I saw an ad for “clean coal” while watching the Winter Olympics. The actress was clean, in her neatly pressed pantsuit, her shimmering, freshly-washed hair falling to her shoulders. The background scenes were clean. You felt like you could drink the water without boiling it. There was no picture of coal in the ad and I said to myself, “I bet she never held a chunk of anthracite in her hands, ever.” It made me think back to my experiences with coal.
In the late forties and early fifties, when I was a little kid, we heated our house with coal. There were five apartments, all hooked up to the same furnace, with large pipes running out of the top, making it look like a giant squid. Every night, my uncle, grandfather, and on occasions when he couldn’t escape the duty, my father, shoveled coal into the maw of this monster, filling the firebox bottom to top. In the morning the shovel-man had to empty the box of the caustic, coral sediment that remained. And it was a foul brew. No sane person would want to touch, much less inhale the acidic residue.
The coal I’m talking about was anthracite, a hard coal that gives off less dust and toxicity than the softer bituminous kind that is only a step up from peat. But when I say “less dust,” I am speaking in relative terms.
We had a huge bin in our basement that could handle more than a ton of the stuff. You stoked the furnace using a large, flat shovel heavy enough itself to wrench your back and a regular ball-buster if filled with a full scoop of coal. The bin was conveniently located, so you could scoop up a shovel full, turn and toss it into the firebox without having to take a step. Every shovel-full raised a cloud of dark dust, so that by the time the firebox was full, the air reeked with an especially acrid, caustic particulate that had anyone within range gagging. No one wore a mask, or any protection from this poison whatsoever. We just breathed it in, as if there were no such thing as black lung.
Two or three times each winter, the coal man came, in his filthy soot-black dump truck, to deliver a ton. He was a short stocky man whose hair might have been black, but since he worked with coal, you could never be sure. He wore very cool boots that both laced and buckled so that he could keep the coal crap out of his socks. He wrapped himself in a heavy leather apron that looked to be a half-inch thick, and donned enormous leather gloves that covered nearly all of his stubby forearms. Every wrinkle and furrow was filled with a mixture of sweat and blue-black coal dust that ran in streaks away from his eyes, nose and mouth, as if they were the painted-on whiskers of a Halloween character — as garish as a Dickensian chimney sweep.
He’d back his truck up to our basement window and run a ramp down from his truck bed to our coal bin. He’d tilt the bed of his truck and use his own heavy-duty coal shovel to coax the blue-black pile down the chute and into our bin. He had scale on the truck that told him when he’d offloaded a ton. Then he’d close the basement window sealing into our cellar all of the cancerous pollutants that he sold.
I don’t buy the claim that anthracite is so damn clean. From my recollection, a ton of anthracite piled up in your basement leaves the air heavily laden with a large-particle form of dust that refuses to settle. It hovers tenaciously in the firmament for weeks and months, blocking nearly all of the light that otherwise might seep in through a window. It will not fall to the ground or disperse. It soars. It floats. It hitches rides in the eddies of air currents, oozing into every cranny, every corner, every surface and there it hovers until the turbulence of some creature’s passing, or merely a draft causes it to take flight once again.
In our basement, there was no avoiding it. There was no keeping it out of your lungs. Like the foul smell that lingers in a heavy smoker’s clothing, this dust became enmeshed in every warp and weave of fabric you might be wearing. Even a month after its deposit into the bin, our basement remained contaminated by the bluish, acidic particles and the light was still dismal because of it.
For those who happened to live on the first floor, right above the basement, they were able to smell the coal until they grew accustomed to the stench and forgot it was there. Throughout the entire house, you could clean and clean but never be able to pick up the cloth without finding the telltale streaks of dust as black as Hades at midnight.
Put that cloth up to your nose and you could almost smell the mine where the coal came from. You could imagine hearing the wracking coughs of the miners who picked and shoveled it out of the ground —visualize their coffins as they were carried away to the company grave yard, a day or two after they drew their last feeble gasp. And you would realize that if you spent too much time in our basement, you would share their fate, because no one ever emerged from our cellar during those years without coughing.
In 1953 or 4 we converted to an oil furnace. I missed the coal man for a while, but I suppose, like the blacksmith, milkman and a thousand other jobs, it’s not really to be lamented that his job became obsolete. Maybe he lived a little longer for losing it.
I’d love to see this clean coal that the clean lady in her new, snug fitting pantsuit was talking about. Clean coal is how they used to describe anthracite in the forties and fifties. If they are claiming that they can make clean coal out of the stuff they dumped in my basement when I was a little kid, I, for one am skeptical. The coal I know about, the messiah couldn’t make clean, that nice clean-cut lady and her pristine Olympic commercial notwithstanding.