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playing in the coal mine
2004-08-30 - 11:13 a.m. When I was a child, I lived in a house at the bottom of a big hill. At the top of the hill was an old abandoned coal mine, complete with old abandoned mine shafts and slag piles and old abandoned equipment. of course, trespassing in the old mine was absolutely forbidden to all the neighborhood kids, thereby making it the place to sneak into and play. There was the requisite busybody bitchy neighbor without children whose property was adjacent to the mine on the south side. This woman made it her mission in life to station herself at the window to run off kids with trespassing on their minds. She was really mean and horrible, and some of the kids flipped her the bird or said 'Fuck off, you old bat!" Which was really stupid because we lived in a town the size of a postage stamp where everybody knew you, your mama, and your Grandma, and by the time you made it back to your house, one of the above had already heard an earful of how you sassed the coal mine lady, and you were now going to have to eat a ration of shit for that indiscretion as well as for trying to sneak unbidden into the damn coal mine. This failed to deter us one little bit. Instead, we intrepid adventurers figured that, instead of approaching from the southern side, we could walk a mile or so into the woods, hike up a huge hill to the county road which abutted the mine's northern end, descend surreptitiously down the slag piles, and we were home free in the forbidden coal mine. Of course, our legs and shoes were completely black from walking-sliding-tumbling down piles of slag, so it wasn't exactly like nobody couldn't tell that we had been at the mine, but we figured out how to beat that too. There was a creek that ran from the hills into the mine and turned what can only be described as flourescent orange. I have no freaking idea just what turned a clear mountain stream into flourescent orange water, but that might have had something to do with why our parents didn't want us fucking around inside the mine property. To a bunch of kids, though, it was business as usual. We played in the knee high water, splashing each other, getting soaked and acting totally stupid, the way all kids will when they're getting away with something they're not supposed to be doing. We climbed in and out of the coal bins, set up shop in the old office, where in a few years, we would come to drink beer and smoke pot, but we were still just a bunch of dumb, innocent kids trying to have a good time in a one-horse town. No matter how many times I got punished (and it was often) for playing in the mine, there wasn't a gate in the world that could ever keep me out. We were smart enough to stay away from the shafts (hell, half of us had lost family members to mining accidents; we knew there was nothing good could come of climbing down into the belly of the earth), but that whole huge piece of property was well explored by my group of latchkey friends. I wonder if it's still there, and how many more generations of Ohio kids spent their summers turning black from coal dust. �
still here - 2009-12-18
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