Highballin' is a 3,000 word short story about sinking a mining shaft in the Sudbury Basin of Ontario, Canada, in the 1960s. The narrative is told in the first person from the viewpoint of a miner, old now, recalling an incident from his youth. In 2006 Highballin' was shortlisted for a CBC Literary Award in the English language short fiction category.
HIGHBALLIN'
Moose called yesterday.We worked together once, back when we were young. It was the last underground job either of us ever took. Moose became an ironworker, I became a millwright. We see each other around town occasionally and, because of what we went through, we always have a minute to ask how the other’s doing. But I can’t remember that we ever talked on the phone, so when Moose called I was surprised.
He wanted to know if I’d heard the news. I thought he was talking about his cancer and said no, feeling guilty about seeing him being wheeled out of chemo last month at Sudbury General and turning back the way I came before he saw me.
Moose said, “They’re shutting down #5.”
*
In the early Sixties, St. John Blasting sank Armstead Shaft #5. Starting a nickel mine in northern Ontario means somebody has to blast a 12 by 24-foot shaft as much as a mile and a quarter down through the Canadian Shield. Sinking the shaft is all money out, no money in, so unions look the other way while companies hire contractors willing to highball. That’s what miners call work where speed trumps safety: highballing.
I was 19, engaged, working as a mechanic’s apprentice, making a buck eighty-five an hour. Put my name in at St. John when I heard they were paying three plus shift bonus. Two months later I came home from the garage on an early summer night and Mom told me St. John had called. When I called back they didn’t even ask if I wanted the job. They just told me I was the new greaser on the graveyard shift if I could be there by quarter to eleven.
The sky was clear the night I started, a bright half moon overhead. I remember running across the parking area; excited, frisky, ready to make serious money. Had my head down, watching my footing, and I felt like I could run forever. When the ground changed from rutted dirt to smooth rock, the way it does around Sudbury, I was able to look where I was going. A hundred yards to my left a car whizzed down the north end of Frood Road; up ahead loomed the Shaft 5 headframe, shaped like a pyramid with the peak cut off. Poking out of the top, the shivs, two cast iron pulleys ten feet across, tended to business. Nowadays headframes are made out of pre-fab steel, but back then we were still using trestle timber and plywood.
Recessed into the angled wall of the headframe was a truck-size garage door, lit by two spots. It dwarfed the door beside it: the one for men. The air in front of the smaller door was furry with bugs flying around a dim bulb under a bent, green shade. I swatted my way into #5 and told the first man I saw that I was supposed to report to the shift super. The man I told was Moose. He took me to see Mike St. John. The company belonged to Mike and his brother, Billy, who worked days. They were Newfies: learned their trade in the Nova Scotia coalfields. I found out later that this had been a concern when the job started. Sudbury’s hard rock mining: not like digging coal at all. How you blast, how you shore, the wear on machinery; it’s all different. But the shaft was down 700 feet by the time I came aboard and nobody had died yet, so the St. Johns coming from coal wasn’t the worry it had been, or the accusation it would later become.
The main shaft was split into the working shaft and the counterweight shaft. The shivs, one over each shaft, raised and lowered five ton buckets with bowls big enough to hide a car. The number of times the working bucket brought up a load of rock during your eight hours was the measure of your bonus. Separating the shafts was the ladder-way. Spooky place; chamber after empty plywood chamber, each one four feet wide, twelve feet long and twenty feet high, the ladder alternating sides every floor, the only light the one you wore on your head. It was the only way out if anything happened to the hoist system. The hoist shack was a two-story building off the headframe. The shack housed the spool, which held something more than two miles of steel cable. One end of the cable ran off the bottom of the spool, the other off the top, meaning whichever way the spool turned, cable was winding down one shaft and up the other.
Moose was a driller, son of a miner from Gaspè. We’d ride down the shaft together standing on the crossframe, a deck that rested on the collar that the bucket was suspended from. At the bottom of the shaft was the set, a 20-foot high steel box anchored into the rock below the ladder-way, down where the shaft was still all of a piece. The girder floor of the set held the Cryderman Clam, a giant version of the devices you see in arcades and use to grab stuffed toys or cheap jewelry. The walls of the set served as the frame for the cement walls that we poured as the shaft descended.
The plate deck of the crossframe stuck out over the edge of its I-beam frame, to catch the girders of the set floor. The bucket passed through the set to the bench, the bottom of the shaft; the crossframe stayed on the set, making a small work area.
Moose would climb down a chain ladder to the bench and drill holes for the next blast. I would stay up top, greasing the four motors of the Cryderman.
I’d been working at #5 for almost a year when it happened.
We hit underground streams all the time. Mostly they’d just seep down the walls, but sometimes we’d hit one with some force behind it. When that happened, drillers, working off the crossframe, would punch out cistern-like catches, where I would later run hoses and install sump pumps. We were closing in on 4500 feet and one of the largest catches, down around 900, was overflowing, landing as a continuous mist on the bench, far below. Mike told me to grab a driller and a replacement pump and fix the problem. The pump was a Briggs & Stratton, the driller was Moose.
As we waited for the bucket to surface and dump, two electricians showed up to wait with us. When we climbed aboard, Moose and I stood in one corner of the crossframe with the electricians balancing our weight by positioning themselves on the diagonal. The Board of Inquiry later found this to be a contributing factor. We should have each taken a side, Moose and me opposite each other, the other guys doing the same.
The electricians rang for the 300 level, we rang for 900. Moose and I would work off the crossframe till they needed the bucket down below. At 300 the electricians got off and entered the ladder-way. But before I could swing around to balance the crossframe by standing opposite Moose, the hoist operator, forgetting there was still one more stop to make, let the bucket drop.
Sticking out of three sides of the crossframe were flanges that ran inside timber guides bolted into the walls of the shaft. All our weight in one corner tilted the crossframe, canting the flanges inside the guides. The Board’s final report said the grinding of the flanges popped one of the guide bolts out of the weak rock face near the 800-foot mark. I already knew that, because I felt it go and saw the twisted bolt hanging loose in its hole as we dropped past. The flange catching the bolt on the way up was what eventually brought everything down.
The hoist operator, a true highballer, was letting the bucket free fall. I grabbed the bell rope. I wasn’t thinking straight and I grabbed tight and the rope jerked my shoulder out of the socket. Moose saw what happened, so he knew to snatch the rope and let go quick.
Down we plunged, Moose ringing as best he could, me on my knees. We were falling at thirty miles an hour and past the 3000 foot mark before the bucket began to slow. Moose dropped to his knees beside me and helped me lay on my back. I remember thinking he was gentle for a big guy.
Landing blind from close to a mile up is never better than haphazard. The ball of my arm was no longer inside the cup of the socket. When the crossframe bumped to a landing my arm rolled one way, the shoulder rolled the other and I screamed.
I waited out the pain looking straight up the shaft, Moose and the Cryderman operator talking urgently nearby. Though it was a straight line from my eyeball to the top of the shaft, we were so deep no light survived the trip down. Below us, hanging from the underside of the set, were high power floods that lit the bench. Light reflected dimly up the shaft, casting faint shadows.
My shoulder singing as if I’d been beaten with bats, nearly a mile from the world, I was going cold with shock in a bad situation. The only heat I could muster came from anger. I needed the heat and let the anger lift me to my feet. I was going to climb to the surface and kick some hoist operator butt. It took Moose and the Cryderman operator a minute to calm me down enough to understand that taking the ladders to the surface was a six, seven hour proposition for the healthy, which I wasn't.
“Once I catch my breath, I’m going up,” I told them.
Just saying it helped clear my head enough for me to understand that I was talking nonsense. Try climbing a ladder with a dislocated shoulder. My way of conceding their point was to say, “No way am I riding up till the whole shaft gets inspected.”
We argued about it, the operator saying that inspecting the shaft meant missing our quota and losing the shift bonus.
“I felt something go,” I yelled. “You want one of those flanges to pop out of the track with a full load of rock? Then we got real trouble.”
But I was wrong. We had real trouble already.
When they saw I wasn’t going to budge, and maybe because they believed me, they agreed to send the bucket up once, empty, to test if it was safe. We rang the code for up and climbed to the far side of the set, Moose helping me every step. The three of us stood on the girders, hanging onto the sides of the Cryderman, a 20 foot fall onto jagged rocks all around.
Empty, the bucket was hoisted out at top speed: 12 miles an hour. It took almost four minutes for the crossframe to reach the 800 level. Of the whole event, I remember those four minutes the best: the smell of dust and scorched rock and diesel and damp, my mind blank but still working inside the shock.
The Board of Inquiry said it happened just the way I was afraid it was going to. A flange caught the bolt that popped loose on the way down, tipping the crossframe, swinging the bucket into the sides of the shaft. After the Inquiry I looked up what the speed of sound is and learned that it took three seconds for that first deep note to reach us. By then the crossframe was good and twisted and the bucket was ripping out the guides, cracking the concrete walls, tearing everything loose. Up in the loft the pressure on the shiv pulleys was multiplying as the hoist bore down to fight the mounting resistance. In the hoist shack, gauges were redlining.
A sheet of concrete, no more than a black flash as it fell through the set, completed its 3700 foot fall and shattered like a bomb against the bench. Rock and concrete flew up through the underside of the set. A chunk caught the operator between the legs and he fell without making a sound. I never saw the man land. Stony shrapnel knocked out enough of the floods to short the system, plunging us into darkness save for our headlamps, dim cones of pale light in the thickening dust.
“Inside the Clam,” I screamed at Moose. If the bucket was coming, being inside the Clam was our only hope. We made our way to the ladder. Moose went first. He waited for me to swing onto the ladder between his arms. Once on the bench the Clam was just two steps away. We crawled inside the triangular opening between the resting scoops, Moose curling against one side, me curling into the other.
On the surface, the pressure had grown too great. The shivs wrenched free of their mountings and suddenly the buckets had 20 feet of slack. Once the working bucket used up the slack, it jerked hard enough to set the hoist emergency brake. But when the falling shiv crashed into the bucket the cable snapped. The sudden release of pressure twisted the trestle timber tower and the headframe collapsed in on itself.
Down around us the roar of the falling sky echoed and re-echoed off granite that had only lately heard sound after two billion years of silence.
Between the time we realized the bucket was coming and the time it landed, Moose and I had maybe twenty clear seconds. We were sitting in mud, facing each other, our backs against the scoops, our knees pulled against our chests. My headlamp lit Moose’s face, his lamp lit mine.
I hadn’t thought of those twenty seconds in decades, but with Moose on the line telling me they were closing Armstead Shaft #5, those seconds returned. Maybe for the first time, I understood what it was that I had seen in Moose’s eyes; and what he had seen in mine.
Death was coming. We couldn’t stop it and we couldn’t get out of the way. All we could do was wait to learn if it was coming for us. And at the core of that certainty there was stillness, a terrible stillness that felt somehow crowded, as if all the dying of the world gather round a single thought, a thought the living can never admit to: the thought that death should hurry up and get on with it.
Death did arrive that night, so loud and tortured it sounds in memory more like screams than crashes. Moose and I were safe inside the Clam, suffering nothing worse than damaged hearing, cuts and gashes, and the humiliation of soiling ourselves. The operator wasn’t so lucky. When we finally emerged from the Clam, hacking and stinking, there was a place where the rock face looked as if it had been hit by a pail of red paint.
It took us 16 hours to climb out, Moose helping me up all 224 ladders. We met the rescue team four hours along. We told them what was down below. They popped my shoulder back in place, shot me up with morphine, cleaned and bandaged the worst of our cuts, gave us water and pills. Six hours later they passed us on their way back up. They offered help but we waved them on. Coming out under our own steam seemed the most important thing in the world right then, and I can’t for the life of me remember why.
When we finally reached the surface there was a crowd waiting. It cheered and whooped like we’d scored a winning goal. Moose and I just held each other and wept.
*
When Moose told me they were shutting down #5 I said, “She was a rich one.” Then I said, “Saw you at the hospital last month.” He said. “Saw you, too. Guess that’s why I thought of you when I heard about #5.”
“Guess so,” I said. “Heard you got cancer.”
“Yeah,” Moose said. “Was it the diabetes that got your legs?” I looked down at my stumps and remembered when I believed I could run forever and said, “Yeah.”
“The bucket’s falling,” Moose said. I knew then that he called because he’d been remembering the same thing I’d been remembering of late. “Would have been worse,” I said, “waiting inside the Clam alone.”
“That’s what I've been thinking,” he said. I was glad, then, that he'd called.
We talked, in ways the dying can and the living can't, about what we're going to miss and what we'll be glad to leave behind. Today I thought of some more things to talk about and figured it was my turn. I wonder if he was surprised.
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