//------------------------------// // A Trip North: The Mine // Story: Field Notes from Equestria // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// The Mine Admiral Biscuit We really should have worked out what I could eat before Overburden and Gytta had prepared dinner. The centerpiece of the meal was a grass and flower casserole, and I wasn’t sure if I could or should eat too much of it. There weren’t many plants that ponies ate that were actually poisonous to humans, which was nice, but there were lots of them that humans couldn’t digest. So I had a fairly small piece, and picked it into really small bits before putting it into my mouth, since I had my doubts about how well my teeth would do on all the pasture grasses. At least the bread they had was edible, although that, too, had a really high hay content. The sun was just setting as we made our way to the mine. Lignite had put on her harness over my protests, because she was determined to actually pull me into the mine. It didn’t seem right, but it was probably better than walking hunched-over all the way down and then all the way back up. We were on the left side, which actually felt a little bit wrong to me. Obviously, back on Earth I was used to driving on the right side of the road, and that idea seemed to have carried over to traffic in Manehattan. “How come you’re on the wrong side?” I asked. “It’s how mines always run,” Overburden said. “Everypony knows that.” “Always keep your left flank to the wall,” Gytta explained. “’Cause it’s easier to turn right.” “It is?” Was there a way that it was easier for me to turn? I’d never thought about it. Surely it was more of a production to turn with four legs to contend with. “Yeah.” Lignite stopped for a moment and bent her head down to the shaft, pushing a lever with her nose. “Gotta set the brakes a little bit. I can run the cart down empty easy, but it’s heavier with you in it.” “I can get out,” I offered again. “You’ll bang your head on the ceiling.” That was almost certainly true; we weren’t even in the mine yet, and I was feeling a bit claustrophobic. Maybe this hadn’t been a good choice. “Gotta have a hard hat, too.” Longwall opened up a wooden cabinet and got one out, then plunked it on my head. It was pink, and it had a light fixed to the front just like theirs did. “That’s it for gear? No reflective vests or gas detectors or anything like that?” “Pfft, you’ll hear if Lignite’s got gas.” “Puhlease.” I could hear the eye roll. “Gytta farts way more loudly than I do.” “But not as often,” Assay countered. I tuned their bickering out and studied the entrance to the mine. The archway was carved with dozens of pictograms that I couldn’t quite puzzle out. They weren’t warning signs, I was pretty sure of that. Then we got inside the mine itself. I’d seen a few construction sites where they had big signs giving safety information and posters about labor laws and things like that. Here, there was a bit of a bulletin board with flyers and oddly crude drawings tacked up on it. On the opposite wall, there was what I could only imagine was a job board, showing the work schedule. I saw Longwall’s cutie mark on the map. “You don’t mind sitting on some coal on the way back, do you?” “Why?” “It kinda seems a shame to go all the way down in the mine and not bring back at least one cart of coal.” “Plus, then you can see how we get it out of the walls,” Gytta said. “His clothes will get dirty,” Longwall said. “And he hasn’t got any more with him.” “What if I also tow a cart?” Assay offered. “Then we’ll haveta wait for you to get hitched up, and—” Longwall shook her head. “No, we’ll be going slow, to show Joe everything.” “I’ll be right back,” Assay promised. The first thing I noticed was how smooth the floor was. There were a few ruts and hoofprints, but not as many as I’d imagined. It seemed like with constant traffic, the floor would be quite uneven. The next thing that caught my eye was the support beams. While Westerns weren’t known for being terribly accurate, the wood supports probably were the bare minimum required, and not finished. At least, that’s how it would have been done on Earth. The ponies had other ideas. All the support beams were not only finished, but they had vine scrollwork and flowers on them, which had been painted bright colors. Each one also had a pair of brackets holding crystal lanterns. Looking further down the mine, I could see that there were occasionally lit pairs. The last ponies out probably turned off most of the lights for the night. The taxi that I’d ridden from my hotel to the station had been fairly smooth—how much of that could be credited to the wagon’s suspension and how much of it was the skill of the pony, I didn’t know. But even at slow speeds, the mine cart was not nearly as smooth. It bumped hard over the few ruts, and I could feel the sway of Lignite’s hips in the cart. “The cross supports are made by a couple of ponies in Pit Town,” Gytta said. “They come down every day and fit a couple of new pairs to make up for the day’s mining. That’s why almost all the building are made out of stone, ‘cause we haven’t got enough trees for both the town and the mine.” “Sometimes we get a couple of rail cars back full of wood,” Longwall added. “It’s not as good as what they can get, though.” “We had to import the lanterns, too. It’s dangerous to have oil lamps in the mine, ‘cause sometimes there’s methane pockets.” “Only behind you.” Lignite stuck her tongue out at Overburden. “If you strike a fresh one, you can usually smell it right away, but sometimes it builds up and if you’re used to the smell, you might not notice that it’s getting dangerous, and then boom!” “It’s really bad when that happens. A lot of times, the mine caves in, too.” “So what do you use to smell for methane?” “We used to use canaries. It was nice to hear them singing while you worked, and if they stopped you knew that there was too much methane.” “But you don’t use them any more?” Longwall shook her head. “It wasn’t good for the canaries. Even if we got them out of the mine in time, they’d be really sick and listless for a long time.  Now we’ve got special crystals on the support posts, and they start glowing when there’s too much methane. Plus, we can absorb a lot of it.” “Yeah, we’ll show you how it’s done when we get down to where we work.” That was something I was curious about—seeing some kind of pony air scrubber. *** As we walked, Longwall and Gytta pointed out other features of the mine and also gave me some history of it. The coal seam went all the way to the surface, and the first settlers had found loose coal on the ground. Once that was exhausted, ponies had started to chip the coal out of the rock face, ultimately undercutting the embankment too much, and it collapsed in a rainstorm. “Everypony knew it was going to go,” Longwall said. “My granddam said a few ponies tried shoring it up with any timbers that they could find, but when the ground started to slip and a few trees fell off the front of the rock face, everypony knew that it was too late and just galloped for high ground. “It took months to clean everything back up and rebuild some of the houses, and then everypony decided since the seam went deep into the ground it made more sense to dig a normal mine and follow it down that way.” “That was when they built the road to Greenock,” Gytta added. “Well, to the railroad, since there wasn’t much of a town there yet. Most of the buildings got built out of the trees that were cleared to make the road.” “There wasn’t even a railroad there yet,” Lignite said. “Just the old road to Manehattan. That was where they put the tracks.” “Nuh-uh, they had the railroad back then, but it was just a wagonway and went to the canal instead of all the way to Manehattan.” “You can still see where it was; it’s overgrown now but you can see it if you go right to the end of the road in Greenock and then look to the forest on the other side of the tracks.”  Longwall stopped suddenly and pointed to a support. “Right there, that’s a methane detecting crystal.” Lignite obligingly stopped the mine cart so I could examine the crystal. It was a single crystal, about the size of a soda bottle, and wrapped in copper. “How does it work?” “Some unicorn puts the enchantment in them—we didn’t used to have them—and then as long as the spell stays active, we can recharge them.” “How?” Longwall sat on her rump and put both forehooves on the crystal, one on top and the other on the bottom. “Like that.” I wouldn’t have believed it, but the crystal actually started glowing when she did that. “It’s a lot easier when it’s not mounted on the wall,” Gytta said. “We’ve got extras, so we rotate them out and let the fillies and colts charge them for practice. And there’s a couple of older miners that still charge them, too.” “We’ve only ever had to send back one,” Longwall said proudly. “It musta gotten overlooked, or else the spell on it didn’t stick.” We weren’t very far in the shaft, and already it was pretty dark. My eyes had gotten a little bit adjusted, to the point where I could see a continuous row of lights stretching off into the distance. I could also feel the gravity pulling me downward. The mine wasn’t at a terribly steep angle—if it had been, the ponies would have had trouble getting the wagons out. As we got further in the mine, there really wasn’t much to see. Here and there, side paths branched off, following seams. Longwall knew when each one had been started and when it had been mined out. “Down here,” she said, “We use this room to help clear out methane.” Lignite moved towards the center of the path to turn, since she had to go left. At first, I didn’t believe what I was seeing. It looked like there was a pine forest in the room, but that wasn’t possible. Trees couldn’t grow underground. “Spruce trees breathe in methane,” Gytta said. “So that’s what we use.” “How do they live down here?” “We carry down bottled sunshine.” “Bottled sunshine? How does that even work?” Longwall and Gytta started laughing. “We bring them down every couple of days and then take them back up. When they get too big, we plant them.” “That sounds like a lot of work.” “It’s better than getting blown up.” *** Assay joined us with an empty wagon shortly after we left the tree room, and we continued our descent. I noticed that we were getting close to the end, because the lights stopped. It was weird, though, because I couldn’t see the end, and for all I knew, it actually did continue deeper but there weren’t any more lights. The illusion continued until we were almost at the wall, when I finally saw a few glints of light off the rocks across the path. Turning around was an interesting experience. “Hang on to the sides and don’t move around too much,” Lignite advised. “The cart’s tippy and we’ve got to make a really sharp turn.” She wasn’t kidding. They hadn’t made the shaft much wider than they needed to, and she almost scraped up against the wall before starting her turn. I could get an idea of how her hooves were moving by watching her hips and shoulders—I wanted to lean forward and get a better look, but the cart did feel unstable already. She had one advantage that a wheeled vehicle didn’t: she could step sideways, which she did, getting an immediate angle on the shafts. After that, it was a conventional turn, and then we were facing uphill. That felt really weird after facing down for so long. It took her a moment to straighten out the cart, and then she released the brake and backed near the wall. Assay did the same thing with her wagon, then turned and backed along the opposite side of the path. The other three had to go get their mining tools—they kept those in a nearby side shaft—and then they came back down to the front wall. The process of mining wasn’t anything too technically amazing. I’d long since gotten used to ponies using tools with their hooves and mouths, and as I’d suspected, the process for getting coal out of a seam was to chip it out with a pick and then shovel it into the waiting wagon a bit at a time. Just the same, there was something mesmerizing about their choreography.  Both Longwall and Gytta chipped at the wall, alternating strikes, and Overburden reached in between them with the shovel, raking a mound of coal back and then lifting it up into the cart. What was a surprise—which I should have been prepared for—was when Gytta’s pick made a different sound hitting the wall. She’d found another gem. She worked around it with the pick until it came loose and plunked down to the shaft floor, then she kicked it away from their coal pile. I couldn’t help myself and picked it up. That was a bit of a mistake; it was naturally covered in oily black coal dust. For a moment, I considered wiping it off on my shirt, then I remembered that if I did, I was probably never going to get the black streaks out of it. The only other option that came to mind was a sock, so I untied my shoe. “You don’t mind if I keep this, do you?” Longwall shrugged. “There’s plenty more where it came from, and it’s not worth much.” “I think that one was an emerald,” Gytta said. “Sounded like it, anyway.” The three of them worked until they’d filled Assay’s cart to the brim and then it was time to leave the mine. Longwall and Gytta put away all the tools, and when they came back, they helped push Assay’s cart to get it moving. “The hardest part is getting it rolling,” Longwall said. “After that, it’s pretty easy.” “Sure.” I had my doubts. I didn’t know how much coal weighed, but when Lignite started pulling me, nobody helped push us. Therefore, I weighed less than a load of coal. The ride back up was slower, since it was of course all uphill, and everyone wanted to stay together with Assay. I kept an eye out for the tiny point of light that marked the entrance to the shaft, but I couldn’t see it at all, even when I thought that I should be able to. “Everypony does that their first time down,” Gytta said. “You won’t see it for a while, ‘cause it’s not any brighter than the crystal lights.” “You won’t see it at all,” Assay said. “’Cause it’s dark outside now.” My face went red—I’d somehow forgotten about that.