Remember, this story is serial style, so if you want to read it from the beginning make sure and click on the earlier segments.
My New Mexico Job Interview
So they set me up with this interview in Grant, New Mexico and I of course was very excited. This was my first significant interview. I mean, I had gone and talk to people in companies before but that was never an interview for a job that actually existed. And this company actually really wanted me to interview with them and had a position available. They were even flying me out to Albuquerque New Mexico and had arranged for me to rent a car to drive to Grants New Mexico. So I got on the plane and flew out to Albuquerque and rented the car all the while thinking that the mine at Grants New Mexico was paying for this expense because they were anxious to get a geologist out there to interview for this position. And I thought “this is like heaven! I just may wind up working here!” So as I drove I was checking out the town and I remember thinking “Well, Grants is pretty small but it’s not too far from Albuquerque, and I could probably drive into the bigger city on weekends. What are some of the things that I could do here? What is the social life going to be like?”
So of course I was pretty excited. I checked into the hotel overnight, and the next morning I showed up at the mine bright and early for my interview. And as I began talking with the supervisor who was interviewing me I found out a little bit about the job position and realized that they needed somebody to actually go down in the mind and do some work. And I didn’t mind that because after all I graduated in Geology and that is all about rocks and you have to go where the rocks are, and sometimes that’s in the mine and I was okay with that. So he needed somebody to go down there and work, but it turns out what that person would be doing was to hold a probe Geiger counter and stick it into the ore material (they refer to it as muck) that had just been excavated out of the wall, and check the radioactivity of the material. Radioactivity levels were low, so it was fairly safe to be around this material. After checking the level you were supposed to record this radioactivity level on the chart and race off to the next location to do it over again. This is referred to as muck logging. They wanted to keep track of the radioactivity of the material being dug out of the ore body so they could tell whether or not they were mining in the most productive areas of the ore body or if they were in an area of low productivity. By plotting location and radioactivity they could find the locations beneath the ground that would produce the highest grade ore. By “they” I mean the real geologists who were up on the surface. Muck logging does not exactly need someone with a BS degree to do it. Actually, you don’t even need someone with a high school degree to do it. It’s just a technician job. All you need is somebody who will race around through the mine day after day to location after location carrying this probe and recording whatever it said on your data sheet. That’s it. No rocket science here – or rock science as the case may be. They could have just as well assigned the miners to do the logging every time they created a new excavation in an area or blasted out a new stope. Just provide them with the muck logger and let them log it every day. But no, they would rather have a Geologist do that. And the reason they wanted a Geologist was because there was a flood on the market of young BS degree Geology students that they could take advantage of. Why hire a high school dropout when you can hire someone with a BS degree in Geology to do exactly the same thing at the same pay rate? I’m not sure what the logic is in that, but that is what they were doing. And that is part of the problem you face when you are a new college graduate. Every generation of new students graduating from college faces the same thing – exploitation.
So that is what they offered to me, and I thought to myself, “Okay fine, maybe the salary is not great, in fact it’s not good at all, but right now I am pretty much use to no salary at all so any salary is an improvement!” They wanted to give me a tour of the mine to show me what the job responsibilities would entail, and so I said, “Sure that would be great”. So they assigned this guy to give me a tour of the mine; he was a Geologist and he had worked down in the mine for about three years. After you have been working down in the mine for two or three or four or who knows how many years, the mine czars decide that you have put in enough time below the surface, and as they have need up on top, they promote you to an entry-level Geology position. And this guy that I was introduced to had just recently been promoted up to the surface to actually start doing Geology work. So I thought to myself, “Okay great, this guy is going to give me a tour of the mine and I will see exactly what I have to do and what the environment is like, and then I’ll make some kind of decision about whether I want to move here and take this job and try this work.” I was really trying to be open-minded about it. It was a possibility of getting my foot in the door. I was not really keen on spending three years of my life working as a technician to get to an entry-level Geology position, but it was a possibility. And then as a Geologist you would work with all that data; you would construct the three-dimensional contour and isopatch maps, dictate productive areas of the mine, coordinate with the engineers, and really get your start as and economic ore mining geologist.
Now this guy who had worked down in the mine and was about to give me a tour seemed like a nice enough guy – young, just a little older than me at the time. And the first thing he did was give me great big rubberized boots that went all the way up to my knees. Well, I immediately started to get the feeling that it was going to be a bit wet down there. Then I got the ever ubiquitous safety vest, hardhat, a carbide light, and finally I was ready to go. We got into one of these elevators that are the huge industrial type. We entered it actually in this building that houses the structure that pulls the elevator up and down; it’s a great big tall building and is call at the gallows frame or head frame for the elevator. The elevator was just a platform with a little fence around it, and as it started lowering us down into the mine, I watched the rocks go by as it lowered us faster and faster down into the mine. The elevator was made for hauling up large groups of people and equipment but there was just the two of us in there so I felt like I was getting this pretty special treatment. Finally the elevator slows down and came to a stop and I could see that we were entered one of the main mine levels. So we got out and I finally start going through the mine. Now I am pretty good with directions; actually I am really good with directions. I’m really good with maps, I’m really good with orientation, I can almost always tell where I am. But I knew the minute I got into this mine that I was going to have problems with orientation. Every turn in the mine was a broad, round, wide Y turn instead of a right angle. There were no left turns or right turns, they were just wide broad branching Ys. So you would have this broad branch come off here, and then you would have another broad branching Y come off there, and it was just a maze of round, curving tunnels. And these tunnels were not just tunnels through the ground, they were actually tunnels with railroad style tracks on them. Hence the broad Y intersections instead of any left turning or right turning corners. The tracks were in every tunnel in the mine (really “tunnel” is an improper name. A tunnels has an openings to the outside – an entrance and exit – and of course none of these “tunnels” open to the outside at all. They are actually called adits, but for the sake of this story it will make a lot more sense if I just continue calling them tunnels.)
So there I was in these tunnels and every one of them has railroad tracks on them for the ore trains, and that includes railroad ties. And the walls of the tunnels are not wide, in fact they are really narrow and they are only wide enough to accommodate the railroad ties and that is it. So when you walk, you can only walk on the railroad ties, you can’t walk on the side of the track. So we start walking down these tunnels and we began branching here and then branching there and it was not five minutes before I knew I was lost. Well, I thought, “Okay, I’m lost but this guy I am with, he has been down here working for years and he knows where he is going, so I’m going to stick really close to him and everything will be cool.”
I need to tell you now about how wet it was down there. In sandstone and siltstone there is a lot of space between the grains of sand and silt that make up those rocks, and this pore space can be filled with water – groundwater. Now if you are deep in the ground you can bet you are going to be down below the ground water level. So the groundwater literally was seeping through the ground through the pore space in the sandstone and then seeping out through all the rock walls leaking into the tunnel. All of these tunnels were constantly filling up with water, and at the same time were constantly being drained; that is how a soft rock mine works. So anywhere we walked we did not actually walk on the ground, we walked on railroad ties, and the railroad ties were below the water by about 6 inches. Have you ever tried walking on a railroad track and not looking down at the ties while you were walking? Pretty much it is hit and miss whether you step on the ties or your foot goes down between the ties. And in this case, when my foot went down in between the ties it went way down into the mud below the ties. Then I had to work to pull my foot out of the mud and hence the big rubber boots! So you can go down to your ankle, to your shin, to your knee in mud and water, and then you have to pull your leg out and keep trying to walk on the ties again. And then you miss another tie and you are stuck in the mud again. So “difficult walking” in this mine would be kind of an understatement.
So there we were, there was water everywhere, and we were in narrow tunnels deep underground, and the walking was really difficult on the railroad ties, and I was completely lost, and finally we got to the first ore logging area. My guide finally began to explain to me how you go from location to location muck logging (which is what this job is referred to as; I would have been a muck logger), and how to use the Geiger counter probe, and how to keep a log of all these mining areas that you are going to in the mine, and how to record the uranium levels that are being exposed in the ore cuts, etc. Then he explained that you have to go from one to the other of these locations constantly throughout your day. And then he started telling me some things that the interviewer up on top of the mine had sort of neglected to mention.
My guide said, “Yeah, when I work down here it was really hard work. You have got to really race from one location to the other; you gotta kinda run. You have a schedule and you have a whole lot of locations and they all have to be done that day. Sometimes I started before dawn and worked 12 and 14 hour days and I’d get out of the mine and it would be dark. Sometimes you never see the daylight for weeks on end. I’ve had days when I would just get out of the mine, go home, wouldn’t even eat anything, just lay down in bed with all my clothes on, the alarm would go off and I’d wake up, get up, pull my boots back on, go back to the mine and do it all again. I’d grab food to eat while I was going out the door.”
No kidding, he really said that to me!
So as you can imagine, by this time I’m pretty much thinking, “Perhaps this isn’t actually the golden opportunity that I was thinking that it might be. Perhaps this isn’t the wonderful first geology job that I was hoping for. In fact, perhaps this actually isn’t a geology job at all. I wonder how long before I can just go home.” Wisely, I held my thoughts to myself. I had tried to be open-minded about the position, but my mind was starting to close more and more as my guide continued to talk. Little did I know it was going to give much, much worse!
Next Week—Segment No. 3
“Mine Shafts and Ore Trades”