Michael Brunelle and fellow miners in front of the Lucky Friday Mine.

No Guitars at Brunelle’s ‘School of Rock’

SUZANNE RAMSEY
College relations staff writer

As a college student at Boise State, Michael Brunelle was into hard rock. That doesn’t sound like a big deal (What 19-year-old hasn’t played a little air guitar?) until he tells you the rock was located thousands of feet below ground in a northern Idaho mine.

“I spent two summers working in a lead and silver mine called the Lucky Friday in the northern Idaho panhandle between Missoula, Montana and Spokane, Washington,” Brunelle, an instructor of modern languages and literatures, explained.

“Working four thousand feet below the surface was a unique experience, but it also convinced me that college was the way to go.”

Brunelle grew up in Boise, Idaho. His dad, a mining engineer from a panhandle city near Coeur d’Alene, also worked in the mines during college. His grandfather owned a small gold mine and did some prospecting.

“When I was in college, I wanted to go up there and kind of see what my roots were all about,” Brunelle said, referring to the town of Wallace in the “Silver Valley” of Idaho. “My dad’s aunt and cousins were still [there], so I went up there to work for two summers.”

In the summer of 1974, Brunelle was a “big hole helper,” an odd-sounding job for a fine arts major. Working more than 3,000 feet underground on the graveyard shift, his job was to change drill pipe for the aptly named “big hole drill” for a crew that was installing an elevator in the mine.

“The way they do that is they drill a hole about nine inches in diameter from one level to another level,” he said. “They had to hit another tunnel at the bottom and I think they were trying to go two thousand feet. Then they would hook a big drill bit on — it’s a cone shape — and then pull it up.

“That thing would grind a six-foot-diameter hole and they would drill upwards. That way all the rock would fall down and they could collect that there. So … I changed the drill pipe every six feet.”

It wasn’t a bad gig, really. Working only 10 minutes of every hour gave Brunelle lots of time to read. That summer, with the aid of a headlamp, he read several books, including James Michener’s “Hawaii.”

He and his co-workers also explored the subterranean passages, called “drifts.”

“It’s just a mining term,” he said. “The up and down, the vertical ones, are shafts and the horizontal are called drifts. We had wandered down into a drift one night and turned off our lights and that is experiencing pure black darkness. No light at all.”

The job definitely wasn’t without risks. During the summer of 1976, Brunelle spent his mornings pounding rocks with a sledgehammer and afternoons delivering dynamite and blasting caps, both dicey propositions.

So it’s not surprising that he had his share of scary moments, including a “rock blast.” If there is a sudden change in pressure, Brunelle said, rock fragments can explode, hurtling through the drifts like bullets.

“You can imagine that rock that’s four thousand feet under ground is under a lot of pressure, so when you dig a hole, dig a tunnel, suddenly there’s nothing on the underside of it and rocks will expand very suddenly sometimes.”

Luckily, he was far enough away that he wasn’t hurt.

When asked if he missed anything about working in the mines, Brunelle’s first reaction was to laugh. Although he said he found it “very interesting,” he didn’t want to work in the mines forever.

Some of his fellow miners didn’t plan to make a career of it either, telling Brunelle that they planned to work in the mines for a few years and make some money before heading off to college.

“It’s kind of a trap,” he said. “They made money, then they bought a really nice car, and then they got a girlfriend, [and] then how do you go to college when you’ve had a job where you’re making good money?

“It’s really hard for them to make that jump, and I saw that and thought, ‘Boy, I don’t want to get caught in that trap.’ Also, it’s just very physical. Like I said, one of my jobs was actually breaking rocks with a sledgehammer. It’s about as basic as you’re going to get.”

When it was suggested that rock-breaking duty sounded a little like prison, Brunelle shrugged. “Well, at least I was getting paid for it.”