He was driving my rental car through the West Virginia coal fields when he said this.
His father had taken care with his dress and appearance.
Robert Mark liked suits and bow ties and his white beard as tightly and neatly groomed as an Augusta green.
Chris wore a wrinkled uniform of flannel and jeans and a careless stubble that was closer to the Augusta rough.
After 40 years in the coal fields, he looks and sounds less like a Princeton kid than a West Virginia coal miner.
When he laughs, he reveals a hole where a molar should be.
Nothing about him is decorative;
everything serves some structural purpose.
He lives in a modest house in the Pittsburgh suburbs
and drives a 10-year-old Subaru Forester with a standard transmission.
In the presence of luxury, he was visibly uneasy
— the sort of person who, when offered filet mignon,
squirms a bit before saying he’d rather have a cheeseburger.
“We always told our kids there are two ways to be rich,” he said.
“One is to make a lot of money.
The other is to not want much.”
It was the kind of thing a father would say only if he’d figured out how not to want much.
From the moment we left the interstate,
we were on narrow back roads winding through towns half-populated by people with a talent for throwing leery glances at strangers.
One side of the road was usually bordered by a canal or a single railroad track
and the other by exposed layers of sedimentary rock containing a thin seam of coal.
The West Virginia coal fields were famous for their abundance of coal seams.
Seldom more than six feet thick, they were still everywhere and encouraged generations of small mine operators to dig into the closest mountain they could find.
Every couple of miles, we’d pass a mine that had been abandoned,
its infrastructure left in place.
Old cranes rose from beds of weeds.
Chutes that once carried coal still ran half a mile from the mouths of exhausted mines to rusting and empty shipping containers.
“Does anyone ever intend to remove any of this?” I asked,
as we passed what looked like a vast abandoned construction site.
“It’s hard to imagine,” he said. “There’s no money in it.”
When Chris arrived in coal country in 1976, there were roughly 250,000 coal miners in the United States.
There are now fewer than 70,000.
During this time, West Virginia has turned from the bluest state in the country to the reddest.
“My idea about how society changes has changed,” he said.
Public interest in preventing miners from being killed on the job has always tended to peak after a mining disaster
and then fade until the next catastrophe.
The U.S. Bureau of Mines was created by an act of Congress in 1910,
three years after 362 coal miners were killed in an explosion in a West Virginia mine.
The bureau was mainly a research facility, however, and lacked the authority to police the mining industry.
In 1941, a year after mine explosions killed hundreds of miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania,
Congress gave the bureau the authority to enter mines and look around
— but not much else.
In 1952, a year after 111 coal miners died inside an Illinois mine, Congress required the industry to acknowledge every roof fall fatality and investigate the cause of failure.
In 1969, a year after 78 miners died in another explosion inside a West Virginia mine, Congress passed a new law that gave the bureau the power to punish safety violations with fines and even criminal charges.
In 1972, after 125 people were killed by a burst dam in a West Virginia coal mine, Congress,
suspecting that the Bureau of Mines had been largely captured by the industry it was meant to regulate,
encouraged the Interior Department to separate mine inspection and regulation,
and created a new agency called the Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration.
Five years later, after 15 miners died inside a coal mine in Kentucky, Congress changed the new agency’s name to the Mine Safety and Health Administration
and gave it even more powers.
It mandated quarterly inspections of every underground coal mine, for instance, to ensure it was following the safety rules.