I found this in Spain last year, thought it was a clever idea although it will never fly here in the USA. These specialized plastic bags are designed to be filled with water and tossed into the freezer, and in practically no time at all you have ice cubes. Actually, they are more like ice pillows, lacking the sharp edges and corners of cubes that come from plastic trays. 

Americans do not realize, until they go abroad, that they use much more ice than people in other countries. We also demand that beer, white wine, and soda be served ice cold, while people from other places avoid drinking and eating anything so cold. Even ice cream is served warmer everywhere else. This is why refrigerators manufactured and sold abroad are usually not equipped with automatic ice makers, and many people do not even bother to have ice trays in their freezers. 

Tonight I will be testing my new ice pillows with a new bourbon recommended to me by a friendly ABC store clerk, with a little water (just a little) and a fresh piece of lemon peel. 

In February 1981 I was a graduate student at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. 

It was an interesting time to be in Spain; the dictator Francisco Franco had finally died at the end of 1975, and after 40 years of suppression the country was quickly catching up to the rest of the modern world in things cultural and political. Of course the police, the army, and the hierarchy of the Catholic church, who had all helped Franco keep a lid on things, were not at all happy to watch the modernization process. The freedom of expression in the arts and the press, the creation of a constitution, the legalization of labor unions and political parties, including the Spanish Communist Party, the loosening of the centralist government and recognition of regional differences, and granting limited powers to the regional governments, all made the old hard-liners nervous. The increased activity of the Basque separatists, and the fact that the new King was booed and hissed on a recent visit to the Basque city of Gernika made the hard-liners angry.

I followed all of this from the “inside”.  Although I was in a Spanish University program with foreign students, mostly European and African, my real window on the culture was the fonda where I lived, a sort of rooming house that occupied the fourth and fifth floors of a building on a street named calle Princesa, an extension of the Gran Vía that leads to the area known as the Ciudad Universitaria, the university complex. My companions were students from all over Spain, and I had two roommates from León and Avila. Gerardo was studying English Philology, but he was always ready to slip out for a beer or a coffee. I do not know if he ever finished school; in early ‘82 he stopped going to class, blew all his rent money on lottery tickets, and got thrown out of the fonda. Maricio, from a tiny village in Avila, was a very serious student majoring in agricultural engineering. He went home on weekends to help on the family farm, and often brought back some good food made by his mother. Mauricio always studied and we were only able to get him out for a cup of coffee once or twice. Another boarder named Pedro Carrasco from Córdoba, a journalism major, was always ready to hit the street with us after dinner, served at 10 p.m. as is typical in Madrid. 

In Madrid the techno-pop music of a group called Mecano was popular, the early films of Pedro Almodóvar were shown at the Alphaville Cinema, and pasotas were seen everywhere. They were “hippies” of a sort, 10 years behind the rest of the world’s hippies and of a very definite Spanish “flavor”. Mostly they smoked hash and hung around the Malasaña neighborhood, adding some local color and causing the old conservatives to complain about their lack of shame and patriotism. About every other weekend I traveled up to the Basque country, which was much more politicized, and where Punk Rock was becoming popular.

Besides going to class I had joined the Círculo de Bellas Artes, which had a large building with a movie theater, a cafe, an auditorium, and drawing studios on the top floor. Two or three times a week I attended figure drawing sessions from 6 to 9 p.m. I was not a great draughtsman, but determined not to lose the ground that I had gained in art classes as an undergrad in the United States. I was there on the 23rd of February when the Spanish Army and the paramilitary police called the Guardia Civil attempted to overthrow the Spanish government.   

During the summers of 1974 and 1976 I worked underground for the Hecla Mining Company in Wallace, Idaho. Hecla had a summer program for college students, most of whom were mining engineering students at the University of Idaho. I was a Fine Arts major at Boise State but managed to get into the program through my dad’s contacts in the company.

The first summer I was put to work in the Lucky Friday Mine, down the road from Wallace towards Montana in Mullen, Idaho, with some Canadian drillers that Hecla had contracted to drill a six-foot diameter shaft from the 3450 level to the 4250 level. They used a “Big Hole Drill”, and I was called the Big Hole Helper. That was better than than being a Miner’s Helper, because we worked nine-hour shifts rather than eight, to keep the drilling going instead of losing an hour at every change of shift. It takes a while to get one group of miners out and the next group in. The first shift at the Lucky Friday began at 11 p.m. Sunday night and ended at 7 a.m. Monday, the day shift was from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the swing shift began at 3 p.m. and ended at 11 p.m. The last shift of the week ended at 11 on Friday night. Miners were paid “portal to portal”, from the time they left the dry room and picked up their headlamps and self-rescuers at the counter on the way to the top of the elevator shaft, to the time they dropped their gear off again. Not only did I get a nine-hour day, I worked the graveyard shift and therefore got a small bonus on top of the $5.00 per hour that the Miner’s Helpers were normally paid. 

Big Hole Helper is a title that is rarely seen on job applications, and I can’t say that it ever helped me get any of my later jobs as a bartender, draftsman, designer, translator, or teacher. But it didn’t hurt when I returned to the Lucky Friday two summers later and was given two job titles and sent to join the 3850 crew.

I began each shift as the Grizzly Man. The coaleducation.org glossary explains: “Grizzly - Course screening or scalping device that prevents oversized bulk material form entering a material transfer system; constructed of rails, bars, beams, etc. My job was to make sure that the bulk material, in this case high grade ore rich in lead, silver, and zinc, did get through the course screen. I stood on the grid of steel railroad rails spaced a foot apart, pushing and prying the rocks until they fell through into the deep hole that angled towards the elevator shaft, where it was then hoisted to the surface in large buckets above the cages in which the miners were transported. The ore, blasted from the face of the vein at the end of the previous shift, was brought from the stopes where the actual mining took place in ore cars pulled by a “motor”, which was a mini train engine powered by a bank of car batteries. The rock was dumped into the grizzly and then transported to the top during the first half of each shift.

On my first day in the mine I was sent to the surface to get something, and soon after jerking the appropriate code on the bell cable a cage arrived to pick me up. I got in and the hoist shot upwards at a great speed, then suddenly stopped to leave me looking over the top of the steel doors at the solid rock face of the shaft, the only light that of my headlamp. It was very quiet for a long minute, then I heard a rumbling that rose to a deafening level as the big rocks were dumped into the steel buckets ABOVE MY HEAD! Loose rocks fell down the shaft banging on all sides of the metal box in which I stood, and the cage began bouncing up and down. Only every time it bounced down it only bounced a little way back up; the big fat, grease encased cable from which the buckets and cages hung was stretching. Was that supposed to happen? Watching the wall in front of me, half obscured by falling debris, I saw the cage drop three to five feet. Then it was suddenly quiet again, I could just hear the cable creaking and the last of the debris falling to the bottom of the shaft, which extended another three thousand feet (!) below me. The bucket and cage began its ascent again, slower this time, and in few minutes I was at the surface and in possession of whatever tool I had been sent for. These many years later I wonder whether that tool was something the miners needed, or had they just hazed the college kid on his first day?

While waiting for a cage to take me back down, I had a second memorable experience. There were two shafts side by side, and I held on to the gate of the one that was not being used (I may have been a college boy, but I wasn’t THAT dumb), and I leaned out to look straight down the nearly six thousand foot deep hole. The square shaft narrowed as it went down, and at intervals light from each working level was visible. The lights were dimmer at the deepest levels, and finally there was just a small black square of darkness at the bottom. Except that it was not the bottom, it was probably not even halfway to the bottom. I was hanging over a hole that was over a mile deep. I calculated how many football fields that would be. I figured that if it were horizontal I could run the distance in about 15 minutes. If it were an upward slope I would probably have to walk most of the way, and if I had to climb ladders or even stairs from the bottom I probably would not make it. If I fell down the shaft I would arrive at the bottom much too quickly. I thought perhaps I WAS that dumb after all and backed away from the shaft. Years later I read that a miner did fall down that shaft. He was doing repair work on the cages, and his partner Cliff watched him fall. Cliff was the motorman on the 3850 crew while I was there, he is the tallest in the pictures that I posted of the crew below this entry.

After the ore was hoisted to the surface, boxes of dynamite, or powder as the miners called it, were dropped off at the working levels. This is when I became the Nipper. 

Researching the word on the Internet I found the “Nipper” program in Alaska that trains young people to be miners. The press release said that the word came from “nipping things in the bud”, and I am not sure how that relates to helping miners. Another entry mentions that the British term “nipper” means “a small boy”. This makes more sense, because children worked as helpers and even miners from the times of the earliest mines, and this continued until the relatively recent child labor laws went into effect. Who better to deliver your dynamite than a mere nipper who hasn’t yet the strength to swing a sledge? Have I mentioned that I am pro Labor?

During the second half of the shift it was my job as the Nipper to deliver boxes of dynamite to the gypo miners working in the stopes, where they had finished drilling six foot deep holes in a circular pattern on the rock face following the vein of ore. The holes were just large enough for the sticks of powder to be inserted, and the miners packed in as many as they could, ramming them with a long wooden dowel. Blasting caps were crimped to thick black fuses that I had also delivered separately from the powder, as required by safety regulations, and then inserted into the last dynamite stick in each hole. Dynamite “sticks” are actually cardboard tubes filled with TNT, which is fairly soft and malleable like clay. Over time the liquid chemicals tend to separate from the matrix and become unstable, but new powder requires the small explosion of a blasting cap to make it go off. However, I got quite nervous watching the miners ramming it into the holes, and even more when they let their cigarette ashes fall onto the dynamite sticks in the boxes, or when they started whacking each other’s helmets with sticks of powder. This was when I would return to the motor and drive it back down the tracks to the station.

The gypo miners and the entire crew would gather at the station near the grizzly and the main shaft a half an hour before the shift ended. The fuses had all been measured and spliced to each other to cause the powder “rounds” to go off with precise timing that would create a large opening, in effect a six foot extension of the tunnel following the ore, with a pile of rocks that were small enough to remove to the ore cars at the beginning of the following shift. The fuses were lit as the miners left the stopes and walked out along the motor tracks. We all sat on benches, smoking, chewing tobacco, or sucking on sunflower seeds still in the shell, and waited for the explosions. They could be heard and felt, thumping in our ears and on the bottoms of our feet. Only after all blasting was over did the cages appear to whisk us up the shaft to the dry room and hot showers. Our boots, work clothes, or “diggers”, and yellow slickers, would be put in a wire basket that hung from a chain that looped over a pulley at the double high ceiling and angled back down to where it was attached to a wall at chest level. We pulled the chain to raise the basket to the ceiling, where they dried until we returned two shifts later. By the end of the week our overalls and jeans were so stiff they could stand by themselves, impregnated with fine rock dust that dried like plaster or cement.