El Burro Volador

There is not much time to talk when you are swinging a pick or loading an ore cart, but we do get a half-hour lunch every other day, and like most workers we like to chat while we eat.  We don’t really follow current events, so there is not much talk about the “news of the day”, although we all thought Sarah Palin was hilarious, and we think she should do more of those skits with Katie Couric, and less of those lady movies like Baby Mama, and we are all hoping that President Obama gets us some health insurance that covers Devil’s Rot.

No, we mostly talk about our work in the mines.  Our favorite talk is to argue about which is the worst job hazard.  We have three main job hazards at the sulfur mines (four if you count deep crows, but I think those are myths), not counting Devil’s Rot, which is more of a job nuisance once you learn how to make the poultice.

One main job hazard is the whip of the overseer.  I don’t understand how it is okay for them to whip us – Pavel says it has something to do with our union being crooked in the 1930′s.  Our overseer, Grigalt, isn’t really so bad with the whip, because he spends most of his time with his other detachments – Yevgeny says it is because he doesn’t want to see my ugly face, but I say it is Yevgeny’s face that is ugly.

The other main job hazard is fire.  I understand that this isn’t a hazard in most sulfur mines, but I work in a white sulfur mine.  White sulfur is mainly used for making brimstone, I guess, and sometimes it likes to catch on fire.  These are not good times to be in the tunnels.

Our third hazard is cave-ins.  I don’t worry about these so much, because I know that the other miners would come to get us out sooner or later, and if we were down here for a while we might have to eat Yevgeny to survive.

Most of workers say that fire is worst hazard – we have the saying “the whip finds the lazy ass, but the fire she burn everybody some time”.  It’s a pretty wise saying, if you ask me.  Yevgeny says whip is worse, but that’s because he has never fallen into a flame-spout…yet.  You just wait, Yevgeny.

You just wait.

…and what do you get?

In this blog’s short history, I have spent quite a few posts describing a typical morning in the snug little zoo/asylum I call home.  Five days a week, these zany mornings give way to their polar opposite, as I drive my battered car to the local sulfur mines for another drab day of tiresome menial labor that will soon be indistinguishable from the day before.

I park as far away as possible, both to delay the actual start of my work day and to keep the other miners from seeing my car.  I am one of the few  miners to own a car, and some of the other miners chaffed me for it when I first started.  Pepe would only call me “rico” for about a month, and Yevgeny didn’t stop making jokes about it until I “accidentally” hit him with a spanner.

I trudge up to the gates and make sure to find my detachment.  I am part of Drudge Detail 168.  My detachment also has in it Pavel, Pepe and Yevgeny.  Our overseer is Grigalt, but we mostly call him “boss” if we don’t want to get whipped.  When we are on boring duty, Ilsa the mechanic usually runs the giant steam-borer for us.  Boring duty is actually the most exciting duty – this is one of our favorite jokes.

I find my place with my detachment and we crowd into the cages with the other drudges assigned to our tunnel.  It is a good tunnel, we rarely have trouble meeting the quota.  After a minute or two, the big whistle blows like the sky is screaming at us, and the foreman slams all the cage doors.  Then the cages start to go down into the ground.  It is not so bad for me, because the cages go so slow you barely notice, but Pepe gets nervous.  I try to tell him jokes to distract him.  Pavel doesn’t like Pepe, he says that he is stealing jobs from us, but I like him because he doesn’t speak much English, so he is real quiet.  Not like that bigmouth Yevgeny.  I don’t like Yevgeny at all.

After a while, cages reach the bottom, and Grigalt is there to open the door for us (how does he get down here?) so we can start our shift.