I'm glad someone is willing to be a miner. My mine isn't going to be over my head, no deeper than my shoulders. When my cousin and I were younger and dumber -- probably
16 because we were driving a 37 chevy pickup, without a muffler, bald tires, and the windows wouldn't roll up -- we drove over to Green Mountain without telling anyone
where we were going. We had one flash light, and who knows how long the batteries had been in it. Green mountain was named I suppose because it was loaded with copper.
My cousin and I went into a copper mine to explore. Solid granite for 20 or 30 yards, then shored up with timbers for a long ways, then branches going off in several directions,
all caved in except one, followed that, until it was mostly caved in, then we crawled into that until it opened up, and there were two branches, one caved in and a short distance
into the other that one was caved in also. My cousin says, "I hear rocks falling." We split and made it out of that hole in record time. The flashlight lasted, nobody was hurt,
but I got PTSD over it. Bad dreams and all. And I've never been in a mine again, and never will. I don't even like thinking about it now, 61 years later, one of those memories
that's burned into your mind. The sheer stupidity of it I guess is what eats at me. Come to think of it, probably most of us can come up with stupid kid stunts that we lived through,
accidents and near accidents is one way we learn. But going into that mine was something else, beyond dumb kid stuff, the flash light going off or for any number of other reasons we
could have been trapped in there. Not going into another one.
