Into the Darkness

Today his route will extend over 10 miles. By the end of the shift, he will have walked underground for six hours, most of the time alone.

It gives him a lot of time to think and perhaps to ruminate over a lifetime of choices that led him to this place. At one point, the coal miner's son wanted to be a dentist. But two years into his college career, he dropped out to earn a paycheck and marry his girlfriend.

"How can you account for the decisions of a 20-year-old man?" says the man who, for the sake of self-improvement, went on to earn his MBA at night school and now teaches courses on the side at the local college. "I knew there was work available in the mines, and I went in that direction. I made a decision to get married, and to sustain that lifestyle, I had to have a good income. The same thing happened to a lot of us."

In return for his hard toil, the mine gave Plumley a life. "I built homes. I bought land. I bought cars," he says. "I supported my family. I put kids in college. I sent my wife to college. I sent myself to college."

"That hole in the ground," he says, "has been a gravy train for me."

Not that it has been easy. On workdays, he leaves the house before dawn for the hour-long drive to the mine, and he rarely returns home before 6:30 p.m. During winter months, whole weeks pass in which he never sees the sun. Family outings are squeezed into a few free hours on Sunday afternoons or during the two weeks of annual vacation.

His wife, Susan, who met her husband in high school, says she has learned to live with the possibility of accidents and with the ache of worry that comes every time Plumley gets called to enter a strange mine to help others. She allows that her husband could find other work, perhaps even one with more money and fewer hours. But Susan Plumley would never ask her husband to change jobs or stop his rescue work.

"It's who he is, and it's what makes him happy," she says. "All I know is, if Mike Plumley is ever in a mine disaster, trapped underground somewhere, there had just better be someone coming after him who is as good as he is."

Two of Plumley's closest friends, also sons of West Virginia's southern coal fields and now Plumley's partners on the mine rescue team, followed almost the same course to Pinnacle.

Richard Crockett's grandmother ran a boardinghouse for miners, and Crockett's father had grown up packing lunches for the men and listening to their stories about the hard life in the tunnels. "It was worse back then," he says. "My granny had seen so many miners die or get mangled up. She made a vow that none of her boys would ever go into the mines." Like Plumley, Crockett, 51, had set his sights on college and a career. But after two years of struggling with the books, he dropped out and returned home to marry his high school sweetheart. Not long afterward, he was trying on a miner's hat.

Darren Blankenship, 46, had once thought of mining as a temporary job, a way to sock away some savings until he could afford college. His father was a miner at a time when much of the work was still done by drilling beneath the coal and blasting it with dynamite. "You could see when he came home how worn out he was," Blankenship says. "Early on, he worked in very small mines, where the seams were 28 to 30 inches high. He would tell us how he would have to crawl on his belly all day and lean on his side to take a drink. I remember telling myself I would never do that."

But Blankenship's temporary job ended up dragging on for 28 years.

In some ways, they were lucky. The three came of age at a time when coal jobs happened to be plentiful. A few years later, the hiring boom of the 1970s ended, followed by a job drought of 25 years in which virtually no young miners were hired.

They also were fortunate to land jobs at what was widely considered to be among the most stable, most safety-conscious mines around. Only four workers have died in accidents in the mine's 37-year history, yet each of those deaths triggered periods of soul-searching and change, the three veteran miners say. One of the fatalities, in 1980, occurred a few inches from Crockett as he and another man were bracing the ceiling with long spikes called roof bolts. Without warning, a slab of rock as wide as a garage door fell on Crockett's partner, crushing him.

The accident weighed heavily on Crockett. Not long afterward, he made a decision that would change his job and his life: He joined the company's mine rescue team. Most large mines have such teams, which are made up of ordinary miners and operate much like volunteer fire departments. The teams train throughout the year to be ready to help with mine disasters of all kinds -- from explosions, fires and floods to ordinary accidents and medical emergencies. Within a few months, Crockett had talked Plumley, his carpool buddy at the time, into joining as well. Blankenship signed up in 1986.

"Hundreds Of Years' Worth Of Coal"

THE TWO-LANE ROAD THAT WINDS PAST THE PINNACLE MINE also traces the peaks and valleys of a century of West Virginia's bittersweet affair with coal mining. A few miles south of the mine, in the town of Welch, is the spot where a pro-union police officer named Sid Hatfield was shot dead by coal company detectives in front of the county courthouse in 1921. It was one of the opening salvos in a bloody conflict over unionization that ended that same year when President Warren Harding dispatched federal troops to put down the workers' rebellion.

A few miles farther southwest is the tiny village of Bartley, where a mine explosion in 1940 killed 91 workers. That tragedy does not even make the list of the top five deadliest coal accidents in West Virginia. The bigger or more famous accidents can be evoked with a single name: Fairmont and Farmington, two accidents in the last century that between them claimed 439 lives, and now Sago. Each of the big accidents became the impetus for new mine-safety laws, including regulations requiring escape routes, better dust and fire suppression, and safer equipment. Thanks to new laws, the annual number of coal-mining fatalities nationally has dropped over the years, from more than 2,000 in the 1920s to less than two dozen in 2005. (In 2006, fatal accidents surged unexpectedly to 47, the highest in 11 years. Two major incidents, the Sago disaster and an accident in Kentucky, accounted for 17 of those deaths.) Coal mining today is a statistically safer occupation than logging, commercial fishing or even truck driving. Oversight of mine safety was ratcheted up still further after the Sago deaths, with federal and state mine agencies imposing new standards for emergency breathing equipment and the placement of caches of oxygen tanks in mine escapeways.

But miners continue to die and to suffer in other ways that do not show up in fatality statistics. In Pineville, a town of about 700 people just north of the Pinnacle Mine, two kinds of businesses dominate: First are those that cater to employees of the mines and supporting companies, from the bars and the motels with long-term rentals to the laundromat that keeps separate machines for work clothes and politely admonishes patrons to refrain from pouring coal dust on the floor. Other shops serve those whom the coal mines can no longer use: the disabled, the retired, the chronically ill. On a main street that is barely 2/10 of a mile long, three stores specialize in hospital beds, oxygen tanks and other equipment for convalescent care.

The same divide exists in most West Virginia coal towns. In some communities where mining has dried up, the sick, injured and elderly are virtually all that are left.

Injuries are not the only reasons for early retirement. Three of West Virginia's 19 black lung clinics are within a few miles of Pineville. Black lung cases have fallen dramatically since the 1970s because of government regulations that helped reduce the amount of airborne dust in mines. But an estimated 4 percent of working miners will be stricken with the disease, which occurs over years as coal dust thickens and scars lung tissue and causes a kind of fibrosis. The effects range from shortness of breath in the early stages, as the lungs lose their ability to supply oxygen to the body, to severe complications such as emphysema, an enlarged heart and ultimately heart failure and death.

Still, assigning responsibility today for black lung and many other miners' ills can be a particularly complex affair. By law, mining companies must provide breathing masks for underground workers. But the miners aren't required to wear them, and few do. At Pinnacle, while miners emerge from the tunnels black with coal dust after their shift, many who are asked about the masks say they do not wear them because they are hot and uncomfortable.

Similarly, many miners grumble about new emergency breathing apparatus they must carry on their belts in case of fire or another crisis underground. Until this year, the standard breathing mask came in a small aluminum canister and served only to filter the smoky air until the miners could find their way to emergency caches where oxygen tanks are stored. But the new masks are several pounds heavier, and miners generally despise them.

"It may not look like much, but on top of the other gear we carry, you really feel it," one Pinnacle miner says.

Union officials help push for safety improvements and encourage miners to take advantage of better dust filters and masks. But the union's influence is ebbing. Today, Pinnacle is one of a handful of mines in southern West Virginia that are represented by the United Mine Workers of America.

Coal mining companies have come a long way since the miner wars of the 1920s, and the better ones have sought to build partner-ships with the miners and their unions. Ben Statler, who heads Pinnacle's parent company, visits the mine once a month for informal gab sessions with groups of fewer than a dozen miners.

"There used to be a saying that miners were hired only from the neck down," says Doug Williams, the general manager. "It's not like that anymore. Our success depends on us being able to work together."

The mutual dependency is especially stark when it comes to safety. Accidents cost companies more today because of workers' compensation and the likely prospect of an investigation that could slow or halt production. Major accidents can shut down a mine for months, and perhaps forever.

"There's No Telling What I Was Exposed To"

HALFWAY UP THE HILLSIDE, RETIRED MINER ELLA THOMAS STOPS TO BREATHE, letting in the mountain air with short, raspy gasps. The distance from the roadside to her husband's grave is only a few yards, but each step is a reminder of the extraordinary toll coal mining has exacted on her life.

Her right knee is stiff from joint-replacement surgery. Her back aches from old injuries and years of wear. Her left arm burns where it was crushed long ago by falling concrete. Worst of all are the breathing troubles, which her doctor says were caused by exposure to rock and coal dust.

At last she reaches her destination, a simple granite marker that commemorates the sad end of Dewey Thomas, who suffered from a more severe case of black lung disease. Ella Thomas considers the empty grave next to her husband's, and then shakes her head adamantly.

"The tombstone has my name on it," she says, "but I don't want to be buried here."

Her resistance is at least a small way to separate her life from that of her husband, who shared the same background and career path in the coal fields and suffered many of the same ailments. At 72, Ella Thomas is something of an expert on the suffering of coal miners, having experienced it herself and witnessed it in the lives of close friends, some of her children and most especially in her husband.

"He talked about it all the time -- about how hard he worked and how bad it sometimes got," Thomas remembers. Unlike miners today who shower and change at the mines after their shifts, he "came home most nights still in his miner's clothes," she says. "He worked late and would come home tired and covered in coal dust."

Dewey Thomas quit the mines in 1973, while still in his early 50s, but by then the damage was already done. As he grew older and his black lung disease worsened, he became increasingly bitter about his failing strength and the way his medications clouded his thinking. The couple had separated by then, and he was living on his own, yet he was becoming ever more dependent on his wife and children.

His wife followed his decline with a growing sense of alarm.

"He had gotten so thin," she remembers. "Even his face was thin, so much that the bones showed."

Finally, early one March morning in 1995, Dewey Thomas made up his mind about how to deal with the disease. He had another doctor's appointment that day in Beckley, an hour's drive away, and one of his daughters stopped in early to remind him.

"Daddy, get yourself ready. I'll be around to pick you up," Sandra Toler had said.

"Don't come back," he told her.

After his daughter left, Dewey Thomas took out a box containing his will, insurance papers and some cash and set it on the kitchen table. Then he took off his watch and rings and placed them neatly beside the box, along with his wallet. Then, just after 7 a.m., he called Ella, who lived in a small trailer a few doors away.

"I don't want to be a burden to anyone," he said calmly. "I'm going to blow my brains out."

She tried to talk him out of it, then tried to stall him, but he wouldn't listen. "His mind was made up," she says. "He was tired of suffering."

She immediately phoned a son-in-law who lived nearby. "Dewey's going to kill himself," she blurted out. Then she dropped the phone and hurried outside, cutting through neighbors' yards to get to the small frame house where her husband lived.

No one heard the gunshot. But when Ella arrived, just seconds behind her son-in-law and grandson, her husband was lying on the floor, still breathing but unconscious, bleeding from a shot to the temple. A .38-caliber revolver lay next to him.

On the table nearby, she found the hand-written will, in which he had divided savings and a few pieces of jewelry among family members.

He left the .38 revolver to one of his sons, a miner like his father.

As she stands by his grave, she allows that Dewey might have preferred a different course if he were to live his life over again. But she can't readily suggest an option that didn't involve coal.

Nor can she suggest one for herself.

Twelve years after leaving the mines, Ella Thomas straddles two worlds. She identifies herself proudly as a coal miner and looks back at her job with an almost wistful affection. But after her disabilities forced her to quit, she became a coal industry casualty, part of a community that includes the widowed and elderly poor, disabled workers, black lung patients and entire towns that collapsed economically after the local mines shut down. Each group is a reminder of coal's complex, deeply ambiguous legacy in the state's southern coal fields, with its stark contrasts of profit and loss, boom and bust, dependence and wariness, prosperity and tragedy.

A fellow disabled coal miner named Pam Hall has accompanied Thomas to the cemetery on this bright December afternoon. The two were among the first women hired into the mines after the gender barrier was lifted in the 1970s, and they became allies in an effort to prove their sex fully capable of performing jobs long reserved for men. "We did the same jobs as the men," Thomas says, "and they treated us as just one of the guys."

For a woman who spent her early adulthood raising children, being able to succeed as a miner gave Thomas a sense of accomplishment as well as a camaraderie she had never experienced, says a son, Randy Shrader. "She liked doing things with her hands, and eventually she got to where she could do anything," from laying bricks to patching electrical wires to winning admirers with the homemade biscuits she frequently brought into the mine to share with others.

Hall, now 55, spent 27 years underground at Pinnacle. During that time, she worked nearly every job, from general laborer to fire boss. But two years ago, the soreness in her arm and leg joints intensified. "My knees basically wore out from carrying 50-pound bags of rock dust," she says. The fingers on one hand are permanently bent after being injured in a fall inside the mine.

Thomas was already in her 40s and the mother of seven children when she started work, and younger miners gave her the nickname "Granny" because of her graying hair and penchant for bringing in food for the other miners. Hall, athletic and nearly 20 years younger, was Thomas's occasional partner in building tunnel dividers, called stoppings, out of 58-pound concrete blocks. To pass the time, the two would play improvised games of "Password," loosely modeled after the popular TV quiz show. It was one of those blocks that crushed Thomas's arm, damaging it so severely that doctors had to rebuild her blood vessels using veins from her leg. "You just learn to go on with it," she says. "You take painkillers."

As the two friends wander through the cemetery, they tell and retell stories of relatives and friends from the mines who have died, and swap bits of news about the long list of sick and injured.

Hall remembers her grandfather, a lifelong miner who chipped at narrow coal seams with a pick and shovel. Thomas recalls the death of a son-in-law, buried in the same cemetery not far from Dewey. He was a miner who died of a heart attack in his 40s, leaving Thomas's young grandson fatherless. Buried under a large black stone is an old friend from the mine whom both women knew as "T.J." In 1982, he had been in a mine car loaded with coal when it collided with another vehicle, killing him.

A few yards farther is the tombstone of a retired miner who, still alive, has prepared his grave plot in advance. The pink granite slab is engraved with a coal miner's helmet.

As they walk, Thomas frets aloud about the health of a daughter -- one of four children who have followed her and Dewey into the mines. The daughter has been unable to work since a section of conveyor belt broke, hurling her backward against a metal scaffold.

"Two surgeries, and she isn't any better," Thomas says. "She'll never be able to work again."

Hall worries about her father, a retired coal miner with black lung disease. She thinks about her younger brother, who also worked in the mines and already shows signs of the disease at age 43. And she thinks of her own daughter, 20, who has severe autism. Although there is no hard evidence, Hall has long been convinced that her job and her daughter's condition are linked.

"At the time I was pregnant, I would work in dirty coal water sometimes as high as my waist," she says. "There's no telling what I was exposed to."

Back at Thomas's small home, reminders of the suffering brought on by coal are always close -- as close as the photos of her husband, daughter and son-in-law displayed on her walls, as close as each labored breath.

When she thinks back on her hard years as a coal miner, she confesses just one regret.

"After all this time," she says, "if I could go back into the mines tomorrow, I would."

Joby Warrick is a Washington Post staff writer. He can be reached at warrickj@washpost.com.