Analysis Of Ralph Strahin's A Story Underground: Danger In The Mines

A Story Underground: Danger in the Mines
Life as a minor is sometimes scary and most often dangerous. From the coal mines of West Virginia, to the zinc mines of Tennessee, comes an amazing account of one man's experiences during his many years underground.
Ralph Strahin is the son of a coal miner. Ralph was born and raised in Kingwood, Virginia. At the young age of twenty, he began laboring in the coal mines. He labored for eight years in the coal industry and was pleased to accept a foreman position in Tennessee–no longer mining for coal, but Zinc instead. He was twenty-eight years old when the first shaft was sank in Gordonsville, Tennessee. By now he had become comfortable and confident in his mining abilities.
Ralph began to tell me about
His boss sent him to the bottom to shovel out the skip bed–that's were all the debris gathers up from loading the rock,” his face became rigid as he continued, “and uh, for some reason or other, the foreman had left the air off. When the air was turned back on, it bled all the air off the hoist break, dropping a sixteen-ton skip on that boy.” Ralph and the others nearby immediately scaled the ladder down to the bottom of the shaft. When they reached the bottom, they saw that Scotty had been crushed beneath the skip, “We just knew he was dead. The boy's spine was sticking out the center of his back. We carefully loaded him onto a metal stretcher and hoisted him out.” Ralph wouldn't have given a nickel for the boy's life. To Ralph's surprise, the boy survived, though he was paralyzed from the neck down. Then Ralph said, “I think I need a breathing treatment,” and he left the
I noticed a playful smile begin to emerge onto his face, then he said, “I had one of my fingers blown off,” he added, “I was repairing an airline inside the shaft when I heard a funny whistling noise. I started feeling around on the pipe to see where it was coming from. Right about then, the pipe broke loose and all that compressed air blew the tip of my finger plumb off!” He began to chuckle as he shared the details of his painful memory with me. “My buddies at work had nicknamed everyone of the fingers on my right hand.” Starting with his thumb, he called out each of the nicknames, “This was cut, bent, broken, lucky, and plumb gone!” We laughed together. There's nothing like a good laugh to lighten the