Dennis Hollingsworth

Meade Arble

Meade and Grada are the other Yanqui expats that we know here in Tossa. We had dinner with them recently, a great view of the Med from their balcony, by the way. Self described hippies, they've been living in Spain since the mid-70's when they were students at the University of Seville. Their arc from then to now involved a stint in a Pennsylvania coal mine, Meade's home town... Meade wrote a book about it that is a reckoning and a coming of age: "The Long Tunnel, A Coal Miner's Journal". From the inside flap:

After drifting indecisively through two universities, one of them in Europe, Meade Arble returned in 1973 to the Pennsylvania coal town where he was born and raised, and where his father had been a physician, and found emplooyment in one of the local coal mines. He had no choice: without a degree, and with practically no job experience, there was little else he could do to support his pregnant wife and their two children.

The Long Tunnel is the journal Arble kept during the year he toiled underground. It takes the reader on an engaging odyssey into the labyrinths of a challenging and at times malevolent subterranean world; Arble's richly detailed portraits of his fellow workers, his graphic accounts of the hazards these men face in the normal course of the day, his mounting indignation at the conditions in the mines and hsi description of a long and demoralizing strike give this book the kind and dramatic power ordinarily found in naturalistic fiction. For all its grimness, The Long Tunnel, abounds in wildly comic episodes: Arble has an ear for the ribald lingo of his comrades, and an eye for humorous situations that arise incongruously in this forbidding miieu...

Sounds good, huh?

It turns out that Meade and I share a common past: we were both sailors. And with sailors, you have sea tales. Early in the book, Meade fills in part of a backstory, the reason for the first time in the brig:

My father was determined to salvage me, his only son. My sister, two years older, had always been near the top of her class and was everything they hoped for. After Staunton I joined the navy with the hope that they might rehabilitate me. Soon after boot camp, aboard a destroyer escort in Pearl Harbor, I was put over the side on a stage to chip paint. Chipping was normally done in large blocks, and the exposed metal was protected at the end of the day with a coat of dayglow orange paint called red lead. i spent the day in an artistic frenzy chipping a life sized nude girl, hair flying in the wind, and at the end of the day I red leaded her. She could be seen all the way across the harbor, shimmering in the blazing susnset. She was seen in fact by the harbor commodore, who phoned the captain of our ship for an expanation. The incident cost me the first of a couple of trips to the brig...

I had a good friend then who pulled a similar, if crazier move. His name was Hutch, a short tubby redheaded guy (from Pennsylvania as well, by the way) who was all into Tolkein and was teh kind of guy who would pull a long drag with his Camel and say with the exhaled smoke that he is a flat out loser, squinty from the tar and nicotane, the corners of the mouth a smirk. One time, Hutch smuggled an Aussie on board while we were on liberty in Melbourne as the ship made way for Subic Bay, Philippines. Boy, shit hit the fan that day when they discovered the lad chilling out, watching tv in the crew's berthing compartment while we were at sea.