Work as life experience

The attitudes people have toward work vary greatly. For some, a job is a necessary evil; for others, it is a source of great satisfaction. Those that love their work and find it life-affirming are the luckiest.

One particular experience shaped my feelings in this regard.

In 1945, after finishing high school, I earned a scholarship to the University of Manitoba, but it covered only small fraction of the funds necessary for post-secondary education.

I therefore took a job working in one of the underground gold mines in the province’s northern region. I was to be the “the grizzly man” on a “tramming crew,” though, at the outset, these terms meant nothing to me.

The recruits got into a cage. The level where my job would be was about 2,000 ft. below the surface.

The atmosphere was cold and damp. A few bulbs lit the immediate area, but beyond that all was total darkness. I could hear jack-hammers in the distance and, periodically, an explosion.

The crew leader took me to a large hole off to one side of the cage. The floor of the hole was formed by railway rails spaced so that there were 1-sq.-ft. holes between them. This was the grizzly. Ore trains drew up to the grizzly and dumped their dusty cargo on to the rails. My job was to take a 12-lb. sledgehammer and ensure that the ore went through the holes. Some of the ore chunks were as large as refrigerators.

During that era, Canadian gold mines worked under what was known as the “bonus system.” Wages were minimal, and the real money being sought lay in bonus payments which were based on the amount of ore that a crew was able to blast loose, haul in trains, and send on its way to the surface. In this situation, my sub-par performance was a bottleneck on the earning power of the entire crew . . . and this was explained to me in terms that were very hard to misunderstand.

The crew leader offered me a solution: dynamite could be used on the big chunks. There was nothing to it, he said, and proceeded to show me how to peel the paper wrapper off the putty-like dynamite and press it into the cracks in the rocks. Unwrapping dynamite was against safety rules, he told me, but as he put it, “the guys that write the rules don’t know nothing.”

He did, however, caution me never to touch unwrapped dynamite with my bare hands and, if this happened, never to touch any other part of my body because a very painful rash would ensue. He was right.

When the crew left to load another ore train, the crew leader stayed behind to show me how to blast the rocks down to a manageable size. He showed me how to place detonators into the little dynamite putty balls we wedged into the cracks in the rocks. It was explained that the fuse burns at 18 inches per minute and when fuses were lit it was necessary to scramble up out of the grizzly, turn on alarm lights and bells, yell “fire,” and duck around a right angle corner to escape the rock-fragments that ricocheted around during a blast.

After the next train dumped its load, he departed and left me with my duties. The work actually began to seem enjoyable. Blasting a bunch of big rocks to smithereens a couple of thousand feet underground was kind of exciting to an inexperienced 17-year-old. Moreover, it allowed me to keep pace with the crew.

At the end of the shift, exhaustion reached record levels. But in a few days, as proficiency grew, there was acceptance by the crew. I worked the rest of June, all of July and August and part of September, and began university with more money than I thought would be possible.

When it was time to leave the job, I felt despair. I had grown to love my work. The dignity and satisfaction of the work itself had been impressed on me, and I felt elated at having accomplished something that had seemed impossible. What good fortune to learn this so early in life.

— The author, a retired geologist, resides in New Caanan, Conn.