A jarring crash of splintered glass awoke my mom and grandma. They shot up and walked in the dark to investigate the clamor. Colliding in the living room, clumsily stumbling around, they found no signs of broken glass. The house was safe and sound. My grandpa slept and never sensed the sounds or the commotion, and of his wife’s and daughter’s fear he really had no notion. He concerned himself with working and with getting to the mine. He laughed and ignored their stories, said he didn’t have the time. First, my grandma asked him nicely if he’d please take a sick day. Something bad was going to happen, so with her he should just stay. More urgently, my grandma warned, but he wouldn’t hear her pleas. Said he couldn’t lose his shift work, had a boss he must appease. Then he dressed in heavy clothing, took his lunch pail and his gear, and he headed off to Sherwood where he never had a fear using dynamite and blasting walls of iron ore in the shafts. It was what he did routinely as a well-developed craft. Other workers had descended in the elevator cage, and my grandpa and his buddies had begun the descent stage. They could not ignore bad odors permeating the mine’s air. It was rotten egg of sulfur— they would know it anywhere. Then there came a huge explosion! Fire and smoke came up the shaft, and the cage became their prison, filled with flames and sulfur gas. My grandpa pushed the button, sent the cage back to the top. Although he was charred and burning, he got out when it had stopped. Other miners didn’t make it; there were four, then five, then six. Grandpa was so badly injured with so many burns to fix. (This was way before burn units and enteric feeding tubes. They just had simple debridement. Forcing fluids was abuse.) The Sherwood Mine disaster, it was briefly in the news. My grandpa’s name not mentioned among other names they used. He would spend two months at Mayo, another five years getting well. He was no longer a miner, but the stories he could tell. The mystery of the broken glass will never be explained, but if Grandpa had just listened, he would’ve suffered much less pain. The Sherwood Mine, it is no more; Inland Steel, they shuttered it, and I hope iron mining’s safer-- now they mine in open pits! When your family gets a warning, it’s something you should heed. You should trust their intuition, as their wisdom’s what you need. Some people are just more prescient with events that they foretell. When they get those signs ahead of time, hear them out and listen well!
Poet note: The Sherwood Mine disaster of June 1, 1959, caused by an explosion of sulfurous gases, led to burns, lung injuries and asphyxiation that killed six men and injured many others. Contrary to the news reports, the smell of sulfur was in the air before this happened, as my grandfather recalled. The event occurred when I wasn't quite four years old, and I didn't hear the shattering glass that awakened my mom and grandma, but I do remember getting up that night after they bumped into each other in the dark. I was also there for the breakfast when Grandma kept begging Grandpa to stay home. The hospital in Stambaugh where they took my grandpa after the explosion had no way of taking care of burn victims, and it was only after my mom somehow forced my grandpa to swallow egg nog that she got any nutrition into him. How she spirited my grandpa out of that place and into an airplane to be flown to Rochester, Minnesota, for treatment at the Mayo Clinic, I have no idea, but it happened. Had it not, I believe my grandpa would have been counted in the fatalities. He was a strong man who endured unbelievable suffering, but he rarely complained, and he lived another 26 years, albeit with plenty of scars. The Sherwood Mine predeceased him in 1976. It was the last underground iron mine in Iron County, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Some iron mining is still being done in the U.P., but interest has now shifted to nickel and cobalt, as well as some copper. For more information about Sherwood Mine: https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/sherwood_news_only.htm
Wow indeed! What a vivid, well-told tale.
Wow! Thanks for sharing this. It is easy to forget those who built a nation with sweat and blood.