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After his junior year, his parents divorced
— Chris was surprised;
they never argued
— and any overt power his father held over him vanished.

“I said, ‘You no longer have the right to tell me what to do with my life,’” said Chris.

“You’ve been giving me a hard time for not doing what I’m supposed to do,
and now you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do.”

He’d finished high school a year early and a decision presented itself.

“The big question for my father was, would I go to Harvard or would I settle for Princeton,” said Chris.

“And I told him that I wanted to work in a factory.

And he said, ‘I’m not paying for you to go to college so you can get a job at an auto plant.’

So, I thought about it and decided, ‘What do I need college for?’”

He joined a group whose goal, quaint as it sounds today, was to train smart young people to organize workers.

“The idea was to make the unions more responsive,” he said.

Along with a small crowd of like-minded young people,
he bounced from an oil refinery outside Los Angeles to a UPS warehouse inside Los Angeles to an auto factory in Detroit
and, finally, to a coal mine in West Virginia.

“It wasn’t that I was going to be the leader or anything,” he said.

“It was helping working people make use of their own power.”

The more time he spent with actual working people, the less plausible his self-assigned role seemed
— and not just to him.

By the time he arrived in West Virginia, he had only two other young revolutionaries by his side
— and they both took one look at their new jobs and fled.

Neither of them had had any idea of what a coal mine looked like, either.

His arrival in West Virginia coincided with something else:

a call from home to tell him that his mother had died by suicide.

(He never mentioned this to me. I learned it from a former colleague of his father’s.)

Chris went home for two days … and then returned to the coal mine in West Virginia.

He was now 19 and nearing the end of a romantic mission to revolutionize the life of the American worker.

The main effect of the previous three years had been to alienate his father.

(When his father told a friend of the curious path that Chris had put himself on,
the friend had said,
“You must be so proud of him.”

To which Robert replied, “I’d be proud of him if he was your kid.”)

He wasn’t organizing anything or even trying to.

He was sleeping in a trailer and working the graveyard shift at the Lightfoot No. 1 mine in Boone County, W.Va.,
alongside a bunch of guys who had grown up together.

It was as if he had flown halfway across the country to crash some random high school prom.

“I was never unaware of my outsider status for a moment,” he said.

“There was not a moment when I thought I fit in.”

Real-life American workers were different from his mental model of them.

“I had thought if they only knew what I thought, they’d see things how I do,” he said.

That idea now struck him as so obviously nuts that he didn’t bother to let them know what he thought.

His fellow coal miners were less concerned with his ideas about the economy and their rightful place in it than in simply making a living.

Their morale, at that moment, was actually sky-high.

“Coal was booming,” said Chris.

“We were going to save the world.

Thank god we have all this coal so we’re not reliant on Arab oil.

People felt good about themselves.”

Inside a West Virginia coal mine that politics had brought him to,
politics seeped out of him.

He was aware that his fellow miners must wonder why this stranger had turned up wanting to be a miner,
but they never asked him about it.

He returned the favor and didn’t pester them about their opinions.

“I’ve always thought that everyone has a right to think what they think,” he said.

But there were moments when he was reminded how different their world was from the one he’d grown up in.

The one time in the mine that someone brought up religion, for example.

“I broke my rule,” said Chris. “I said, ‘I’m, uh, actually an atheist.’

This other guy got this stricken look on his face, then looked up at the roof and said, ‘don’t say that in here!’”

Another time, Chris woke up for his night shift to hear on the radio that Mao Zedong had died.

“No one had the slightest interest in global affairs, but I thought, ‘I’ll try it.’”

He told a fellow miner the news.

“Who’s that?” asked the miner.

“He’s the head of China,” said Chris.

“Well, they won’t miss him, then,” said the miner.

“It’s standing room only over there!”