THIS MINE OF MINE by Brandon Forinash
You wouldn’t guess it looking at me now, but I had a pretty ordinary childhood and early adulthood. My parents weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. I grew up in one of those suburbs where every house is a variation of four basic designs. I went to a state school for college and took out student loans. I got a job in a satellite city which had nothing to do with what I studied in university. Along the way, I had several more or less serious relationships which, by the time I was twenty six, made me rethink my definition of love.Anyways, all of that changed, kind of got lost in terms of my identity, when I became a mining camp in South America.I should explain.I did one of those DNA/ancestry tests and found out, along with the fact I’m not even a little bit Irish, that my body contained a very scarce earth mineral. I didn’t know anything about the mineral at the time. For legal reasons I can’t tell you what it was. All I can say is you probably interact with it every day. It is used to make a very small but essential component in a technology you could certainly live without, but with a markedly lower quality of life.So I found out I was largely Scottish (what?!) and I also contained this random mineral and I needed to cut back on sugars because I’m genetically predisposed to diabetes, but I got on with my life. I stopped eating cereal for breakfast and the movie Braveheart hit somewhat different, but other than that, no big deal. Except I started to get these letters and emails with offers to buy the mineral rights to my body. I ignored them at first, because it seemed like a ridiculous premise, but then the mayor showed up at my door.“James!” he said. “May I call you Jim?”“It’s the same number of syllables, but sure.”“Jim, I’d like to talk to you about a little proposition.”I could see where this was going. “Sir—”“Now hold on a second. I want to ask you to sell your mineral rights to the city. Opening a mine in your body would be a big thing for our town. It’d mean jobs for a lot of people and growth for our struggling businesses. Not to mention, it would help me out a great deal in the upcoming election, and then I’d be in a position to help you.”I could see the reasoning. It weighed kind of heavy on me. But I also didn’t want to be mined, didn’t know what I would be after the process, so I politely refused.“Jim,” he said, “I am so disappointed in you.”So they filed a petition for eminent domain to obtain the rights to mine this rare essential mineral from my body, and they won. They had vastly better lawyers. In retrospect, I like to imagine my lawyers, by comparison, as hand-puppets who are comically bungling the legal process. A flurry of felt and misplaced documents while the tall one flapped, “I thought you were supposed to file the grievance for harassment of our client”, and the short one would respond, “Harassment? You’re the biggest ass I know!” Sorry, I harbor a lot of resentment from the experience.We lost in court. I couldn’t stop it. And even though I was opposed to it, there was a kind of wild exuberance in those early days. Hungrily, they used pressured water to blow off my top soil, revealing rich veins of ore for the drills and bulldozers to excavate. They carved great pits in me ringed by long ramps for trucks to haul out the essential minerals from my body. They used blast charges to break up the larger rocks and expose deeper deposits.Everybody made money, and not just the people directly profiting on my scarce earth mineral. The local university received a nice endowment and brought in some of the top minds in engineering. A wife of one of the big-wigs in the mining company was a former ballerina, I think, so her husband helped build an opera house near downtown. This whole new arts district sprung up after that with nice restaurants and boutique stores and increasingly expensive art galleries that locals couldn’t afford. After a few years, I could sense the city’s feeling about the mine, and me, had shifted. I would be at a party in the backyard of a small old house, the kind of house realtors now described as “craftsman” when they listed them for 3x their old value, and somebody would say something. About how the city had lost some of its charm, or how a lot of the poorer (if I’m being honest, minority) residents were being priced out of their homes and businesses by all the affluent (white) newcomers. Who were always referred to as Californians, even if they weren’t. Somebody would mention that they have a friend who’s a doctor and their friend had told them they were seeing more and more children born with heart defects and they think it was from the runoff at the mine.And then people would remember that I kinda sorta am the mine (people would sometimes forget because by then I wore a lot of baggier clothes to hide my scarred landscape). They’d apologize and do the whole, “That’s just what I heard,” thing.And I would say to them, “No, I get it. I agree! But there’s nothing I can do.”There would be an awkward feeling at the party after that. The taste of the local craft beer would be less hoppy. I’d make some excuse to leave early, and then I made excuses to not go in the first place. And then I stopped getting invited to things at all, which I told myself was what I wanted.At that point I was in my early thirties, still paying off the student loans, and the city had grown out and then surrounded our satellite (not a little bit fueled by the mine). The scandal with the runoff and the heart defects briefly made national headlines. A question actually got asked about it at one of the Democratic national debates—I really liked what Elizabeth Warren had to say (sigh). There was a protest at me for a couple of weeks, if you can imagine how that feels. And then they closed the mine and sold my mineral rights to a firm out of China. I had some suspicions, had seen a lot of new faces in and around the mine, and then the mayor confirmed it.“Jim,” he said, “The city council, the city planner, the railroad commission…well, we all talked about it and we think the best thing we can do for the city is move on from the mine.”I didn’t know what to say at first. And when I did, I thought better of it.You might disagree, but I’ve learned from past relationships that when someone says they’re leaving you (or, in this case, that you’re leaving them) it’s pretty pointless to argue and can only lead to hurt feelings. You ask what you did wrong, what you could have done better, and find out she doesn’t like how passive you are. And when you say you were just trying to go with the flow, she asks why, in finger quotes, “going with the flow”, means that every evening y’all get dinner delivered and watch Netflix/HBO/Disney+. You suddenly have to revise everything about yourself and your relationship, because you always appreciated those evenings settling in on the couch with her, coming home from a job you didn’t fully understand.So I didn’t make a fuss about it. I left this city my essential mineral had helped build, and the Chinese firm placed me in a narrow valley which had been carved by glaciers over many millennia. The glaciers were all gone now, but the mountains remained, and a river ran between them which emptied into the sea through a Pacific port city (I can’t remember the name. I never had a chance to visit). It was rather stunning and for a while, as they brought in the mining equipment and built sheds and a refinery out of aluminum siding, cinder block dormitories and outhouses for the miners, brought in modular housing for management, as miles of pipes were laid to bring up water from the river—Forgive me, where was I?So they placed me in this valley carved by glaciers, and while the camp was being built, I got to hike the hills, go up into the mountains. I’d look down at the mining camp, look down the valley at the local village, the adobe and rust colored buildings, the green and yellow fields being farmed. I would turn to my security contractor—one or more would always accompany me—and I would point and ask if we could visit. And they would shake their heads. Just to eat, I would gesture. No, no, they would shake their heads.Still, it was a nice break, rather joyful being up there, the smell of the earth. But once the work got started, I didn’t get out much again. My experience as a mine had been different when I was located outside a major city. I would watch the trucks go in and out of me. As each new pit was dug I could feel the detritus, the tailings, moved and dumped into the last disused pit inside me. But there was so much I hadn’t seen which I had been kind of oblivious to as I was locked in my day-to-day or sat at home, scrolling Instagram, ordering food for delivery.There at the mining camp, there wasn’t any hiding it, that rough work reopening the mine. The filled pits were dug out again. Dams were carved into me and filled with the runoff and debris, the water variably a metallic yellow or azure blue. Great mounds of tailings were set around me. When the wind came through the camp it would create a cloud of dirt and gravel which would hang at the level of your mouth and eyes until it rolled down the valley, following the river.At night local diggers would mine with picks and shovels and buckets. They built these shacks or set up tents at the periphery of me and dug down, made rough mine shafts into my fingers and toes. I wouldn’t feel it while they dug during the night, but in the morning there was tingling in my extremities. Even though I didn’t tell anyone, couldn’t tell anyone, didn’t speak the language, I watched as more and more uniformed men with guns showed up around the camp.I think I knew what was going to happen.And then everything did.The security forces cracked down on the local diggers. The locals protested and blocked the roads into the mines. More security forces and the military came in to break up the protests. The protesters threw rocks. The military had guns. The roads were cleared, but costs had gone up and output had diminished. The company cut staff, denied raises. The miners went on strike. The local diggers continued to dig, but had to take greater risks. There were accidents. Some diggers lit tires on fire to try to break up some rock. They were poisoned by the smoke and nearly died. The strike was broken by the government with some concessions made for raises, but corners were cut at the mine. Farmers complained that some of their cattle died after drinking at a nearby stream. The company trucked in water. I saw all that coming. I didn’t expect the flood.I don’t know what I could have done. Even if I knew, I didn’t speak Spanish and they didn’t speak English, and I didn’t have much of a chance to learn. The miners had enough of their work from the day to eat with me in the canteen. There was a security contractor I nicknamed Kurt, and some evenings he would sit down with me and play cards while he worked on a fifth of vodka or rum. And I would try to talk to him, but he didn’t really say anything. Therefore, ‘Kurt’.Still, when the dam failed and the tailings flooded down into the river, and the river flooded the village downstream, it was my dam. It was my inattention to detail, my callousness, my attempt to cut corners, maybe knowing that if the dam broke, it wouldn’t have to be me who paid for it. Because I didn’t want to pay so much for it, for the lifestyle I’d had growing up in the states that I didn’t think, or really didn’t care, to live without. So it was my dirt and debris and polluted water, flooding that village and killing those 17 people.I think they were mostly the very old or the very young.The company paid those families the cost of a life, about 120k, and they built for the villagers a brand new village. And the mining continued, until at some point there wasn’t any more me left to mine. It actually took going past that point. It took the cave-in of my left cheek, for my lungs to collapse, and finally a dip in the stock market, an inevitable tragedy experienced by a few after several tragedies of the many, before the mining actually stopped.Nobody told me it would happen. It didn’t happen all at once.At first the equipment left, and then some days later the workers, and then the security personnel. I was empty for a while, there in that great valley carved by glaciers, amid the slanted cinderblock buildings. But then armed rebels came in and claimed me. They brought in local diggers who surveyed my last ribs, talked about mining into the spine of me. They shook their heads. The rebels pointed their AK-47s and then the diggers tried for months.They tried, painfully, and the rebels became increasingly quarrelsome with the diggers and each other, until the winter/summer rains came and they quit the mine, went off to raid the local villages once more for supplies, and then go north. It rained and rained. I waited for something to happen. I watched the muddy road that ran up to me and tried my best to stay dry. And then an old woman, definitely a local, came and she placed flowers against the heart of me, and she got down on her knees, there in the mud, and she prayed. I am sure she was grieving the death of a digger, but the way I felt, I was a thing to be grieved too, and not totally for myself, for the death of the mine too, and all the potential that I had carried so deeply.What I’d become, I don’t know how to put it into words. I had been beautiful once. I know that isn’t attractive for a man to say about himself. But I look back at old pictures of me, and I really was something to look at, even though I didn’t know it at the time.I’d stopped looking at myself in the mirror a long time ago. I think I disassociated from my body. I think it was something I needed to do or else I would have lost it. But for once I took a look at myself. Everything that had been done in the mine was written into my skin and muscle, fat and bone. What hadn’t been excavated was mostly debris. There were these rivulets of waste running off my abdomen, pooling around my hip bones.But more than that, people had died in me. I was a crime scene. I was a cemetary. I had been gutted and fished and swallowed up, time and again. I had been displaced, not only my being, but also the various parts of me, across the world. I didn’t know how to talk to people anymore, because—let’s say that you ask me about the weather—I don’t know if you mean the weather here or at my elbow, my left shin, behind my right ear. I stammer. My fluency—let me try to get this right—my ability to speak and to talk about myself and my place in the world and all of the things going on in it.I’m sorry. Please forgive me.I really meant to say something just then, but I can’t tell you now what it was. There’s so much to it, and so little left of me.So I watched the woman pray in the mud, and I tried to pray with her. She crossed herself and then got up and then she walked away.And so I got up, and nobody tried to stop me, and I used every last dollar and sol that I had hidden away, and I went home, back to the U.S. It took a long time, and there was some hard going along the way, but I finally came home, and I found the city had prospered. It had shaken off its roots as a mining town, and it was now this beautiful gem of a city, but the mayor had lost his seat (which I was happy to see). Where my mine had been was now a golf course and a shopping complex.I was getting a coffee with a friend there just the other day. We spent the afternoon catching up; she’d recently gotten engaged and I was so happy for her I didn’t really go into my stuff. It was late November and she asked if we could talk and shop. We were in a store, I won’t tell you which, but I had this undeniable feeling a certain product contained a very small part of me. I picked it up; I turned it over. I looked at the price. I tried to calculate how much it would cost to buy back everything, all of me, to pay for all of the damage to everyone and everything. The math was beyond my imagination.So I put it back. I can’t really afford to be frivolous right now. I’m still paying off my student loans.