there are a thousand imitators inevitably waiting in the wings, a phalanx of folks eager to piss on the same lucrative post. Bridget Jones’ Diary gave rise to hundreds of Pepto-bismol jacketed “chick-lit" laments. The success of Cold Mountain birthed out a run on Civil War love stories. And then, of course, there’s Sebastien Junger with his clean jawline and admirable millions. When it comes down to it, who in their right mind wouldn’t want to write another Perfect Storm ?

In the eight years or so since Junger’s book and its improbable success (reinforced shortly therafter by Krakauer’s Into Thin Air), a unique genre has arisen, the Disaster Narrative. Sinking ships, mountaineering mishaps, whitewater accidents, our appetite for deadly mistakes seems endless. Junger’s book apparently exposed some sort of cultural nerve, some rich vein of disappointment over our own safe and antiseptic lives. It’s the Outside magazine syndrome. We can’t stop reading about people more adventurous than ourselves. Of course, it’s best if the narrative heroes make it out alive, and it’s most satisfying if there’s a shortsighted, overweight bureaucrat who finally has to eat his words; otherwise, the field’s wide open. The newest addition to this genre, Gregg Olsen’s The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in America’s Richest Silver Mine, while perhaps flawed by the fecund needs of reality (eight or nine people on a boat makes for a coherent, clean story; ninety-one people in a mine creates confusion), it’s nevertheless a compelling nail-biter of a tale. The amazing thing is, how has it been missed for so long?

Here’s the gist: In early May of 1972, somebody in the Sunshine Mine of Kellogg, Idaho, caught a whiff of smoke. Minutes or hours later, dozens of men were dying of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning. Out of the 174 miners who entered the maze of hardrock tunnels to work that morning, only 83 made it out alive. Two of these 83 lived for seven days at 4,800 feet, surviving on water and a stale tuna sandwich, a candy bar. Afterwards, any number of fingers were pointed in blame. The miners blamed the company. The company blamed the miners. But alas (and unfortunately for Olsen’s book), there was finally no mustache-twirling villain. The guilt was dispersed across an array of engineers (who didn’t recognize a weakness in the mine ventilation system) and safety experts, a chemical company who manufactured a foam sealent and a gaggle of corporate bluebloods whose chain of command failed at a critical moment. Five thousand feet down, nothing’s ever easy.

Unlike coal mining, wherein you spend your days striking sparks inside a mountain of combustible fuel, fire wasn’t considered a particular danger at Sunshine. What could burn? And so, the safety measures in place were desultory, at best. To make matters worse, the mine was deep, and at its deepest (5,000 feet or so), the ambient temperature hovered around 125 degrees fahrenheit. An intricate series of fans and air conditioners kept the air circulating, keeping it cool enough to work. When the fire finally broke out, it turns out that this same system of fans was enough to spread the smoke through hundreds of miles of underground tunnels. Death came so quickly that some men were found with lunch sandwiches still in their hands. On the surface, Idaho wives and mothers were having their hair done, taking the kids to school, going grocery shopping, unaware that their lives were being taken away from them.

Olsen has tumbled across an extraordinary story, and he knows it. The depth of research and work that went into this project is impressive, to say the least. In an afterword, he says he made more than 200 interviews. It’s easy to believe. As a writer being true to his chosen genre, he brings a novelistic sensibility to the characters, having no compunction about diving into the heads of real people, writing little riffs of privileged information that you'd have to say were fictionalized. A young wife thinks to herself how much she despises her mother in law. A miner put in charge of crowd control, after berating a newspaperman, thinks, “This is a disaster...not a contest over who gets the story.". But it serves his larger purpose, which more than anything else seems to be a portrait of blue collar America, a paean to a class of hardrock miners who regularly risk life and limb for “grandma’s silver tea set, the film in a young family’s camera, or the precious metals used in electronic components." The miners are making enough to buy a new truck every year, but they don’t see the sense in paying regular visits to the dentist. Kellogg whorehouses are still active, and it turns out that the first wife to come claim a dead miner’s paycheck might not be the only wife.

A list of the deceased is appended “in memorium" at the end of the book. It provides a constant, back-and-forth reference point for the reader. Family members of the deceased are constantly seen as reassuring themselves that their husband or father must be alive. “He’ll be okay, she thought. He’ll be getting out...tomorrow. As readers, of course, with a quick flip of pages, a run down the alphabetized list of names, we discover that her husband is already dead. Our commiseration is mixed with a guilty dose of schadenfreude. It's like craning your head out after a car wreck. Olsen understands this impulse, and exploits it, even going so far in the final pages as to give us the grisly details of decomposition, how certain bodies swelled in the heat, popping shirt buttons, sloughing off gloves of skin. No one really needs to know this shit, especially if it was your uncle or father he's describing. But you’re not going to stop reading because of it. If nothing else, we need to know what started the fire. We’re repeatedly told, nothing could burn down in there. It’s a silver mine. What could burn down there? How did it start? Alas, they never really find out what started it. They have a notion of contributing factors (a supposedly fireproof polyurethane foam that, turns out, was the accelerant equivalent of Tide mixed with gasoline), but not what started it. With the narrative tricks that Olsen plays, this is not unlike following Poirot into the drawing room only to hear him say that he’s stumped, no idea who did it.

Not unsurprisingly, Olsen has previously made his living as a true crime writer. His novelistic ability to paint a portrait, to see the world from another person’s eyes, is the book’s obvious strength. He gives us real people in desperate situations. As a description of actual events, however, his authorial license can, at times, be frustrating. He is so concerned with creating a gripping story, with manipulating our emotions (at one point, he describes elementary children listening to a radio for updates on their fathers, grandfathers and brothers, and how their “little fingers would reach for the volume knob.") that he sacrifices a certain measure of veracity. It’s not insignificant that he doesn’t cite sources, that he has no bibliography or index. He obviously wants to write a good read, not contribute a piece to the historical record.

So, take it on the level of its ambitions. Olsen is a ferociously talented writer who has come across a tragedy equal to his abilities. For the Perfect Storm afficionados of avalanches and earthquakes, of good people caught in bad situations, it would be hard to bury yourself in a better book.
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