An excellent article from last week's GQ. A very humane look into the miners of America. While us Chinese people are tragically used to hearing about mining accidents that killed dozens of people in the news every now and then, this industry is largely forgotten in the developed world. However, with a quarter of the world's reserve of coal, the United States employs over 80,000 miners in extracting the "freedom fuel" from its land everyday.

Coal, if it disappeared from the nation's consciousness, never went away. This is America, and this is our fossil fuel, a $27.6 billion industry that employs nearly 80,000 miners in twenty-six states. We are sitting on 25 percent of the world's supply—the “Saudi Arabia of Coal!”—and lately we've been grabbing it in record amounts, gorging on the black rock the Bush administration calls "freedom fuel."

The question I had going in was almost ridiculous in nature: If coal is really this big, and all these people really exist, how is it that I know nothing about them?

The ceiling is five feet high, and so you can’t, actually, stand up. You look around and everyone is walking around like the freaks in Being John Malkovich. “Okay, they should make it higher,” I said to Foot the first time I experienced this. I wanted to call a congressman or something. This was ridiculous. There are people in here! Everyone’s doing a duck walk, hands clasped behind their backs to give the body balance as they lean over and waddle. You work your whole ten-hour shift like that, duck-walking through the darkness, nothing but a pinpoint of light shining from your hat to tell you which rat tunnel is which. A rat. You feel like a rat.