KIMPER, Ky. — The work starts at dawn, at dusk if you're pulling graveyard. You crouch under a door that stands maybe hip-high and hop a flatcar that ferries you a mile, two miles, five miles, deep into the dark cool belly of the mountain.
It's muddy inside, and cramped. The mine shaft is at most 3 1/2 feet tall. You crouched to get in and you stay crouched all shift, clawing coal from the mountain. There's noise and dust and rock, everywhere. You suck coal into your lungs, and coal rains down on your face, and the noise and the dust and the rock pound you flat until the shift ends and you hop back on that car and ride out of the mountain, spent.
They need more coal miners here in Eastern Kentucky. Many more, hundreds more, if they are to capitalize on the energy crisis, if they are to take advantage of record coal prices, if they are to meet the demands of a president who has called for increased production and eased regulations that stand in the way.
The jobs are here. They pay better than most anything else in Appalachia.
But miners are telling their children: no way. No way will you spend your life crouching through a mountain, sucking dirt.
"I told my kids, I'd rather 'em go out and pick up cans and bottles on the roadside than go into the coal mines," said Robert Justice, who spent 26 years in the mines and has the X-rays to prove it--his lungs spotted white with coal dust, his back wrecked with three discs ruptured.
Mining has long been a proud family tradition in the hollows of Appalachia. Yet the collapse of local unions, the physical toll that the work exerts and a grim recognition that every boom will be followed sure as sunrise by a bust has prompted many miners to vow the tradition will stop with them.
"My boy was pointed in this direction, but I pointed him in another," said Billy Leedy, who has worked the mines for all his son's 18 years. "I told him there was no sense in killing himself for nothing."
Leedy holds one of the most dangerous jobs underground. After others have gouged out the coal, he pins the roof of the mine to the rest of the mountain with giant bolts to prevent cave-ins. He earns $12.50 an hour. "I've had my legs broke, my arm cut off, my back broke," he says matter-of-factly. He rolls up the sleeve of his work shirt to show off a powerful biceps laced with scars and stitches.
"Now they're crying about how Pike County don't have enough miners," he says, bemused. "Well, no wonder."
