The great escape
On the afternoon of Aug. 5, 2010, miners working beneath a mountain in the Atacama Desert in Chile heard a deafening crash. At first, Héctor Tobar writes in his extraordinary new book, the men weren’t sure what to make of this unprecedented “thunder blast.” But when it was followed by a similarly disturbing racket — “a rumbling sound that grows in volume with each passing second” — they recognized that they were in grave trouble: “Their faces ask, Does anyone know what that is? Finally, someone shouts, ‘ La mina se está planchoneando.’ The mine is pancaking.”
A huge chunk of stone had broken free, blocking the mine’s exit and trapping the 33 men 2,000 feet from the surface. For the next 21⁄ 2 weeks, the miners were sealed off from the outside world. They lived on daily mouthfuls of canned fish and drank from a water tank in which one of their number had often bathed. Even as they gathered to pray, the men feared they’d be left for dead. A rescue team finally established contact, but another 52 days would pass before they were lifted to the surface, a moving spectacle witnessed by a reported global TV audience of 1.2 billion.
Tobar’s “Deep Down Dark” tells this tale with remarkable depth and nuance. A novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, he combines a historian’s eye for context with a gifted storyteller’s ear for minorkey character traits. Tobar seems to know what each of his nearly three dozen protagonists were feeling at any given moment, and he relates their fears and yearnings in unvarnished present-tense prose, imbuing the events with an added jolt of urgency. Scary, sad and, yes, even funny — when the collarbone of one of the hungry miners began protruding, he was dubbed “Bicycle Chassis” — this just might be a great book.
Though it boasts the epic sweep of a man-against-nature saga, “Deep Down Dark” also Deep Down Dark The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free By Héctor Tobar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 309 pages; $26) happens to be an endlessly satisfying ensemble drama. The cast includes “a paunchy, soft-spoken Romeo” who will be called on to give vaccinations to his peers; “a troubled and anxious” mechanic who takes up jogging underground and will later complete the New York City Marathon; an “earnest, baby-faced twenty-fouryear-old” who had started working at the mine that day; and “a hard-drinking (machine) operator” who will be- come the miners’ collective memory, recording the events in a diary.
When the 121-year-old San José Mine collapsed, the men had a two-day food supply. This was a problem, even before the workers realized they’d be trapped for many weeks. “Really,” Tobar writes, “there should be only sixteen or seventeen of them, but thanks to all the men working overtime, or make-up days, there are many more.” They took a head count after realizing they were stuck. That there were 33 of them felt significant. “The age of Christ!” said a few of the men. “¡ La edad de Cristo!”
A routine quickly emerged. On their fourth day of captivity, Tobar writes, “All thirty-three men attend the daily prayer session, followed by the meal of the day: today a single cookie and perhaps a spoonful of tuna, or an ounce or two of condensed milk mixed with water.” The next day was a holiday — the Day of the Miner. Tobar explains, “(M)ining is tied up with Chile’s national identity: Pablo Neruda wrote poems to the miners. … The men of the San José are miners going hungry inside a mine on the Day of the Miner, and the feelings of pride-tinged suffering this simple truth brings lead them to end their talk by singing the national anthem.”
If the 17 days before rescuers made contact were marked by competing feelings of hopeless- ness and buoyancy, the sevenplus weeks that followed, until the miners were finally freed on Oct. 12, were strange and disorienting. Along with food and medicine, a fiber-optic cable and a small projector were fed through a half-milelong tube, allowing the men to watch live soccer and morning TV. Up at ground level, survivors of the 1972 plane crash chronicled in the film “Alive,” which detailed how a band of stranded men survived by turning to cannibalism, stopped by to share their encouragement. Meanwhile, the miners’ romantic lives and their subterranean hierarchy were analyzed in embarrassing fashion in the press.
The use of the word “miracle” in the book’s subtitle might suggest otherwise, but Tobar never strains to see what’s not evident in his tireless reporting. His version of the events is so powerful because it’s so deeply rooted in the testimony of those who were there, all 33 of them. In his acknowledgments, Tobar says his vivid account resulted from “hundreds of hours of interviews” with the miners. He could’ve said “tens of thousands” and I’d still have believed him, so thorough is his command of this unforgettable story.