We met a hundred feet underground. The walls around us consisted of a seam of iron ore. It was about six degrees Celsius in there, but she said the temperature never changed year-round. At one point, when she turned out the lights and lit a single candle, she explained that was all the light miners had during their digging shifts – 10 hours a day, six days a week – year after year.

Then, she made the whole place human. She said her dad had worked there in the 1950s, lost the lower part of his leg in a mining accident, but was able to joke about it.

“He wagered strangers, he could put a foot down in one spot and his other 25 feet away,” she said. “When they bet he couldn’t, he took off his prosthetic foot and tossed it 25 feet away.” (more…)