Sometimes the good guys win. Sometimes life defeats death. Sometimes there are happy endings. And when those coal miners started rising from the innards of the Earth, their faces covered in grime, their hardhats and ponchos glistening with water, I was like so many other Americans: I punched the air and yelled toward my sleeping wife: "They're alive, they're alive ..."

Sitting there in a safe, dry, well-lighted place, watching the amazing results of human will and technical ingenuity, I thought of the men and women in hardhats who used so much intelligence and muscle to clear the World Trade Center site in record time. And then another image entered me: a trip I made into a coal mine in Hazard, Ky., 40 years ago, where I'd gone to cover a strike. I was guided by a miner, a grizzled union organizer fighting to get this mine manned by members of the United Mine Workers. For the moment, all work had stopped. Everybody I met was carrying a pistol, including my guide. The two of us crouched low under the roof beams, then entered a large room that ended in the coal face.

"For Chrissakes," he said, "don't light a cigarette or we get blowed to kingdom come."

He talked about gases then, and about water seepage, part of the terrain of the inner Earth. His flashlight showed the crude tracks for carts that carried away the coal, and the rough-hewn beams that held up the tunnel roof. Everything else was black, the air seemed like a fine black dust and I could feel the oppressive, silent weight of a mountain above us. If a timber loosened, there'd not be enough of us to bury. We were there about an hour, as my guide explained what miners do. It felt like a year, and I never went into a coal mine again.

Men like Thomas Foy kept going into the mines. Men like Blaine Mayhugh and John Phillippi and Ronald Hileman. John Unger and Dennis Hall kept going into the coal mines as did Randy Fogle and Robert Pugh and Mark Popernack. Wednesday, the nine of them went into the Quecreek Mine near Somerset, Pa. Three were 50 years old or older. All were trapped 239 feet below the surface, 8,000 feet from the mine entrance, when they drilled into a mine abandoned in the 1950s. A mine called Saxman No. 2. A mine filled with millions of gallons of water.

A mine that maps told them was 300 feet away.

The maps were wrong.

Soon we'll know what else was wrong in this mine run by the Black Wolf Coal Co. We know that it was in operation for about a year, employing between 50 and 75 nonunion workers. We know they were being paid about $30,000 a year, less than what Business Week tells us the average American CEO of a major corporation earns in a day. We know that on Oct. 17, a 40-by-30-foot section of roof caved in, but that accident drew little attention because there were no injuries. We know that Black Wolf has been cited 26 times since March 20, 2001, for minor violations of federal mine safety regulations.

We don't know much of anything else, for now, about what happened in the Quecreek Mine. Perhaps it was simply the fault of the maps. Perhaps there were other mistakes, caused by cutting corners or simple carelessness. Investigations are surely already underway.

But this extraordinary event should again remind us that valiant men and women still work hard every day in this country to help make our lives better. There are 75,000 coal miners working in our country (down from 489,000 a century ago). In 2001, 72 American miners died, and their on-the-job death rate is still the highest of any industry. The United Mine Workers, once one of the mightiest of American unions, pushed for a century for better wages and pensions, and greater safety. The union made the country better, and the mines safer, even for those miners forced by need to work in nonunion mines.

Wondering about coal

Today, four-fifths of mined coal is used by electrical utilities, giving us light and power. About a tenth is exported. But as I watched the drama of Quecreek unfold on TV, my mind drifting to that mine in Hazard, I also remembered the way coal was once used here in New York.

There was a coal stove in our flat in Brooklyn when I was a boy during World War II, jammed against the kitchen wall. My mother cooked on its top. It warmed us when the harbor winds blew under the badly fitting windows. On wintry Saturdays throughout the war, I lugged burlap coal bags - bought from a man who also sold ice - up the stairs to the flat and was charged with operating the grate at the bottom of the coal stove.

Sometimes I found bits of unburned coal and used prongs to drop them back onto the fire. The ashes were sifted and shoveled into grocery bags and taken to the street. On days after snowfalls, they were spread over the sidewalk ice. We always wanted to get "Blue Coal," which sponsored "The Shadow" on the radio, but it was, my mother said, "too dear." We settled for cheaper coal that sometimes smelled like rotten eggs as it burned. I sometimes wondered just what coal was and how it got to Brooklyn.

When I was in sixth grade at Holy Name School, I wrote my first true composition: "The Autobiography of a Lump of Coal." Honest. I read everything I could find at the Prospect Branch of the public library. I read the entry in the Wonderland of Knowledge encyclopedia. I used the first person so that the piece of coal explained what anthracite was (like "Blue Coal"), and how coal was formed (my narrator was 200 million years old) and how he was the most valuable mineral in the world and how a coal miner had chopped him into existence. Brother Rembert gave me a reluctant A. I thought I'd never find another subject.

In 1948, our landlord installed steam heat. Two huge men came and took the coal stove away. Few of us thought much about coal after that, or about the men who worked the mines. But the mines are still there, still dangerous, the miners still giving us light and warmth. On Saturday night and Sunday morning, the good guys won. Keep them safe, forever.