Casa de Cultura, Copiapo, Chile, by permission, Wikipedia, Sfs90 (The civic center of the mining town where many of the 33 lived)
Of the many poignant accounts in the narrative of the Chilean mining disaster, one of the most gripping is the play of thought that the miners suffered as their condition and their plight continued to roll over them, penetrating their minds and souls and wounding them to the core.
Today, where I live, there is a cool, cool breeze and the skies are dove grey. It’s the middle of August, and our temperatures have been in triple digits for days. Today is like the early effects of autumn, and it is DELIGHTFUL. No rain yet, just a cool, refreshing, heartening change, a thirty degree drop on the thermometer.
In the San Jose, it was always hot and hotter. Dangerously hot. By the end of the first day, all the men were sweaty and smelly and now, more than ever before, gritty and blasted. And that is how they would stay. The precious water they had could not be used for bathing … although one of them had typically rinsed off in it “before,” that is, before they knew they would all be drinking it.
The men fell asleep, thinking of all the “never again” moments of their lives. Never again to walk through an open door onto a patio, never again to light up a barbeque, to join the guys for beer or something harder at the local bars, never again to see their wives, their children, never to meet their unborn children and grandchildren, for several of them. Never again to feel any breeze on their faces. Their lives were hard, the landscape was hard, their thoughts were often hard, but in such a world it does not take much to engender delight. No more delight. No more anything except waiting for death or maybe, somehow, don’t get your hopes up, a miraculous delivery. They had, almost all of them, been underground or related to those who were, for too long to imagine that any drill could reach them before it was TOO LATE. It had taken ten years for them to get where they were.
There is much more to this story, as you can imagine. So much to tell. So very many parallels to your life and mine, every day. Certainly, so many reminders that there are those in our lives who live in a place where they are just waiting for death, and afraid of it. For some, no more delight, or very little, very seldom.
And so, we dig.
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