5
The Paths of Blind Horses
After days of cloud cover and brooding, Merthyr Tydfil opened its eyes, blinking at the warm rays of the morning. I stepped out to the road, walking past the rows of houses with brick, stone, and gravel facades. In the backyards, laundry lines and odd pieces of junk were just visible above the fences when viewed from the high road near the mountain. The houses tilted toward the center of the slender valley, where even the dry field over the old colliery looked inviting. I was on my way to take the train to Merthyr Tydfil’s town center to do some research in the library, but I heard the rumble of the departing train when I was still a block from the tracks.
Returning to wait for the bus, I glanced at the hill that sloped up from the other side of road. Grass was growing where houses once stood. Since the mines closed, there had been a lull in real estate. A group of rather roguish looking sheep grazed on a tilted patch across the street from me, looking as if they had been sheared with a chainsaw. Before the energy possibilities of Merthyr were discovered and the Dowlais Company was founded in 1759, a mere forty families lived here, planting crops and raising animals. I couldn’t help but think that before the coal and drudgery of Evan and Margaret, one of my ancestors climbed up these hills on a morning like this. Merthyr Tydfil had been conquered by the Picts, the English, and then the ironmasters; it was my turn to climb a hill and stake the claim of my family’s inheritance.
In my knee-length skirt, I heeded the call of the hills, which had been beckoning to me since I arrived in Wales. I scrambled over the low rock wall that held in the hillside and went up through the mountain brambles, scratching my legs and wetting them with dew. I gazed across the clearing in the middle of the valley to Aberfan and the graveyard with its rows of white arches. The sun warmed my head and made the dew on my legs sparkle. The sound of whistling drifted over the tangled growth, and I imagined it was the shepherd of the homely little flock below, restored to his rural calling of nearly 250 years ago, looking over the pleasant valley no longer stained with smut and fire.
Leaping and sliding down the hillside, I watched for the bus through the trees, keeping my ears pricked for the sound of tires on the pavement. Once through the trees, I was faced with Malcolm. He and a few elderly ladies waiting at the bus stop stared as I tried to negotiate the stone wall gracefully.
“We saw you up the side of the mountain,” Malcolm began when I reached them.
“Yes.”
“In these parts, we are not used, to seeing women, up the mountain, in the morning.” He paused between each cluster of words, his voice lilting up at the end as if he was reciting verse. A deep and thoughtful look passed over his eyes, as if he had stumbled upon a profundity. If Malcolm had not entirely caught the poetic sentiment of his countrymen, he had certainly inherited the rhythm.
The nervous twitching and grimaces of the elderly ladies made me realize that my attempt at bonding with the hills of Wales had constituted a cultural faux pas, or at least an abnormality. “Yes, I am a mountain girl,” I said stupidly, realizing how close this was to mountain goat after it had left my mouth. I didn’t know how to explain my need to embrace the hilly land that my ancestors had left and the desire to meld it with the rugged land they came to. Margaret and Evan arrived in Carbon County, Utah, in 1886. Later, after living in Oregon and New York City, Bob Thomas moved back to Provo, Utah, in 1951. Here my father was raised and met my mother. My childhood was spent wandering the mountain face above my maternal grandparents’ house on the foothills, which was less than a mile from the home of Bob and his wife Shirley. My parents settled farther north in Utah Valley, and during my teenage years I would ride my bike up the canyon trail in the summers, rock climb without ropes, and scale the Bridal Veil waterfall. Knowing and belonging for me has as much to do with place as it does people. My spontaneous morning scramble was an important step on my journey toward Margaret and Evan. The Rockies in Utah and the Valleys in Wales—these were family terrain and my only truly physical link to my ancestors. I didn’t know how to explain this to Malcolm or the elderly ladies who eyed me askance, so I turned and waited for the bus.
Once in town, I stepped out of the bus almost directly into an open-air mall. I browsed through the shops, noticing how I contrasted with the short, dark, full-figured women and thick men. I can claim Wales as the land of my primary ethnicity, but tall, thin, and fair, I drew mostly Swedish traits out of the family gene pool. Compared with the typical Welsh wide jaws and square faces, the lines of my face are angularly Italian.
Erin Thomas, 2006
“Look how tall she is,” I heard an elderly woman cackle behind me.
I was seeking reunion with Wales, with Evan and Margaret, but I felt like George Borrow: after having descended into a foreign land, I found myself somewhat at odds with the local citizenry. A market blocked the road in one of the main drags, with most venders selling cheap household implements and poorly made clothing. I had chosen to wear a corduroy skirt to avoid the look of an American tourist while still appearing casual. Jeans and a T-shirt would have blended in much better. I stopped in a retail outlet and bought a pair of socks with Cymyru written on the soles.
The buildings downtown, like the miners’ houses, had fresh coats of paint. Flowers hung from lampposts, and the sun moved in and out from white clouds—a very different image than a photograph from 1910 I had found on a Welsh genealogical site on the Internet. In this photograph, the atmospheric effect on the buildings in the distance is significant. A stormy day could have caused this, but the people are hardly blurred, indicating a quick snap of the shutter. It must have been bright, with the clouding of the buildings resulting from the particulate matter pumped into the air by the smokestacks. Puddles gather on the street, and the tracks of a streetcar narrow into the distance. The photograph is of High Street, and men and women dressed in black line the walks next to the storefronts. In Evan and Margaret’s time, these streets would have been even more densely populated. Between the hours of six and ten p.m., the working class would emerge in hordes for their evening promenade: girls in canvas dresses covering woolen petticoats, colliers with tin boxes and broad-brimmed hats. Women in checked shawls would sell their eggs, butter, and bacon. Apples and herring were sold in barrels. Amid the food retailers, quacks would call out their newest remedies for ailments ranging from indigestion to immoderate passions. Ballad singers would dispense a tune at the price of one pence per song.
I turned onto High Street from the retail outlet stores toward the library, past St. David’s Church. There was none of the nineteenth-century plebian clamor; the street seemed deserted, hardly a thoroughfare. Only a group of teenagers slouched in front of the central library, where a statue of Henry Seymour Berry, Baron Buckland of Bullich, stood. A rich collier owner, he was granted a peerage in 1926, but inconveniently fell from his horse and died two years later, never fathering a son, thus beginning and ending the Lords of Berry. I walked past this coal-made man to the library’s collections, pursuing the history of the nameless.
Courtesy of Alan George’s Old Merthyr Tydfil
Hours later I drove with John and Sandie Robinson to Big Pit, on the edge of the town of Blaenavon, twenty minutes from the city center. A shaft was sunk here in 1860, and Big Pit operated until 1985, when the majority of the mines across Wales were closed by Margaret Thatcher. In 2001 the government offered funds to convert Big Pit into a museum, and some of the men who had previously dug its coal were now employed as tour guides. This was consolation to only a handful of the thousands who were impacted by Thatcher’s decision. Since the nationwide closing of coal mines, the population of Merthyr Tydfil County has declined steadily, with several hundred residents leaving each year.
Big Pit was an hour out of Merthyr, but the drive itself was a tour in South Wales’ coal history. Just outside of Merthyr town center, to the east of the road, loomed an enormous viaduct of seven arches, 455 feet long and 92 feet high. The Pontsarn Viaduct was built in the eighteenth century in order to carry water to the canals—a method initially used to transport coal and iron. When the railroad was constructed, tracks were laid right over its top. Cyfartha Castle resided on the mountain face above the viaduct. Built by William Crawshay II in 1824, the style of architecture was hundreds of years out of date at the time. The obvious reference to the feudal period was intended. Crawshay, an ironmaster of the Cyfartha works, was extravagant in his tastes, but generally fair to his workers.
Erin Thomas, 2006
“It is a monument to a man’s pride,” Sandie explained. “The ironmaster was king. The girls knew it. If he wanted them, he had them.”
William II was the grandson of Richard Crawshay, a farmer’s son who rode his pony to London at the age of fifteen after an argument with his father. Selling the pony for an apprenticeship in an iron warehouse, Richard rose through the ranks to establish the world’s most successful iron dynasty, handing it down through three generations of sons. William II paid £30,000 for Cyfartha Castle and lived there through three wives and the fathering of fifteen children. There are no records that justify Sandie’s accusation of philandering, but her comment is evidence of the power the ironmasters and coal owners wielded over their workers. I remembered Margaret and was struck once more by her courage in refusing Mr. Lewis’s offer.
At Big Pit, I waited on a long wooden bench for the next tour. An English family waited with me; their two young girls, with wind-tossed hair down to their shoulders, turned their knees in and fidgeted quietly. A couple in their midthirties smiled at each other and us, but said little. In assembly-line style, we took off our watches and surrendered our purses and backpacks to put on hardhats, belts, and heavy oxygen flasks. The last thing we strapped onto our hats was a miner’s lamp. Our tour guide, Huey, a congenial man with a twisted nose and a receding knob of a chin, cracked jokes. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, he was the genuine article: a retired miner. We went down the shaft in an elevator that seemed to drop fast but was moving relatively slowly.
Stepping from the elevator to the mine entrance, we stood for a minute in what the Welsh miners would call a slae weld, or a break for seeing. In the summer, when the sun rose before the men went to work, they put their heads down and talked to one another until they recognized the people who were passing, a signal that their eyes had become accustomed to the dark.
Once my eyes adjusted, I sensed a cave-like coolness. I could hear water dripping, and the light from our lamps reflected against slick walls. I felt what the miners meant by the bowels of the earth. In a sense, walking in a coal mine was like being swallowed. The stone seeped, suggesting the digestive juices of a black stomach. I understood why, on every descent, miners considered the possibility of never returning to sunlight.
Huey indicated a large metal cart full of coal. “They used to pull the trams along the tracks here, and each weighed a ton. What do you think is heavier? A ton of coal or a ton of iron?”
The girls giggled, but neither offered an answer.
Huey bent down so his head was on their level. “Alright then, right or left?”
The younger girl pointed and we went right, down a tunnel supported by boards. I had to crouch or the top of my hardhat would rattle against the roof. When we got past the first door, into a hallway between two doors, our guide instructed us to turn off our lamps. He told us about the six-to nine-year-old children who used to watch the doors in the dark. At Big Pit the older children, aged ten to twelve, pushed trams, and the boys, who were twelve to fourteen, helped their fathers fill six trams a day. I held my hand in front of my eyes, but I couldn’t even see the outline of my fingers. I thought of Evan, a small boy in such a black world, and sudden tears gathered in the corner of my eyes. He had never resigned himself to mining. He must have resented the poverty that pulled him from school and the hills to this darkness and the fears of scuttling rats and rumbles of shifting rock.
“Alright, turn ‘em back on now.”
I wiped the tears from the corners of my eyes, and we continued through the tunnel until Huey stopped us. We focused our lamps on a room off to the side, where there was a seam of coal little more than a foot wide. The seam had been carved out of the mountainside, but the wall above it was still intact.
“Miners would lay on their sides ‘ere, with a pick and chip out the coal.”
Manual labor was something I understood. I had worked for the US Forest Service for two summers after I graduated from high school. I built fences, using axes, shovels, trowels, hammers, and drills for ten hours a day. I wore gloves and a hardhat, carried fenceposts on my shoulders up hills, and hauled tree trunks through thick forest. Occasionally we cut trail, swinging axes and trowels over our shoulders in a rhythmic action for hours without breaks. But my work environment was mountain air and sun; wet days only emphasized the breathing green beauty of a forest. I enjoyed it, the sweat and the out-of-doors, but I knew that work like this made people old fast. After my two summers, I didn’t apply again.
Looking down at the twelve-inch seam, I thought of the movement and muscle that would be used to direct an implement such as a mandrill. I could imagine swinging it on my side; the strokes would be cramped and stilted, the coal much less yielding than the earth I had turned with the trowel and the roots I had cut with my ax. Muscles would ache intensely from the same posture day in and day out. Inhaling coal dust and being cramped between dripping mine walls where rats scurried up and down would sap out any pleasure I felt from my strength and hard work. I realized this was one thing I did not inherit from my Grandpa Thomas; the darkness of a mine gave me no comfort.
We moved from the seam to a section of wooden stalls built in a room carved out of the tunnel.
“This is where we kept the horses. We still have one,” Huey chuckled.
We walked past a plastic horse with a silly grin. Smaller than life-sized, it made the stall it stood in loom larger. Abbot, Bounce, Victor—the names of the horses were written on the stalls, and I wondered about these animals that lived the better part of their lives underground.
“The miners loved the horses, would feed them food from their lunches, and brandy from their flasks. Some even pulled the flasks outa miner’s pockets with their teeth.”
Huey cleared his throat. “The horses were brought down when they were four,” he said as he put his hands in the pockets of his orange jumpsuit, leaned forward slightly, and rocked back, “and worked for ten years.”
Around the turn of the century, seventeen thousand horses worked in the South Wales coalfields, but it was more difficult to get a horse down a mine shaft than a man. A horse’s legs had to be roped to its body, and men would lift it into the elevator. Due to this challenge, in some mines horses were only brought out for a couple of weeks a year, and during explosions, they were left behind. When the horses were brought up into daylight, they would run around the pastures and kick like mad. In some mines the horses were never brought to the surface at all. These horses lived out their lives in darkness, and when they finally were let out into the light, they were blinded by the brightness.
“What happened to them afterward?” I blurted.
“I dun know,” the guide admitted. “By the time I started working in the sixties, we no longer used horses.”
Throughout the tour, we walked no more than a mile or two in a mine that covered a total of thirteen square miles. Nearing the elevator to the world above, Huey passed his fellow guides who were calling back and forth in French, German, and Russian, mocking the expectations of the tourists who judged them as insular. They must have taken people from all over the world through these passages of their former occupation.
Erin Thomas, 2006
We passed a short, jolly man leading his group into the tunnels.
“’Ello, you know Huey, if I could be reborn as anything, it would be a pigeon.”
Huey chuckled and kept moving.
“Want to know why?” the other guide called to ours.
“I know why,” Huey responded, still laughing to himself at his comrade who had worked all his life underground and wished to defecate from the sky.
On the way home, the Robinsons dropped me off at their friend Anna’s home. I had been told all day that she and her husband “live in an old miner’s house.” Flat-fronted rows stretched out on either side of a narrow road with cars parallel parked on one side, so there was barely room to drive a vehicle along it. The fronts of the houses on one side faced the back doors of the houses across the street. Anna opened the door with her son Malachi on her hip; her husband Nathan stepped up beside her. They made a handsome couple, standing in the small opening to their home: she pretty and blonde, with an open smile, and her husband stocky, with a square face. True friendliness shone from both of their faces. Anna told me it had been a “manic” day, but everything had settled down all right. Her eldest son Jacob hurried from behind his mother’s legs, ran into the house, and buried his head in the couch.
“He’s shy,” Anna explained.
They directed me toward a table, and Anna brought out a noodle and cheese casserole. Jacob refused to come and eat, and Malachi began to holler and growl aimlessly. Anna tried to calm him while Nathan sat down to entertain me.
“So this is an old miner’s house?”
“Yes, we added this back part on. There was only one small room on top of another. It used to house a family of ten.”
While the commotion of two small children filled the living room space, I tried to imagine the atmosphere of Evan and Margaret’s home. They had had five children when they lived in Wales. Anna joined us, and Nathan told me how they had met at a regional dance for all the young LDS singles in the northern part of the country. Anna was from England, and Nathan was a native of Wales, where he owned a small landscaping business. They had been married four years ago, both at twenty-one, nearly the same age Evan and Margaret were when they began their lives together.
“When I met him, I didn’t understand a word,” Anna teased.
Nathan blushed. Anna looked happy in the life she’d married into: a small miner’s house, and two sons—calm Jacob and vocal Malachi, who had continued to test his lungs throughout the conversation. Margaret had made her home in a place similar to this one instead of at Plymouth House, the grand residence that looked down on the terraced housing from above. Evan must have been a Welshman like Nathan, bright-countenanced and eager. Most days he must have been gentle, with only injustice inciting his tongue and making the tips of his ears turn red. There must have been some happiness lived in these small houses.
Anna stood up to settle a disagreement with the boys, and Nathan cocked his head and said abruptly: “Let me tell you one thing. My father told me this. When the horses had worked ten years in the mine, they would retire them. They’d bring them up from the mine and release them into a field at night. When it was daylight they would be blinded, so they would walk the floor plan of the mine, wearing a path into the grass by walking it over and over.”
It was the answer to the question that had been disturbing my mind since my visit to Big Pit. I imagined the paths in the pasture marking the tunnels that lay below with the horses trudging at a measured pace, as they had every day for the last ten years of their lives.
“Because they were blind,” I repeated.
“Yes,” Nathan nodded. “Because it was all they knew.”
There was something about the silent suffering and the burdensome routine of a blind animal that was emblematic of the men, women, and children who labored with them. Helplessness is epitomized in the image of a colt with its legs tied to its body, hefted into the cage by a man on either side, its head tossing back and forth, nostrils snorting in fear and dismay as it is lowered down. I wondered for how long a horse remembered the fields and sky before its vision was dulled by the dark passages and brief shadows cast by headlamps. By the time the animal was roped and carried aboveground, fearful and confused once again, it only had a memory of darkness and the tunnels of a mine.
I think of the path beaten into a field by Evan’s father Frederick, his sons, and the grandsons who trailed after him. In the words of an Onllwyn miner born in 1887, “There was nothing else here. Nothing. What else did you have? It was only the coal mine.” Evan and Zephaniah followed their fathers into the mines, not because of blindness—they longed for a better life—but because it was all they knew. From the circumstances of their early lives, the only option that lay before them was a trail leading down the shaft of a coal mine. “A Miner’s Catechism,” written in 1844 by an anonymous Welshmen, reflects this reality:
Q. What is your name?
Peter Poverty
Q. Who gave you that name?
My godfathers and my godmothers in my baptism, wherein I was made a member of the Black Coal Pit, a child of poverty and an inheritor of the sunless mine.
For my grandfathers, it was always the dilemma of a son who could not go to school. One after another, each in turn, was obligated to supplement the earnings of his collier father, a march of poverty tread by Thomases for generations, until Robert and his brothers stepped out.