I went to the World Museum of Mining (yup, there is one of those) and was completely surprised by how much I learned there. If ever you are in Butte, please go see this little place that is full of the stories of the many men who have sacrificed their lives and health so that my and your little world can be a delightful place to live. Our tour guide, Logan, was all of 25 years old and was a font of information if ever there was one. His dad had been a coal miner in W. Virginia for many years then headed to
Butte where he top-mined at the Berkeley Pit (now one of the largest toxic waste sites in the world). Life is just so complicated. In pursuit of houses that stay warm, telephones and computers that work, not to mention electrical wiring many many men over many many years have suited up and headed down into the bowels of the earth to painstakingly excavate the hidden lifeblood of our modern world...coal, copper, iron, etc... In the meantime, they have suffered (only think back a few days to that tragic recent event in the coal mines of West Virginia), and the earth has suffered, and we take it all for granted, for sure. I had a new appreciation for the complexity of attempting to determine easy answers for not so easy problems. Anyway, enough pontificating.
I probably recommended How Green Was My Valley to Logan ten times during our couple of hours together. I will be sending my sister up again to check in to see if he read it...and if not, well, I think he's lived it.
