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The premise of his radical youth was that people without power needed to be protected from the people with it.

But these coal miners weren’t asking for protection.

Their jobs were insanely risky,
but they seldom complained and at times even courted risk.

They routinely ventured beyond the pillars that prevented the mountain from falling in on them,
and into areas where the mountain floated over their heads without support.

They upped the odds of a methane explosion by smoking inside the mine.

“The way they judged a new boss was to whip out a cigarette and see if he said anything,” said Chris.

“If he said something, he was done.

He’d never be able to mine any coal.”

All of them knew people who had been killed mining coal.

Married couples learned to settle their arguments before the husband returned to the mine,
because they might never see each other again.

“Everyone had a tragedy,” said Chris.

Chris himself was twice nearly killed, and yet he never adjusted his behavior, either.

For reasons he could never fully explain, even to himself,
he loved being inside a coal mine.

“It was just so cool,” he said.

“You go down into a place most people think you are crazy to be.
And you like it.”

But a year into the job, his enthusiasm for the actual work flagged.

He didn’t really belong in West Virginia.

Everyone knew everyone else,
and he knew no one.

“It was like being an immigrant,” he said.

“You could be there your entire life and never fit in.”

Partly out of stubborn pride, he refused to even consider heading home.

He enrolled in Penn State instead, to study mining engineering.

His mother had left him some money.

His father, mollified that his son had returned to college, chipped in a bit more.

And Chris would help pay for his education
— by moonlighting inside coal mines as he studied.

His political interest in workers’ rights was morphing into a technical interest in their safety.

Coal mining had long been the most dangerous job in the United States.

At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat,
and far more likely to be injured.

(And that didn’t include some massive number of deaths that would one day follow from black lung disease.)

Up to that point in the 20th century, half of the coal miners who had died on the job
— roughly 50,000 people
— had been killed by falling roofs.

In his classes at Penn State, Chris saw at least one reason for that:

The coal mining industry had learned to see the problem as the cost of doing business.