Darkness
had settled into the canyon and the air stood still. I could smell the nettles and willows along the creek and hear the sound of water rushing past rocky banks. Among the pines the portal of a tunnel loomed, swallowing mine rail in its blackness. In that dark tunnel the sound of my footsteps took on a dead, hollow strangeness. I felt for the gate. It had been swung open. I went inside the mountain.
Seven hundred feet into the tunnel I felt the switch point with my foot; it was open to the east and I stood silently in the total darkness, listening, listening.
Then it started: “the ring of the steel”.
I lit my lamp and went into the crosscut. The ring came ever louder.
Roy was at the face drilling an “upper”. We talked, he talked, I listened, to the life and times of Roy Newman.
The head of the singlejack he was swinging came up with a relentless rhythm against the end of the drill steel as the bit churned ever so slowly into marbleized dolomite.
“I’ve had some hard spots in this hill where I could only drill an inch an hour”, he said, staring blindly through the face of the crosscut, “four inches of tunnel a day is all I can average in this country but I’ve driven over fifteen hundred feet of tunnel since I lost the eyesight.”
I wandered through the drifts and crosscuts pouring over structure and substance and here and there through the darkness came the ring, ring, ring of the steel.
“Thirty inches”, Roy said, staring into space as he measured along the steel with his hands. “This hole’s a little stout but I think I can pull it. It has quite a bit of burden but the slips are in my favor. I’m going to stop.”
Roy loaded the hole with explosives and with his tamping stick, tamped it tight with newspaper that he had stuffed inside his jacket. He split the fuse with his knife, pulled a wooden matchstick from his shirt pocket, struck it under his thigh. As the match ignited, he pressed it into the cut in the fuse.
“I’m sure it’s lit” he said, rather casually, “I felt it spit against my hand and now the fuse is hot between my fingers.”
“It’s lit!” I said.
As I hurried around a curve in the crosscut, I could hear Roy talking to himself. Finally the mine car began to rumble along the rails, Roy strolling along behind it. “I don’t like to get too far away. Deaf, you know. I like to be able to hear how it breaks. You may want to go further out.” I did.
WHAM! came the heart stopping report instantly followed by a shock wave and a short series of reverberations echoing through the drifts and crosscuts. I returned to where Roy had set the car on a curve.
“That hole broke good, I can tell by the sound”, he said, as thick, gray, gassy smoke came crawling along the ceiling toward us. He raised his head slightly and said “Nitric acid gas. Walk behind me and I won’t step on you. I’m so deaf I can’t tell where you are. The war you know, heavy artillery, it ruined my hearing and then the Accident pretty well finished it off.”
At the portal Roy pulled the heavy chain through the gate and snapped the lock. We stepped into a warm night air laced with gentle alpine fragrances. Roy turned in my general direction.
“It’s hell to be blind,
but I don’t mind,”
he rhymed,
and we started up the dark trail to his cabin.
Our dear cousin Maxine Sudbury was born on June 21st., 1926 in Salt Lake City, Utah. She came to live with us in the home I grew up in, in the early 1940's. She attended East High School which was two and a half blocks away. She was a beauty and a lovely teenage girl. There has always been a remarkable sweetness about her. She graduated from High School and entered the University of Utah. There she met the love of her life, Calvin G. Sudbury. Calvin was a "fly boy" home from "the war", where he had been in the U. S. Army; wavy, sandy hair and a million dollar smile. Cal and Max looked like a couple of movie stars. They ran over to Elko, Nevada and got married. I think it was a match made in Heaven. In their own way, they were very private people. 40 some odd years ago Cal accepted a job in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They moved there with their two boys and spent the rest of their lives there. In recent years, Maxine lost both her boys and her husband to illness. Since she was alone, we begged her to come home to Salt Lake but she was a very independent and self sufficient person. "I've been in this apartment for 37 years." With a recent failing in her health, she finally agreed to come home. We were thrilled. We arrived home on Sunday, June 12th. On Tuesday the 14th, we took her to her Doctors' appointment and then took her to the home where she had lived as a teenager. My brother still owns the home. We looped the block where East High School has been rebuilt to meet the earthquake code. That night we had a fun family party with Pizza and Ice Cream and she enjoyed herself very much. On Wednesday we got a call from her Doctor. He didn't like the results from some of the blood he had drawn and asked us to take her to the hospital. The staff there determined that her condition was continuing to deteriorate rather rapidly. Sunday the 19th was a gray and rainy day. The folks at Mountain West Medical Center had made her comfortable and monitored her closely. At 6:45 PM she took flight, and the sky broke, and sunshine poured into the valley. The sunset was exceptionally beautiful.
The Family is indebted to Felicia Davis of Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque for her communications with us.
Also to the staff at Saint John Rehabilitation in Albuquerque, especially Audry and Andrea.
The staff at Mountain West Medical Center in Tooele, Utah treated Maxine with love and tenderness and we are specially
appreciative for the gentle kindness Damian showed toward us.
Thanks to King S. Udall M.D. whose observations gave us a few extra days with our dear Maxine.
Maxine's friend Peggy Wallace was most helpful and kind prior to, and during our time in Albuquerque.
Maxine and her family are indebted to Jack and Ann Brewer whose service and assistance to Maxine in recent years rose above and beyond any call of duty. They were a blessing in her life.
THE SILVER BELL
In the Spring of 2020 I completed, and had printed, a book I entitled the Silver Bell. It is a sequel to the James Leroy Newman Book described above.
As the cover, (shown below), suggests, it is a documentation of the re-discovery of a lost mine in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah.
It is autobiographic, and contains approximately 200 pages.
Approximately 175 photographs, and 15 illustrations.
As usual, it was expensive to print, so to break close to even, we have to get $35.00 plus shipping. USPS is approximately $10.00.
We like and many others do to. There was a lot of satisfaction in producing it.
