The underdwelling

They followed the tunnel for maybe fifteen minutes, turning off through a series of crosscuts, on and on. The whole way Maki kept trying to stroke Jurgens, doing everything but getting down on his knees for the guy. How’s your wife, Mr. Jurgens? Heard you went down to Mexico…was that nice, Mr. Jurgens? Is your daughter still in law school, Mr. Jurgens? It was fucking sickening. Finally they reached the stope, which was essentially a huge cavern cut by drilling and blasting. It was lit up by floodlights. It stank of sulfur and dankness. The ceiling was sloping and the walls set with jagged fault lines which Jurgens pointed out were from prehistoric volcanic eruptions.

“The rocks are different here,” Boyd said.

“Of course they’re different,” Maki said like he was some kind of idiot. “We’re deeper.”

“No, this is all limestone. Different from the shale above.”

“That’s right,” Jurgens said, looking at Boyd like maybe he was wondering what a guy with a head on his shoulders was doing with a booger-picking moron like Maki. “It is limestone and I don’t like limestone.”

“Me neither,” Maki said.

Jurgens ignored him. “And I don’t like it because where there’s limestone, there’s water. Or there once was. That means subsidence, limestone caves. I don’t like the idea of us blasting into one.”

“No, that wouldn’t be good,” Maki said.

“See, Boyd, the ore is here, we just have to get through this goddamn limestone first.” He led Boyd over to the wall and knocked on the striated rock there. “This is all limestone laid down during the Permian.”

“Sure,” Boyd said. “Sedimentary rock. Layers of mud and sediment.”

Jurgens nodded. “That’s right. Thing is, it just doesn’t belong here. I mean, from a geologic standpoint, this is the first Permian rock ever found in Michigan. So that’s something, but there’s no goddamn ore in it. See, this part of Michigan is all old, very old Precambrian rock. Anywhere from 500 million to three or four billion years old. And this Permian strata is fairly new, roughly 250 million years old. It just doesn’t belong here.”

“There’s no Permian rocks at all in Michigan?”

“None that I’ve ever heard of. No sediments or fossils. Erosion is partly to blame, but the real culprit was the Quaternary glaciation that raged right through the Pleistocene. The advance and retreat of the glaciers also stripped away eons of sediment. Just about anything after the Silurian is gone in Upper Michigan. So, obviously, this Permian strata does not belong.”

“Then why is it here?”

“Some type of singularity, I should imagine.”

“That’s gotta be it,” Maki said.

Boyd felt like slapping him. He had no idea what Jurgens was talking about and Boyd barely understood himself, but at least he was keeping his mouth shut. But Jurgens simply ignored Maki. Something, Boyd figured, that most people at the Hobart Mine learned to do very quickly. Jurgens went on, explaining that the Permian Period occurred at the tail end of the Paleozoic Era, right before the Mesozoic…which brought us all the dinosaurs and made guys like Steven Spielberg a lot of money. The Permian ended the Paleozoic with a mass extinction that wiped out like 90 % of the life forms on the planet. It was a much more massive extinction than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs much later on. These Permian rocks were from that time period.

“We’ve got a guy here studying this strata, a paleobiologist from the U of M, guy named McNair. He theorized that, perhaps at the time of the extinction itself, volcanic action or seismic activity caused this seam of Permian strata to be submerged, engulfed by the much older Precambrian shelves. Thus, preserving it here for us when the rest of the Permian strata was scraped and washed away long ago.”

“So, it’s a pretty significant find?”

“Oh yes. But there’s no ore in it, Boyd, and they pay me to find ore.”

On that note, Jurgens led them away through the stope.

It angled off to the left and things started to get very, very loud. Up ahead, the crews were cutting drift, some three separate tunnels through solid rock to reach the ore-bearing strata. It was quite an operation. There were tram tracks leading from the drifts to other tunnels, the cars coming and going, filled with rock that would end up topside in the Pit. There were dozens of men moving around beneath the dead glare of arc lights and incandescents lining the walls. The smell of sulfur was eclipsed by diesel fumes and clouds of rock dust. Water dripped and ran in little streams. Engines hummed and rumbled. Air compressors hissed and generators whined. There were pipes and hoses and high voltage lines snaking all over the place. The thunder of jackhammers and pneumatic rock drills. Red mud splashing underfoot.

It was unbelievable.

Jurgens assigned them to a crew cutting drift far to the right. Maki and Boyd put on their gas masks and safety goggles, put in their ear plugs. It was a loud and dangerous place with the clouds of dust and chips of rock flying all over the place.