"THE FULLNESS OF LIFE" :

After Roll-of-the-Dice Rescue, a Mine Town Rejoices (FRANCIS X. CLINES, July 29, 2002, NY Times)

In their darkest hours down in the mine, the nine trapped men, bedeviled by rising floodwaters, could hear the steady drilling of rescuers above them. But they still thought it imperative to jot down private thoughts and seal them in a lunch bucket as a parting word to family survivors.

"They formed a barricade, and they wrote their wills, and they put them in one of the lunchboxes," said Leslie Mayhugh, tearful this morning through her happiness at the survival of her husband, Harry, known to everyone as Blaine, her father, Thomas Foy, and the seven other men who had to face their worst thoughts along with chin-high water before the rescuers finally reached them.

"They heard all the drilling and they knew they were trying, but the water just kept coming," Mrs. Mayhugh said of the miners, who initially thought they would drown as they pushed their faces from the water searching for scraps of air.

"And they were ready--they tied themselves together," she said, weeping at that desperate image, even after embracing her husband, alive and well, early today in the hospital. [...]

This blue-collar, Bible-friendly southwestern Pennsylvania town, 60 miles from Pittsburgh, did not hesitate to use the word "miracle" today in describing the intricate roll-of-the-dice rescue operation that freed the men.

At its essence, engineers had to guess accurately in the first hours of the disaster where the men might have fled on Wednesday night, when a torrent of water suddenly burst in on them from an abandoned mine thought to have been a safe distance away.

"We tried to outrun it, but it was too fast," Blaine Mayhugh said of the roaring, rising flood in the mine's honeycomb of paths. At times the waters flowed over the miners' heads as they scrambled for survival in the cold darkness. [...]

The miners fought despair, Mr. Mayhugh said, when the drill fell silent for 18 hours because of a snapped shaft just as the water closed in once more.

Mr. Mayhugh decided it was time to borrow a pen to write a final word to his family on a scrap of cardboard.

"You know, tell them I loved them," the strapping miner said, fighting back tears in the daylight as he described the men's fierce unity in facing the worst even as they prayed for deliverance.

"My father-in-law tied us all together so we wouldn't float away from each other," Mr. Mayhugh said, fairly shaking with emotion in the fullness of life above ground.

The other day our five year old asked me when I was going to die. I told him I'd probably be around to bug him for awhile, but you never know. He told me : "Fine, just if you're going to die, go somewhere else. I don't want to see you dead." We talked a little bit about death and I told him that we all die and none of us know when we'll die, so all you can really do is try to be the best person you're capable of being. I told him you've got to take advantage of every day that your alive and appeciate it and the people around you. That phrase Mr. Clines uses, "the fullness of life", is perfect. Why worry about the prospective emptiness of death when the fullness of life is with us here and now? Carpe diem, baby.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 31, 2002 8:22 PM