Digging Tunnels

I was just reading a news story on Yahoo.com where a twelve year-old boy was digging a tunnel in the sand with his brother and the tunnel collapsed and killed him.  That resonates with me though I've never dug a tunnel anywhere.  However I do have many fears of being stuck in a  narrow place with water gradually rising up until I drown.  I suppose that comes from reading where an escaped convict was trying to crawl through a culvert and got stuck just before it came a hard rain.

It also had to do with the story of my father digging his way under an out building when he was a kid.  He said he dug under it and pushed the dirt back behind him until he could not go forward anymore.  Unfortunately, he could not go backward either.  In the end adults had to take up the floor of the out building to get him out.  Talk about something causing claustrophobia.

Then my older brother told me he had dug a tunnel in the side of the creek bank up Nat's Creek from the Wash Rock.  It never caved in on him but I always think how likely it could have.

Then I have horrible fears of falling down a well head first and not being able to turn where my head is up and drowning like that.  Claustrophobia.  I've got it.  I don't like being in tightly enclosed spaces.  That has to be the most helpless feeling in the world. 

Maybe that is why I could never consider being a "deem miner" in the coal mines.  My best friend from high school and I were both called to work at the White Ash coal mine not long after graduation.  He drove us to the mine site and we both got out of the car and stood looking at that hole in the ground.  Then we just looked at each other and got back in the car and drove away.

That is the mine my brother worked in for some time.  He was an electrician and he worked about three miles back under the the hill on his stomach all day.  Lots of things I've done in my life I regret but leaving that hole in the ground is not one of them.