The Coal Mine

We began with the coal mine. This descends to 300 feet below ground where it stays very cold and wet all the time, so I needed to fortify myself with lunch at Cooper's Seafood restaurant first. Cooper's is famous for having the largest number of beers on tap of any place in the nation, and the parking lot is always packed with tour buses. I don't drink beer, being a steadfast wino. The big draw for me here is the alligator soup, a thick, spicy, tomato-based wonder, and the frogs' legs. I am a foodie, so sue me.

I think McDade Park is named after some local politician, and I don't think he is dead yet. I can't swear to this because I haven't actually lived in Scranton since 1968 when I went away to college, but there has always been a McDade in Scranton politics. The name I remember from my mother, a rabid Democrat, is "Joe McDade". The park may be named after an earlier generation of McDades. I, myself, am a registered independent, gratefully relieved of primary elections and two-party squabbling.

Anyway, don't they have a rule about naming parks after people who are still alive? Presidents don't seem to get their green faces on money until after they are no longer with us.

Back to the park. The entrance to the mine tour itself consists of several large parking lots and a building containing a gift shop (coal chunks), cafeteria (pizza slices and french fries), and a small information section which isn't even interactive. This compact appearance is because the entire attraction is underground. Northeastern Pennsylvania was never into strip mining. Instead, they hauled their product, anthracite (hard) coal, and it waste product, picturesquely called "culm", out of great, deep holes in the ground. I always thought that the mining companies should have put the culm back into the ground to fill up all the holes, but they did not. Instead, they made huge mountains called "culm dumps" around the town, and simply left them there. After some years, these dumps spontaneously combusted, and so were renamed "the burning dumps" bu the population of Scranton. On rainy nights, the culm dumps would burn with an eerie, blue flame, and I always thought them quite beautiful. Eventually the mines collapsed, and the culm had to be bulldozed back into the ground. This proves that my girlhood theory was not without merit.

Siss and I had bough tickets for the afternoon trip into the mine, which was to begin at 2 P.M. This gave us time to peruse the gift shop for some of those souvenirs that you end up moving from place to place in your house and finally throw out or give to the Goodwill. I once had owned a beautiful pair of anthracite ear studs, polished like ebony, and I wanted to see if they had another pair. Alas, the current trend was toward ornate, chandelier earrings and crosses made out of coal; not my style, so I settled for a charm for my bracelet that featured tiny mining tools and a wee lump of coal. I still wear that bracelet.