Two children from Cavnic were coming at school during winter two days each because they had a single pair of shoes. Let’s not say anything about the last ten years when nothing was built and those that have no place to live share the drainage with the …rats.
More than a million Romanians left the country and from the minority of the mining villages about 10 thousands Czechs left. Then the laws of ownership were given at the … owners. If the first dismissed people were those who: “we pretend working, they pretend they pay us” and a selection of the values was necessary, now when we have over two millions of unemployed people, there’s nothing more to say. This is the reform gentlemen …
– Mister Buia, I see it is hard for you to walk, I can’t say we are going better, since we don’t transcend in youth attributes anymore, but I have to tell you I stand with enough indifference the colleges chicaneries at their “giving age”.
Although there are some facts that annoy me deeply, most of all when it isn’t an addressed appellation but parts of conversations of some students to whom I happen to go by during break time through the yard or in the halls of the school. Not long ago were some adjectives that appreciated my character and that, I have to admit, flattered me, mostly when these words were told by a girl. From these adjectives the most used were: tall man, brown with brown sparkling eyes, well tight (not at the eyes) and other alike beautiful words, that were in fact real, why shouldn’t I admit it, I liked it. I felt good when I was hearing those words pronounced of young lips.
Now, maybe the most amiable young man or woman would use completely different words: “An old man, a little crooked, with his arms aggregated, grey-haired, problematic eyes, paled with the shading of tiredness, with a weakly step. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t envy the young ones. I have no reason for doing that; the ascertainment is that those words that used to define us in our youth found other owners, other bearers, we are only catching up what was left from our predecessors. That sometimes could mean nothing.
– Now that you have made a round-up about youth, Buia Thomas continued, I would like to also tell you how my first day of mining was.
I was on an ash pit in front of a gallery. I was looking at those people arranged in a circle, sitting on bricks, logs of wood or on a stone and that were eating their meal before entering the gallery.

I was sitting aside with my back at a tilting cart looking to do the same thing, to eat, but more undercover. I was constrained to “perform myself” in front of so many people that I haven’t known yet and that I was sure that were waiting for me to fail to be the next taken against the grain. From this point of view I did not liked them. I was alone and they were a shift. I was the one that did not know anyone, they all knew each other. They pretend they cannot see me. They left me alone, but I knew it wasn’t long till “they would baptize me”. This circular meeting with the meal service before entering the shift was as a new religion, as a state of being. Although most of the talking was “in shifts” there were issued, more concise than the origin of that ancient province, all the life and work problems of that specific “round”. From the way that the problems were “charged” you could guess the place or state of each individual in that society. This moment was more than a “good evening” or “enjoy your work” often used in other working man societies. Watching them, studying their acting I was questioning myself too. Was my place among them a mistake? Did I force my destiny, I thought I would live better, with less headaches? What would I become after some years among these men, knowing that in Romania only 5% of the working men “have chosen” this “profile”? Waking up from this stack of questions I notice that “the wheel” gets ready to enter the gallery. The meal was over, the bags with food were hanged on a carver and everyone was checking his lamp. At this level electrical lamps haven’t showed up yet, not even for the bosses. I was looking with interest how everyone was checking the lamps and I could say the each one “was making” this in his own way, but “that way” had a purpose. Later I realized that “making the lamp” means the way of using those 300 gr. of carbide. Some were basing on a big flame but for a short time, these were the trimmers from the transportation. For those that were working in the line the lamp was made by placing powder over the carbide to cover it well, this powder was soaked and the lamp was having a permanent flame for four hours, after which the lamp was made again and for most of the times it was interrupting. With the same method, the same time, and the same source of light. The engineers and locksmiths were infiltrating the carbide in oil or gas and it lasted for a longer time. As for the flame they were using the same method as the trimmers, the lamp with big flame, most of all because they and the master workmen had also spotlights that were “pushing” the spot light over 15-20 meters ahead.

After ending this ritual, of the lamp making, we were entering the Nepomuc Gallery. The entering was made according to our gradations and age. First was the horizon master. I was the last. The spotlights that the lamp was giving chase at the darkness figures of the gallery walls. In the boots settle while walking you could not hear a lot. Who had something to say had to holler to be heard. Even walking, the head posture while walking was agonizing. The head cover with the helmet had to be “recessed” between the shoulders. The back had to be “brought down” so it won’t catch the subsidence from the top, the reinforcement, the cables or anything else it was in there. A hit in the head if it wasn’t “pulled out”, could have broken your neck. If you regarded this, at how fast you were walking, a hit on the head could have out you down but could not break your neck.
Feeling my way through the gallery behind the shift from it I felt alone in an atmosphere with a taste and smell of decayed carrots. The moonshine figures caught to the faded light of the carbide lamp as the faded chromatic of the walls disillusioned a young man that loves blazing colors, clear colors. We might have walked for about hundred meters and my mind “getting away” outside not only for the sun I left behind but most of all for the disappointment that I was able to accept “the entrance in the mine”, which I feel as a big punch. I resign to it, a shift will pass, then I would go with other teams with less entrances in the mine, if it’s possible none.
These were my thoughts at the first entrance in the mine. Now after so many years, what then seemed a mission (moving up the discussions to my own person) was a typical “teacher’s” from the underground protection. The fact that I was not “taken in the middle”, and for lots of days I was receiving immediately the answers at my questions (and no glimpse of blame) a tacit sense in their world started to create, in the world of the mine diggers. Maybe, even if I haven’t expressed myself by no means in front of them, they accepted me knowing how hard it is for a man to accept to work “under ground” and maybe they saw something in me that I didn’t know yet. Their way of being friendly, with no words, helping you “through hand grabbing” and not by advising, and that atmosphere in which you could feel protected by seeing and feeling anything different but feeling their attachment all the time, vanished the work’s tidiness and of the place where I had to work and I started to feel that actually life is beautiful.