| In
A
Room for the Summer,
Fritz Wolff takes the reader on a memorable journey into the
rough-and-tumble
world of hardrock mining, recounting his experiences both above and
below
ground as an apprentice engineer during the late 1950s.
In
June
1956, at the age of eighteen,
Wolff went to work for the Bunker Hill Company in Kellogg, Idaho, in
the
Coeur d’Alene region. Arriving in a tired 1939 Chevy coupe,
with about
twenty dollars in his pocket, Wolff spent three college summers working
for Bunker Hill. He learned firsthand the pleasures of camaraderie with
fellow workers and the dangers of working underground.
Today
the hardrock mining industry
is all but forgotten. The Bunker Hill Company is known, not because it
produced 430 million ounces of silver and not because it provided a
living
for thousands of families for more than a century, but because it is
one
of the largest EPA superfund sites. Wolff does not idealize the mining
industry; for many workers the conditions were nightmarish. But in
spare,
lyrical prose, he evokes the intrinsic goodness of a simpler time, when
hard-working folks went about their business with courage, humor, and
lots
of gumption.
|
A Room For The
Summer
Adventure,
Misadventure,
And Seduction In The Mines Of The Coeur d'Alene
by
Fritz Wolff
University
of Oklahoma
Press, 2005
Order
a copy.
|
