By Mannix Porterfield
Forget about coal mining if you can’t tolerate the thought of being stuck deep in the ground for several hours, apart from sunlight and the lung-soothing breezes circulating around the rolling hills of West Virginia.
Clyde McKnight Jr. can issue that advice in a heartbeat.
“You don’t want to be claustrophobic,” the veteran of the pits says.
“I’ve been in places where you had to crawl. In some places, you can’t stand up real good. It depends on where the coal is. If you’re claustrophobic, you don’t want to consider the coal mining business.”
McKnight admits he feels trapped at times, but it all comes down to mind control.
“If you sit and dwell on your feelings, ‘Well, this might be my last time underground; I might never see my kids again,’ then odds are you’re going to do something foolish or stupid and get yourself in a predicament and get hurt. So you’re best to just focus on your job, think safety and work safe.”
Even the safest of underground workers can’t control everything deep in the bowels of the earth.
A few years after he launched his career, McKnight was running a continuous miner on a pillar section, an era when the workers actually sat on the rear of the device in a small deck. Nowadays, the operation is by remote control.
“I was sitting there and we got through pillaring this one block of coal off,” he recalled.
“When you get done, you set what they call breaker posts. Hopefully, the top comes back and breaks off, but it kept coming. As you drive up, you leave blocks of coal to help hold it up. On pillar work, as you come back, you pull blocks of coal out and let the mountain fall in. You get every lump of coal you can.”
But the coal kept advancing at a faster clip than McKnight could retreat with the continuous miner.
As a result, he was buried under 15 to 20 feet of rock. Co-workers farther back dug him out with chisels, slate bars and sledgehammers, opening a tunnel wide enough for him to wiggle through. McKnight came away with mere bruises.
“I was very fortunate on that,” he said.
McKnight lives with such dangers each day he sets out from his Rock Creek home before sunup for a 45-minute drive to the Harris No. 1 Mine of Eastern Associated Coal Corp. in Boone County for a 10-hour shift. Once, he got off promptly at 4 o’clock, but the new policy is to let his and the follow-up shift overlap for safety reasons, keeping him on the job another hour or so.
At 51, he has earned his keep as a miner since 1976, save for a brief stint as a manager of a Beckley motel during a mine layoff after picking up a paralegal degree at Mountain State University.
His affection for mining comes naturally. He is following the same path laid down by his great-grandfather more than a century ago, and taken up in succession by his grandfather and father. That was an era when a mule was an invaluable part of the work.
“I don’t think just anybody, Joe off the street, can just walk in and work in a coal mine,” he said.
“First of all, you’ve got to be a little secure in your own feelings, your own self.”
Admittedly, at certain times, he feels imprisoned at work, unlike other occupations that afford such freedoms as coffee breaks or lunch-time shopping or jogging.
“Some days, like today, we had a lot of water coming in from the mountain,” he said.
“That makes it a harder day, and, of course, you do feel like you’re behind the eight-ball. You wish you weren’t here, but you like what you do.”
McKnight has earned a nationwide reputation of sorts as a miner spotlighted in the June issue of Reader’s Digest in a layout titled “Dirty Work: Life and Death in Appalachia’s Coal Country.”
He was recommended to the national publication by an official of the West Virginia Institute of Labor Studies in Morgantown who remembered McKnight’s work with the United Mine Workers. The magazine sent both a writer and photographer to spend four days with McKnight.
McKnight’s wife of 27 years, Cheryl, worries about him constantly, but she has more than one family member to dwell on.
Their son, Clyde III, who completed three tours of Iraq and one in Afghanistan with the Marines, has re-enlisted after a brief stint as an officer at a regional jail in the Charleston area.
“He missed the camaraderie of the Marines,” his father says. “He’s not afraid of whatever they call him to do. He’s not afraid to face up to reality.”
The younger McKnight suffered a concussion and black eyes in one encounter.
McKnight describes his wife as “strong-hearted with a strong will,” but one nonetheless is given to worry at times.
“She knows when I leave for the mines, she may never see me again,” he said.
“And all the time that my son was deployed overseas, she faced the same reality that he could never come back. It’s a possibility. She thinks positive all the time. She’s real strong on that.”
And then there is the daughter, Michelle, who lives in the Seattle area. Her husband, a former sheriff’s deputy, is serving with the Army in Afghanistan.
Working six days a week leaves little time to relax, but on rare occasions, McKnight slips down to a nearby stream, often as much to simply listen to the therapeutic sounds of swirling water as to bait a hook for fresh fish.
Common thought associates miners with hard-driving country music, but in this vein, McKnight doesn’t fit the bill. His favorites are classical music, especially pieces that lean heavily on violins, and, owing to his Scottish heritage, Celtic music. As he drove away from an interview, he popped in a CD titled “Celtic Woman.”
“I listen to classical music when I really want to relax,” he said.
Under his union contract’s provisions for pension and health benefits, McKnight figures to invest four more years on the job to put in the required years, then retire. He has tried without luck to win a seat in the House of Delegates and says he might take another stab at it.
For all its inherent dangers and, at times, uncomfortable settings that demand working in cramped quarters that tax the back and knees to the limit, McKnight occasionally sees a benefit that no other work offers.
A few years back, while working on a longwall, his crew was toiling on a new panel, pulling back coal. As he gazed backward, embedded in the massive rock at a 45-degree angle was a 50-foot petrified tree, its roots exposed.
“It was beautiful,” he said. “You couldn’t dig it out. It was unsafe to do so. It was spectacular. I’ve never seen anything like it. You see fossils every day, leaves and plants. I’ve got a few at home on my front porch.”
— E-mail:
mannix@register-herald.com
