Week 3 and still we wait. Six men are trapped in a coal mine, three men are dead in the rescue attempt, nobody knows what to do next and now they're trying to come to grips with defeat.
Who would have thought it could happen in this age, and that's the point. Maybe the single most frustrating, discouraging thing about the Crandall Canyon Mine disaster is this one simple fact:
Six men are right there under our feet and we can't save them.
No one can reach them.
With all our resources, with all our machines and our computers and our brains, we can't reclaim men who are some 2,000 to 1,500 feet below our shoes. They might never be found.
Let's face it, we human beings are pretty cocky. We own the planet. We rule it. We've pretty much tamed Mother Earth, or we think we have. We've moved mountains, dug tunnels under oceans, carved out a chunk of the continent to make a canal.
We've gotten used to the notion that we can do pretty much anything.
We can blast men into outer space and bring them home.
We can scale Everest.
We can cure disease.
We can send men and women to the bottom of the sea and bring them back again.
We can cook a frozen dinner in five minutes.
We can fly airplanes to precise targets behind enemy lines without a pilot.
We can replace hearts and kidneys and missing arms and legs.
But here in the 21st century we can't drill a hole in two weeks' time and rescue six trapped miners.
It's humbling. It's frustrating. It's maddening. It's perplexing.
How could this be?
They're right there, below our feet. Just dig a hole and get them out, for crying out loud.
And yet over the weekend, a mining official said the one thing no one wanted to hear or say: "It is likely that these miners may not be found."
Fifteen hundred feet. What is that, six or seven city blocks? Five football fields?
Why can't we do that?
We've invented a car that can parallel park itself.
We not only went to the moon, we took a car with us so we wouldn't have to walk.
We can put thousands of songs and libraries of information on the head of a pin.
But we can't dig a few men out of the ground?
We called on some of the top minds in the mining business to get this thing done. A mining safety expert showed up to help out and advise. The mine collapsed on him and he died, along with two other rescuers.
This thing keeps getting worse. "When sorrows come ... they come not single spies ... but in battalions," Shakespeare wrote.
He's the same man who wrote, "What a piece of work is man — how infinite in faculty — in action like an angel."
But he can't dig out Kerry Allred, Don Erickson, Luis Hernandez, Juan Carlos Payan, Brandon Phillips and Manuel Sanchez from underneath dirt and rock.
Maybe we're a little more humble. We're helpless, and now nearly hopeless. We've been exposed again. We aren't in command as much as we think we are. We are a little smaller this week.
E-mail: drob@desnews.com