Notes from the “Departure Lounge”

My paternal grandfather, as a young man in the 1930s, went West one summer to work in a coal mine. One day, leading a pit pony hitched to a cart through the mine shaft, the pony stopped dead in its tracks and refused to budge. A lesser man, or a denser one, would have whipped the animal and forced it forward. Not my grandfather. Seeing rocks starting to crumble from the ceiling above them, he quickly unhitched the pony. It ran out of the shaft and into daylight, with my grandfather in its wake, as the mine collapsed behind them.