10/13/10: A nondescript blue knit hat that someone has cut a hole in at the crown - for a ponytail?

33 Chilean miners, trapped in a mine since August 5, now being brought back to the surface.  I heard the story as I biked to work today.  The young reporter who described the scene this morning was hoarse and energetic.  I imagined her along with everyone else cheering as each miner came into view, witnessing rebirths throughout the night. 

I biked along in this sunny, snappy fall morning, and I thought about the final miner, the person who has to wait alone while his last co-workers goes up and the transport comes back down for him.  Now that, I thought, is a story someone should write.

Here I sit.  I have just sent Jaime up, have heard the last sounds of him and the machine that carries him.  He is looking up, up toward the light.  I am looking, too, but he will see it before I do.  I have imagined this moment, and it is both worse and better than I have imagined.  Something in my belly loosens, as if I am trying to fill the space with myself - just myself.  The darkness - and beyond it, the stone - presses back upon me.  Who will win, I wonder?  But stone moves slowly, whereas I move quickly.  I will be above this stony warren in less time than it took me to sit and eat dinner each night at home, less time than it took me to bathe my children when they were young. 
The older I have gotten, the less tolerant I have become of being underground.  I will likely never willingly enter a cave again.  To be a miner would be kind of torture, like Winston in 1984 being set upon by rats when he felt he could have endured anything but rats.  Yet somehow these men - through necessity - have found a way to be underground every day.  We endure a great many things out of necessity.  I am happy for them, for their families.  And still I wonder about that one who will be last.  Someone has to be last.