By Reid Collins on 7.29.02 @ 12:03AM
The rescue teams in Pennsylvania displayed something Kipling understood perfectly.
A friend of mine enduring a patch of unrelieved adversity once
said, "I need some good news." So too the nation, enduring since
last September an unremitting march of defeat. The event of the
11th. A "war" waged in far-off countries with unpronounceable
names. At home, little girls, taken from their homes to be
violated, murdered. Lead stories of boardroom betrayals,
proliferating "polls" indicating a weakening of the national pulse
as consumer confidence matched the diving indices of Wall
Street.
Until, that is, this last weekend of July 2002. Nine men 240
feet below the surface of Pennsylvania, and scores of others
working around the clock above them, vindicated and resuscitated
the engine of optimism that drives America. You know the story. But
during the frustrating commute, the toils of husbandry and
householdry, it would bear repeated rehearsal and re-telling. The
nine trapped in a niche of rock and coal, flooding with cold water,
their miners' lamps winking out as time passed. Nine men huddling
together to share what warmth was left in their fading bodies. In
darkness total. Above ground, the fears were mounting. A drill bit
broke far above them. Another one was sent for. The first
paragraphs of tragedy were being typed. The tapping heard the first
day had stopped. The waiting families were sequestered from the
press and prying curious in a nearby church. The governor of the
state began to echo somber cares reflected in the would-be rescuers
faces.
Another bit was secured, more drilling commenced. Two hundred
forty feet, all over again. An air shaft going down in tandem with
the rescue shaft contained warm air under pressure. What began as
rescue was metamorphosing into "recovery," the word of defeat.
America was almost getting used to this. It hadn't reckoned with
what Rudyard Kipling heard a cowboy in Wyoming say to him in the
1890s. A neologism then unknown to the English-speaking world.
Know-how. Kipling introduced that very American word to the
world.
The rescue teams in Pennsylvania had know-how. They managed with
the second giant bit gently to crack the tomb of the nine, who
through their own know-how had managed to keep one another alive,
and sane. Hope was vanishing to the point that one of the men asked
his boss for a pen with which to write a note to his wife and
children. He may now embrace them and tell them himself what was in
his heart. One by one, all nine were brought up the 240 feet in a
little mesh rescue basket. It had been tried successfully but once
before, in Idaho.
It bears retelling because it is what it is: good news. It
reminds that there lives beneath the headlines a strength of
character that surpasses those messages of alarms and defeats. The
lamps have not gone out. And we still have what the cowboy gave the
world: the know-how.
topics:
Oil
