Escape from the Sky

“Copper had drawn people to Butte — the mine owners looking to get richer and the miners hoping to feed their children while their wives took in laundry. But when I went there on an achingly bright day last summer I formed a different impression — that Butte is where men went to escape from the sky.

“First they dug mines that ran a mile deep into the earth, which was about as far from the sky as you could get, and you had to be so desperate to get there that you’d risk being crushed in a collapsing tunnel or atomized in an explosion. Then they built the smelters to blur the sky with toxic smoke so that no miner emerging from the end of a shift would be exposed to the naked firmament, even for the short time it took him to get into the reassuring darkness of the bars, where you could count on the cigarette smoke to soften any stray intrusions of natural light. These are the lengths men will go to avoid being eaten alive by the emptiness, or at least that’s how I began to see it as a child.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God