By Joby Warrick
Sunday, January 21, 2007; W10

DON BRAGG'S LAST BIRTHDAY WAS A NORMAL WORKING DAY for both him and Delorice Bragg, his wife of five years, but she had gone to unusual lengths to make it a memorable one. Earlier, with great effort, she had lugged home a large tool chest from Sears and hid it in the couple's garage. It was one Don had long admired, a Craftsman that stood about four feet tall and had lots of drawers for storage. When it was time for presents, his wife smiled and handed him a small box containing a set of keys.

"He asked, 'What are these keys for?' So I took him to the garage," Delorice Bragg remembers. "He was like a big kid."

He spent hours assembling the chest in the living room and lining the drawers with shelf paper. When the tool chest was finished, the couple carried it to his workshop in the garage, and they both stood back to admire it.

The next morning, January 19, 2006, with Delorice still sleeping after a long night shift as a hospital nurse, Don packed a lunch of sandwiches, snack cakes and a couple of Mountain Dews, and slipped two tins of Skoal snuff into his pocket. He kissed her goodbye and drove to work.

These had been good times for the Braggs, who, after weathering years of difficulty with previous jobs and marriages, had both arrived at a place of contentment. Don Israel Bragg, 33, known as "Rizzle" or "Riz" since childhood, had been recently rehired at the Aracoma Alma Mine, just outside Logan, W.Va., after being idled for more than year by a head injury. By all accounts, he liked his job and especially liked his crewmates on the evening shift, including Ellery Hatfield, known to everyone as Elvis.

The two men had become partners, working 10-hour days together on a machine known as a roof bolter, driving long metal spikes into the mine ceiling to keep it from collapsing. Their job often required them to work apart from others in their crew, so for long stretches they had only each other to talk to. They depended on each other and had grown close.

That January day, they were working in a remote area of the mine with 10 crewmates when a fire broke out. It was a small fire on an underground conveyor belt more than half a mile away, and normally it would have been quickly doused and forgotten. But someone had mistakenly shut off the main water valve, the first in a series of errors. Within minutes, the fire had consumed dozens of feet of conveyor belt and was spreading rapidly, feeding on coal dust, grease, rubber and a cold wind from the ventilation shaft. Soon the fire leapt to the coal seam itself, until the stone walls glowed orange like the inside of a blast furnace.

Miners near the fire quickly evacuated, but it was 30 minutes before word reached the remote alcove where Don and Elvis worked.

The crew boss called his men together, and, within minutes, all 12 climbed into a mantrip, a diesel-powered, rubber-wheeled vehicle that shuttles the workers through the mine tunnels. Around the men, the mine appeared as it always did: utterly dark and silent, except for the flicker of helmet lamps and the low rumble of the transport as it clattered through the shaft for what should have been a 40-minute ride to the surface.

"Everybody was really just joking, carrying on," Duane Vanover, one of the dozen, would later tell investigators, according to an official transcript. "We thought we were going to go down and put the fire out and just come back to work."

WHEN TRAGEDIES HAPPEN IN WEST VIRGINIA'S MINES -- AND USUALLY ONLY THEN -- people turn their attention briefly to coal miners and their world. And the overriding question the outsiders ask is this: Why would anyone work in such a place?

Over the last year, there has been much cause for wondering. Not since 1981 have so many men died in single year in the West Virginia mines. The year 2006 started with the Sago Mine explosion, a tragedy compounded when the 12 victims were briefly and erroneously reported to have been found alive. The fire at the Aracoma Alma No. 1 mine came two weeks later. By February 1, one month into the new year, the statewide death toll had climbed to 16, prompting Gov. Joe Manchin III to declare a "safety stand-down" that temporarily halted mining throughout the state. Eight more miners would die in accidents by the year's end.

Yet tens of thousands of men, and scores of women, continue to go into the mines each day, digging up the brittle black rock that provides more than half the electricity used by Americans to light their homes and run their computers and plasma TVs. As generations of their forebears did, miners don hard hats and lamps and travel a quarter-mile or more into the Earth's crust, into a world without sun. They work in an environment that carries inherent risks that seem extreme to outsiders. Rocks fall from walls and ceilings, sometimes without warning. Coal mines naturally give off gases that are highly flammable, such as methane, or asphyxiating, such as carbon dioxide. Each year, miners are crushed, electrocuted, suffocated, buried, or even drowned in underground floods.

Ask coal miners about the risks, and they acknowledge them. But on the balance sheet of pluses and minuses, such hazards barely register. To many, coal mining is a good living, especially in rural southern West Virginia, where high-paying jobs are relatively few. With ample overtime -- 60-hour workweeks are typical -- miners can easily earn in excess of $80,000 a year, plus medical care and a pension. But that doesn't explain, by itself, why people keep coming back to the mines after tragedies. Or why many of them, when given a chance to take a safer job, choose to stay exactly where they are. And it doesn't account for the deep bond that miners say forms among men and women who work year after year in the dark, cramped space of a mine shaft, beneath an overburden of millions of tons of rock and dirt, where daily survival depends in part on the skill and competency of those around them.

NOT UNTIL THE ALMA MINERS HAD PASSED THROUGH THE EMERGENCY DOOR DID THEY REALIZE THAT TWO OF THE GROUP WERE MISSING. The crew chief and two others scrambled back into the smoky tunnel, shouting the missing men's names for several minutes until the choking fumes drove them back. At that point, one of the men glanced down at his carbon monoxide detector and saw the numbers climb to 650 parts per million, a lethal level.

Reluctantly, the miners joined the scores of others waiting near the mine entrance for news of the missing men. Frantic mine operators scrambled to organize a rescue, calling on volunteers from other coal mines as far away as Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

Hours later, Plumley, one of those volunteers, stood at the portal of the same underground shaft, shielding his face from the intense heat and calculating the odds that Elvis and Don might still be alive. As he peered through an opening to look at the fire, a finger of scalding hot gas shot past him, blistering the skin on the top of his exposed ears.

Plumley had never set foot in the Alma mine before this night, and he didn't know the missing men's names. Yet he knew, in essence, who they were: They were West Virginia coal miners, just like him.

With the deaths of the Sago miners just a few weeks earlier, and the grimness of the Alma search setting in, Plumley found himself struggling to emotionally detach from the task at hand. He resolved to think less about the missing men and more about the mechanics of the search. To do otherwise was too painful. Too personal. Too close to home.

Plumley had worked his entire adult life around Pineville, W.Va., in a mine known as Pinnacle, a subterranean city of coal-lined streets and alleys that, in many ways, resembled this one. The Alma mine is a full hour's drive from Pinnacle -- even longer on a January night when the narrow mountain roads became even more treacherous. At 9:30 p.m. on January 19, when the call for rescue workers went out, most of the Pinnacle team's members had worked a full day in the mine and were already asleep, or nearly so. But when team leader Richard Crockett summoned them, each of the men slipped on his boots and drove to the rendezvous point at the team training center. Even Darren Blankenship, who had missed work that day because of a severe cold, turned out for the rescue.

By 11:30 p.m., the Pinnacle team had arrived at the entrance to the Alma mine, joining a larger force that would eventually include rescuers from 16 mines. Inching their way through dense smoke, the Pinnacle miners were halted by a wall of heat coming up from the burning coal. "We would look down into the area of the fire, and it was just one huge, orange glow," recalls Blankenship. "Coal was burning. So was the fabric of the conveyor belt, the rollers. Everything that was remotely combustible was on fire."

Working in shifts, the group spent two days beating back the flames until the tunnels could be safely entered. Then they split up into groups and began combing the smoky tunnels for the missing men. As they so often did, Plumley, Blankenship and Crockett ended up together.

"From where I was in the middle, I could barely make out the lights on the helmets of the others," Crockett says. "And they couldn't see each other at all."

After hours of searching, the three friends returned to an underground staging area for fresh oxygen bottles, when word came that Don's body had been found. The young miner was discovered lying face down, about 300 yards from the emergency door through which the surviving minors had escaped. He was still wearing his oxygen mask, goggles, miner's hat and the nametag that read "Don." The cause of death was asphyxiation. Recovery teams would find his tools and lunch pail, still containing the sandwiches he had packed that morning.

Forty minutes later, the men discovered Elvis's body. When the older man fell, he was a few hundred feet ahead of where Don lay, still headed in the direction of the fire. He wore no oxygen mask and would have had no protection from the hot, toxic air.

"As long as we were still looking for those guys, the Alma people were fine," Plumley says. "But the minute we got word that we had found them, and it wasn't good, every man in that mine collapsed. It was like you had let the air out of them."

IT'S 7:30 A.M., A HALF-HOUR BEFORE THE SHIFT CHANGE AT THE PINNACLE MINE, and the lamp room where workers congregate is already starting to fill up. The older miners like to arrive early -- sometimes an hour or even 90 minutes early -- just to drink coffee and catch up on local gossip. It will be well past 6 p.m. when the last of them leaves for home.

They are a noisy, boisterous group, and they appear not the least bit intimidated by the presence of the mine's general manager, Doug Williams, or that of a visiting vice president from the corporate office in suburban Pittsburgh. Williams, a solidly built former lawyer with a trim goatee, is approached several times as he makes his way through the room. One beefy miner taps on Williams's shoulder and asks, smiling but earnest, when the company planned to rehire his nephew, a casualty in a recent round of layoffs. "We want to bring him back," is the only answer Williams can give.

Nearly all the miners are middle age or older, including the handful of women -- today there are two among the day shift's 93 workers -- who perform the same jobs as the men. Most have labored for more than a quarter-century in the Pinnacle Mine, which U.S. Steel started in 1969 and sold three years ago to a small firm called PinnOak Resources. To arrive here, some have commuted up to an hour, from distant towns such as Beckley and Bluefield and dozens of villages, hollows, subdivisions and trailer parks in between. Their Ford pickups, Toyota Camrys and Dodge minivans nearly fill the parking lot of the mine entrance, a two-story building of blue aluminum siding that could pass for an ordinary warehouse, except for the large elevator shaft protruding from one side.

None of the miners has a uniform, or anything that smacks of uniformity. Each wears a combination of coveralls or jeans, work shirt, helmet, boots and tool belt as befits his personality and job requirements. Many have festooned their hard hats and lockers with stickers and slogans: union symbols, a Christian cross, a Pittsburgh Steelers logo, first names and nicknames such as "J.D." or "Big Dog." The only thing common to all of them is the patina of coal dust that covers every surface, from coffee cups and time-cards to eyeglasses and maps.

In parts of West Virginia where strip mining is common, powerful machines called draglines have made people all but unnecessary. But for underground mining, men and women still dig the tunnels, load coal, drive trolleys, build tunnel supports, check methane levels. With enough years underground, most of the miners will perform every job at least once.

"I've worked in other states and one foreign country, and I can tell you that the West Virginia coal miner is the best coal miner I've seen," says Williams, the mine manager. "These are proud people, and they take pride in what they do. There are other opportunities out there if they want them. But there's something about living here and getting a little coal dust in the blood that brings them back."

At 8 a.m. sharp, conversation in the lamp room halts as the miners take seats on metal benches for a pre-shift briefing. Chief safety officer Jim Bennett starts with a cautionary tale, a report of a new mining fatality in far northern West Virginia. A slab of rock the size of a vending machine had broken away from the "rib," or side of a mine tunnel, pinning the victim against a piece of equipment. "Operators, look at your ribs," Bennett admonishes.

Bennett ticks his way through the usual list of warnings. Watch out for higher levels of methane gas, especially in the waning days of the year when the mine is drier, he says. Keep emergency water lines open at all times. Keep all surfaces coated with a dusting of calcium or powdered rock to minimize the risk of explosion. "Rock dust is critical," Bennett reminds the group. "In the event you do have an explosion, rock dust will get in the air and reduce the impact of the explosion considerably."

BELOW GROUND, THE ELEVATOR OPENS TO A WORLD UNLIKE ANYTHING ON THE SURFACE.

The first jolt is the unrelenting darkness. Unlike subway tunnels, mine shafts are not wired with lights. The only sources of illumination are the headlights of the mine car and the flashlight glow of battery-powered helmet lanterns. The passing beams reveal the rawness of a workplace where all structures are intended to be temporary. Everything underground is covered in a thick layer of chalky rock dust -- a fire retardant -- which causes even newer sections to appear ancient and abandoned, like an underwater shipwreck covered in decades of sediment. Wires and cables snake haphazardly through the shafts. The sides of the tunnels are strewn with fallen rock, old equipment and dusty stacks of supplies. The powerful but oddly sawed-off machines used for shuttling coal and passengers are dust-covered and as banged up as old battle tanks.

Here and there, a break in the dust coating allows a glimpse of the coal itself, a 4-foot-thick slab of black rock sandwiched between layers of shale and sandstone.

In the glare of headlamps, it sparkles like millions of tiny black sequins.

But as the transport scuttles along, the single impression that crowds out all others is the sheer vastness of the place. The tunnels stretch on, mile after mile, bisected by countless smaller tunnels leading off into blackness. All told, this underground city covers 40 square miles, an area nearly two-thirds the size of the District of Columbia. It is traversed by hundreds of miles of tunnels and chambers, each carved out by people and machines.

Nearly all this space is empty and essentially abandoned. But a flickering of lights, like distant fireflies, signals the approach of the coal face, the active mining area and the reason for this massive hole in the earth. The coal here is nearly 1,300 feet below the surface, and it lies in a thick band that follows the contour of an ancient landscape of swamp forests that existed in this part of North America more than 300 million years ago. The decaying remains of plants deposited here over millennia were eventually buried under layers of sediment and squeezed under immense pressure to form the carbonized substance that humans have used for fuel since Roman times. As a reminder of the extreme age of the rock, miners daily encounter fossilized remains of ancient trees and plants that last saw sunlight more than 200 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex lived here. Entire tree stumps of petrified wood sometimes fall from mine ceilings, creating such a hazard that miners refer to them as "widow makers."

At the coal face, the air, always cool under-ground, becomes damp and slightly hazy from the combination of coal dust and the mist from giant sprayers that drench the newly cut coal to reduce the risk of explosions and fires. The silence of the upper mine is replaced by a jumble of sounds: shouts, the hiss of water, the clacking of conveyor belts and, finally, the low throbbing of the extra-ordinary, 1,000-foot-long machine that scrapes the coal from the bedrock. The longwall plow, as it is known, costs $50 million and takes weeks to set up. But once working, the plow's carbide-tipped claws slice through coal with breathtaking speed. In a typical year, the plow will deliver 4 million tons of coal, or enough to fill 350 rail cars.

To prepare an area for longwall mining, workers first use smaller tunneling machines to dig a perimeter around a huge underground block of coal measuring up to two miles wide. Next, they position the plow on a track and drag it across the width of the coal block, scraping off a few inches of coal like a giant cheese grater. With each slice, a row of mobile, hydraulic jacks called shields lurches forward, pressing the plow ever deeper into the coal seam, allowing the black rock to tumble into conveyor belts for the nine-mile trip back to the surface.

Four times during each 10-hour shift, a supervisor must crawl beneath the 1,000-foot line of advancing shields to check equipment and test levels of methane, a natural byproduct of plant decay released from the coal as it's exposed. Both methane gas and airborne coal dust are highly explosive, and modern coal mines build elaborate ventilation systems to keep them in check.

These are some of the toughest, least comfortable and arguably most dangerous jobs in the mine. But those who sign up to work at the longwall say they prefer being at the heart of the action.

Leslie Hurley, 48, does most of the crawling on the "hoot owl," or overnight, shift. It takes 30 minutes each way, sloshing through water and mud and wriggling over pipes and cables, to pass from one end of the shields to the other. When the coal seam is narrow, the height of the crawl space drops to as little as 36 inches.

The petite but muscular Hurley, a one-time aspiring schoolteacher who took a mining job when she ran out of college tuition money, insists it's the best job she's ever had. She says she likes it precisely because it's hard -- the same reason she prefers grueling hikes on the Appalachian trail to leisurely strolls through the local shopping mall. "You push your body to the point that it can't go further," she says, "and that night when you sleep, you have the best dreams. It's like you've done all you can do."

Could she have done something else? She shrugs. After nearly three decades as a miner, the question seems irrelevant. "I don't want to do anything else. I don't know that I could do something else," she says. "I'm good at what I do, and now it's like a security blanket. None of us want change."

ON THIS DAY, MIKE PLUMLEY IS FAR FROM THE LONGWALL, walking alone through a pitch-dark back tunnel. He will pass much of his day in this fashion, rarely seeing another soul. The beam of his helmet lamp is fixed straight ahead, but his eyes simultaneously scan ceiling and floor, looking for cracks, fallen rocks, sagging roofs, water leaks, anything that might signal trouble. The mine's only hourly employee with an MBA degree works as a pumper, a sort of troubleshooter-at-large who oversees a complex network of drainage lines and pumps intended to keep the mine from filling with groundwater.

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.

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.

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.