Once More into the Depths

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Of course, the dread and frenzy around premature burial is not unique to the post-9/11 or Internet era; there was the Baby Jessica McClure well-rescue story in 1987. One of the first such media circuses happened in 1925, when spelunker Floyd Collins was trapped in Kentucky's Sand Cave. The world was kept on tenterhooks, and 10,000 people a day, news reports said, showed up to gawk and picnic at the rescue site. After Collins was found dead, 17 days later, songs were written, and the incident became the basis for a musical, the Robert Penn Warren novel The Cave and the acerbic 1951 Billy Wilder movie Ace in the Hole, in which a small-town reporter hits the big time by exploiting a mine-rescue story.

Whatever role today's anxieties and media play, the terror and fascination of entombment tap into something primal. To be trapped underground is to be not just in danger but separated from the world of the living. What is underground? It is where the dead are buried. It is where cultures have placed the underworld in their eschatology, where souls are judged and the wicked rent by monsters, boiled in oil or raked by demons over flaming coals.

And what are coal miners? People who descend into hell. People who dig into the devil's backyard, where nothing lives, and bring forth something that burns as hot as Satan's fire. One of the miners who died at Sago, Martin Toler Jr., wrote a note in his last hours: "Tell all I see them on the other side." It was the last sentiment of a man whom family described as deeply religious. But it was also a simple metaphor for the daily hope of every worker who delves in those deep reaches: to rise again and see the faces they love once more. And the fervent wish—felt, in our direst hours, by even the most secular among us—to step from the darkness into the light.