Deep Stories: True Tales from the Pit

Deep Stories #3: A Sudbury Friday night

For single young men working at INCO in 1970, a Sudbury Saturday Night meant bars, Stompin' Tom Connors, and women (apparently). But a Sudbury Friday night was a different creature.

Downtown Sudbury had a triangle of one-way streets (and a rail line running diagonally across the main drag). On Friday nights, those streets ran riot with a parade of young men with a lot of discretionary income and not much common sense. On those few warm fall evenings before the big chill set in, there wasn’t much to do except a) drive around a three-block triangle of city streets in a hot new car, or b) watch said drivers in their hot new cars.

So down one street they would rumble in their Super Sports or Mustangs or Chargers ($110 per month, at 11.5% interest), cruising for girls. Oddly, you never saw a girl in the car, just mustachioed men grinning goofily as they drove around and around. The rest of us – and there was a lot of ‘us’, single guys without much to do - would crowd the sidewalk and look at hot cars, and girls (not in hot cars).

Although… some of us were aware of another reality.

In the fall of 1970, while we were watching young guys cruise the streets of Sudbury, other young guys were getting shot, and shooting at other people. We were Canadians, living in Canada, with a certain innocent outlook on the rest of the world. While we looked at cars circling the block, other young men were creeping through jungles in Vietnam wondering if they would die that day. Our neighbours to the south were in a war that was killing tens of thousands of “favourite sons” - young men my age - and hundreds of thousands of others, soldiers and civilians alike.

It wasn’t just an intellectual exercise: some of the guys working beside me deep underground, and who stood beside me watching that parade of optimistic drivers on a Sudbury Friday night, had fled that war, uprooting their lives to head north. No friends, no family, no clear pathway to a ‘normal life’, whatever form that might take.

So there is hardship, and there is hardship.

This was Sudbury in 1970.

Deep Stories #1: Hired

I saw the ad in the newspaper, all large-font text and exclamation marks: INCO Now hiring!! Deep miners, open-pit miners, labourers! Good rates!!.

INCO was the International Nickel Company, a world-leader in the extraction of nickel and copper from deep – deep – underground. The company needed bodies to work its mines near Sudbury, Ontario, which to me was about as far north as you could get without being in the arctic.

The job didn’t require any experience, which was right up my alley. I was fresh out of high school, and I wanted to head off to college, but couldn’t afford it. So when I saw the ad, it was as if the clouds had parted: if I worked at INCO for a year, I could make enough money for my first few semesters of college. Yay!  

There was a problem, though, peeking out from the fine print in the ad: “minimum weight, 145 lbs”. I was 6 feet tall, but dressed in wet clothes and heavy boots, I might hit 145 lbs. Skinny was an appropriate adjective, as was ‘rail-thin’ and maybe even ‘emaciated’ (although I’ve always preferred ‘lithe’: has a nice ring to it). Back to my weight ‘problem’: maybe I should just eat everything in sight to bulk up. Then again, I always did that, so I wasn’t sure how extra weight would appear. I do remember eating as much as I could over the next few days; it sort of makes sense that a couple of A&W Teenburgers every day might help, too.   

I also wondered if any of my friends wanted to come along on the adventure. Help share the load, whatever that meant. Some of them weren’t doing a whole lot of anything, so maybe… Rick was the lucky duck who piped up: “Hey, maybe I’ll join you."

So a week later, the two of us headed downtown for the weigh-in, as I thought of it. Of course, there was more to it than that, but not much more: they were after bodies, not minds.

Lots of young guys milling about a big room in a hotel, lots of young guys who looked like me (only heavier). Everyone lined up at tables to answer a few questions from people who never even looked up at us. I got the sense these preliminary questions were put in place to make sure we were of sound mind; a few of the people milling about didn’t appear to be.

And I kept thinking about the weigh-in, wondering if anyone would notice the pocketful of change (yes, really), or the heavy boots I was wearing. On top of the big breakfast I had eaten, or the lack of a morning sit-down (yes, really).  

After all the appropriate boxes were checked, it was time for the physical, which consisted of taking a blood pressure reading and asking if I currently had ‘any diseases’. Since leprosy had never been an issue, it was just ‘no’, ‘no’ and ‘no’.  Finally someone said, “step on the scale”. I did (as heavily as I could, if that makes sense), and someone else moved little weights back and forth, and jotted down a number. He frowned, then shrugged and said “146” and that was that.

Hired.

Deep Stories #2: A Year of Living Stupidly

The year itself was not a blur. For the first few months, I lived in a dismal boarding house with four other miners, all of whom were on different shifts. Work in mines and smelters does not stop; once a smelter furnace is up and running, it has to be kept hot and fed with ore 24 hours a day. Which meant thousands of workers in Sudbury were on a 3-shift cycle, which wreaks havoc with the mind and body, especially, I felt, with my mind and body.

Day shifts were the worst, mostly because I didn’t see the sun for 5 days straight. My ‘cage time’ was 6:25 AM, which meant that I got up at 5:15 for breakfast prepared by a sleepy-eyed landlady. Then I waited on a dark, frigid street corner, the wind howling through my coat, for a shared ride into work. No one talked in the car; too sleepy, too many tumbling thoughts about why I was even here, driving through the cold, bleak pre-dawn to burrow into the earth.

Then out of the car and shuffling into a loud, noisy ‘dry’, a massive change-room with 30-foot ceilings where work clothes were suspended on pulleys overhead to – well, dry. Gearing up with grimy overalls, boots, safety harness and helmet, then trudging off to the battery racks to grab a light battery. Spilling out onto the ‘collar’, the area around the shaft, to wait for the cage.

The shaft always steams, vapour rising from the warmer depths, complete with thoughts of Dante and various infernos in those of us more susceptible to letting our minds wander.

All before 6:25 in the morning.  

There’s only one way in and out of a mine, and that’s through the shaft. You get down the shaft on an elevator (sort of), which is called a ‘cage’, because it resembles one. All metal, eight feet wide, 12 feet deep, and open at the front so that you see the raw earth flash past on the descent, illuminated by the miners' head lamps.

It’s also called the cage because on any given shift, 20 or 30 men would cram into that tiny space to be ‘dropped’ to the 800, 1200, 2200 or 4000 level (and any increment of 200 feet between). You were so cozy dropping (very quickly) to your level that everyone knew what everyone else had for breakfast.

And no clean clothes among them.

Once you hit your level, bells clang, the gates go up, and you step off onto the shaft station, the first of various work areas in a mine. Work doesn’t start right away, which I found interesting. Once you get to your level, you head for the ‘lunchroom’, which was as little more than an alcove blasted into the drift (tunnel) walls. For the next few minutes, you just stare at the rock wall opposite, and maybe sip from your thermos.

After while, the shift boss would give you marching orders for the day’s work, and people would head out to their work area, lights blinking into darkness. But even then, the guys drilling at the faces – extending the tunnels by 8 feet a day - might have another 20 minute walk before they got to where they started exerting themselves.

A mine is a peculiar place. The deeper you go in a mine, the warmer it gets, for obvious reasons (well, maybe not obvious if you weren’t paying attention in geography; think molten earth core). When you work the 4000 level, the ambient temperature of the rock around you is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Even though cold air is pumped into the mine from the surface, by the time it gets to 4000 and starts to circulate, it warms up to the same temperature as the rock around it. Which meant, summer, fall and winter, it was always the same exact temperature when you were working 4000 feet underground.

 At the end of the day, we were at the collar for the 3:30 cage (they were always very specific with the schedule, because a cage that was even 10 minutes late meant Overtime pay). Then the quick ascent, the bells and crashing metal barriers, the long shuffle through hallways to the dry. Shrug out of clothes laced with nickel dust, a long shower to get rid of that same nickel dust clogging every pore of your body. Then stowing mining gear for the next day, waiting for the ride-share guy (who came up on a later cage).

By the time we shambled out to the parking lot, the sun had already set over the lunar landscape, leaving a deep indigo in the west.

And by the end of the week, you really started to wonder if you would ever see the sun again.

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