Photo by ralph and jenny

IF I HAD BEEN TOLD 10 years ago, before embarking on my university career as an English major, that I’d end up working 11-hour days struggling to make ends meet as a freelance writer…well, actually, I would have stubbornly applied anyway.

I value my educational background. I became more open to new things, and was given my first real taste of travel through a study abroad program at my school.

I also learned how to shotgun beer, experiment with hallucinogens, and somehow maintain a pretty good GPA despite partying three nights a week and rolling into class at 8am each morning.

But never once did I question my decision to immediately enroll in university right after high school. My friends and I talked about this recently. Alternative routes were never discussed with us before we left home. University was a given.

1. Some things you can learn on your own.

You can’t become a doctor by studying WebMD, but some careers require your own exploration. I started out as a writer by stapling pieces of paper together and creating squiggly lines that resembled words.

I was a creative kid, not a prodigy.

Lucky for us, we live in a time when any information we desire is at our fingertips.

My buddy, Dan Nahabedian, is someone who spent several years devoted to learning the tools of his trade as a photographer. In addition to a few good books (like The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby), Dan used online resources and forums to post his work and receive feedback. Now he’s a working professional, and one of the faculty members behind MatadorU’s photography program.

2. You might not be “book smart.”

Maybe you’ve heard of Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple Intelligences,” an idea based on extensive cognitive research that proves students learn, remember, perform, and understand in different ways. There’s even an “interpersonal intelligence,” the ability to effectively understand and interact with others.

Photo by Simon Shek

“Book smart” nowadays seems to be a term used to describe people who excel at their studies but fail to function as a normal person. Sometimes they miss social cues and forget to change their underwear. Unfortunately, much of college is catered to these people.

When we spend so much time studying and absorbed in text books, we may limit ourselves to other possibilities. Hey, maybe I could have been a ballerina.

3. You’re not financially prepared.

I’m more than a little pissed off about my debt.

In the USA, student loan debt is expected to exceed $1-trillion soon. In Canada, the information is a little more obscure, but is estimated at something like over $14-billion.

If there’s one thing lacking in our education system, it’s a prep course on how to handle money and a reality check for what happens once you graduate.

I spent my student loans without a thought. Hoorah, free money! Now the majority of my pay cheques go toward paying off that money I threw around.

I would have worked my way through my undergrad, even if it meant taking a few extra years to finish my degree. Instead, I’ve been out of school for nearly four years, and I’m still below the “poverty” line. And my university had the cheapest tuition in Canada.

4. You haven’t had the opportunity to travel yet.

While the gap year has been basically a rite of passage for some students around the globe, especially in the UK and Australia, it’s only recently becoming more accepted here in North America.

Most parents look at it as an excuse to be careless, ditch responsibilities, and partake in a round-the-world jaunt just to party, make new friends, and to engage in unprotected coitus.

And to that I say hell fucking yeah.

Travel experience provides valuable life skills that employers consider extremely attractive on a resume these days. Attributes like confidence, awareness of the world, and people skills could be your gateway to greater things.

5. Experience can be just as valuable as a degree.

My father was a born woodsman — a lumberjack who built his own house and could survive a week in the wild with just a pocketknife and a shotgun. His skills and experience have made him more self-sufficient than most, and his ability to turn lumber into gold has made him employable for over 40 years.

Nowadays you can’t be taken seriously unless you have a Doctorate of Philosophy in Ufology.

What happened to recognizing practical skills and talent when you see it? My friend Liz from Toronto works in PR/advertising/marketing, and she’s never had any formal education. Back in her early 20s, while working as an intern at Heinz Canada, Liz became very close with the marketing department and was snatched up due to her talents.

She’s one of the most successful people I know, and she spent most of her life struggling through school.

6. Go to vocational, technical, or trade school.

Photo by USACE Europe District

When I was in high school, only the “dumb” kids went to trade school. “Smart” kids were encouraged to attend university. The dumb kids are now making six-figure incomes.

Hands-on work is in huge demand in the workforce. Trades usually takes much less time to complete, and you’ll usually pay much less.

7. Be an entrepreneur.

During my brief time working at a marketing company, I interviewed a young local guy named Scott Oldford, an entrepreneur since he was 13 years old. Now he owns a business specializing in online marketing, web development, and mobile and online applications. In less than a decade, he’s expanded his company to five other locations in Canada.

Plus he was diagnosed with multiple learning disorders when he was seven years old. He’s just a really, really hard worker.

Now I’m working for him, writing web copy. Go figure.

8. Start off as a volunteer.

If there’s a cause you truly care about in the world –- wildlife conservation, hunger relief, world domination –- you’d do well to start out volunteering. With some hard work, you’ll be able to prove yourself and move your way up through the ranks. At the very least, you’ll get some stellar recommendations.

9. Become an expert in something.

Jay Canter, a professional photographer whose career has taken him all over the world and even on music tours, became internationally known for his work in the motor sports world. “When I wasn’t driving a car, I was photographing them,” he says. At the age of 16, he was offered his first real gig for a magazine.

By finding his niche, Jay became an authority, and then expanded his career into other fields of photography.

Just the same, I’m not sure what you can do with a Doctorate of Philosophy in Ufology.

IN THE WESTERN WORLD, part of our culture is worshiping celebrities on one hand, while tearing them down with the other. We take for granted the fact that we can participate in facebook pages such as “Justin Bieber SUCKS !!” (59K likes) or “I HATE LADY GAGA” (81K likes) without a legion of their fans publishing our personal information online and harassing us on the phone.

But that’s what happened to the guy in this video, Wang Jieyu, after making “a light-hearted jibe” about pop star Shang Wenjie on China’s version of Twitter. Loyal minions that they are, Shang’s fans performed a “Human Flesh Search” on Wang, digging up all the personal information they could find on him, posting it online, and feasting on his privacy. Hence the name, cyber cannibals. Phone numbers, email addresses, family photos: folks have even posted comments about f@%&#%* his mom! That’s messed up, but Wang has to wear a mask when he leaves the house because he’s twice been attacked by Shang’s minions.

Photo by: miggslives

Let’s consider for a moment that Shang’s minions are right. They’re simply giving Wang a taste of his own medicine. How dare Wang speak about their master that way! The truth is that there is no individual freedom of speech in China; there is the collective voice. When people talk about the differences between China and the West, this is the sort of thing they’re talking about.

Anyone who has spent time in China knows how important and ingrained harmony is with culture. It’s been said that the Chinese strive for harmony similar to the way Americans pursue freedom. All I can say is God help us if TMZ ever comes to China.

TODAY A FRIEND OF MINE sent me a spoof version of the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps.”

The parody by Peaches, called “My Dumps,” is pretty funny if your humor skews toward the scatological.

The Peaches song seems to be patterned after the Alanis Morisette version of “My Humps,” a slowed down, Tori Amos-style cover that brings the absurdity of the song into even crisper focus.

I remember hearing the original song for the first time. I used to drive around Louisville with my car radio on scan. My tape player was broken, almost everything on the radio was shit, and so I’d just let the scan function reveal the depths of the garbage out there in the world three seconds at a time, stopping if I heard a snippet of something interesting.

“My Humps” caught my attention. I heard Fergie’s repetitive insistence, “My hump. My hump. My hump. My hump. My hump. My hump. My hump. My lovely little lumps.” I stopped the scanning and let it play out. The lyrics were so stupid, I was sure it was some kind of a joke. The word “hump” as it applied to the female body only called up images of old crones with osteoporosis, and “lumps” in reference to breasts only made me think of self exam cards hanging in the shower and mastectomies.

“What the fuck,” I said out loud, alone in the car. The part where she says, “Check it out,” made me laugh an incredulous chirp. I waited for the DJ to cut in afterwards and say something about how funny it was, but the station went right into the next song.

I was energized in my disbelief. When I got home later that night, I said to my roommate Chad, “Have you heard that lump song? Is that shit real?”

He didn’t know what I was talking about.

I’d ask people, “Have you heard that lump song?” Most of my friends are not big on popular music. No one knew what I was talking about, and I almost started to think I must have imagined or dreamed the song.

Then one day, I was on my way to the movies with my friend John. He was one of the only people who could handle my radio scanning habit, and as we sailed into the theater parking lot in my Olds 88, I heard the Shasta commercial, “Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” of the opening of the song.

“This is it! This is the lump song. Listen to this shit. I can’t believe it’s real,” I said.

“Turn that shit off,” he said.

“No, no, no. Listen. Is this real?”

John tolerated the song, unimpressed. He looked lethargic and bored. I was there with my head cocked and my eyes wide, as incredulous as I’d been the first time I heard it. I’d laugh once in a while. When the part where the guy goes, “I said hey, hey, hey, hey, let’s go,” came on I could barely contain myself.

“It can’t be real. It can’t be serious! Whatcha gonna do with all that breast? All that breast inside that shirt?”

“Who cares? It sucks,” John said.

We went into the movie.

Was this the moment that I became an adult? There were plenty of stupid songs that got airplay while I was growing up — songs that were vapid and silly — like “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” or “Abracadabra,” or “I’m Too Sexy.” Some of these were songs I hated, some I just didn’t pay much attention to, but none of them seemed to have the mixture of dead-seriousness and profound idiocy mixed with a hefty dose of braggadocio that delighted me about this song.

I had turned a corner. Something this dumb wasn’t something to get angry about. It was something to be examined, to be savored and enjoyed. It was a testament to the silliness of our times, to the depths of consumerism we had sunk to, to our culture’s complete lack of shame and self-examination as a whole. And I could laugh at it.

Photo: Zabowski

“WHEN YOU LIVE in a foreign country, your friends become your family. You eat with them on Sundays… ask them to borrow money. In just a short while, I’m going to lose part of my extended family. Micaela… is about to abandon me.”

So begins “Todos Vuelven” (Everyone Goes Back), one of the stories on one of my newest favorite websites, Radio Ambulante. In this story, Peruvian-born Gabriela Wiener tells of her close friend Micaela who, for economic reasons, will soon leave Barcelona, where they both live, to return to her native Peru after a ten-year stay.

Radio Ambulante is a radio program that seeks to give voice to Spanish speakers from all over the world, much the same way as public radio broadcasts like This American Life profile individuals in the English-speaking world. The main difference is, these programs are in Spanish. Rather than giving a voiceover to words in a foreign language, the stories are told in their original — accents, slang, and all — with a style that will be very familiar to listeners of NPR in the United States.

If you already speak Spanish, the stories are a look into what’s happening in Latin America, and to Latin Americans, wherever they may be. If you’re still working on your Spanish, I urge you to listen and listen again to work on your comprehension and think about what happens when people tell their own stories, as opposed to having them told by reporters and translated into English.

The project participants and producers are from all over Latin America and the US, and include writers with connections to NPR and radio production. The project is still in its incipient stages and has a Kickstarter fundraising campaign underway if you’d like to contribute. Radio Ambulante is currently available as a podcast, but in the future they plan to distribute the stories to radio stations throughout the US and Latin America. You can follow them on Twitter at @radioambulante.

Photo: DoctorTac

IN 1985, A HANDFUL of diplomats gathered in the small village of Schengen, Luxembourg, to destroy any plans I might one day have of WWOOFing in Europe for an entire year.

What they created was the Schengen Area, a conglomeration of 26 European states that act as one in terms of international travel. Under the Schengen Agreement, border controls between members are eliminated (if you have a Schengen visa –- we’ll get to that in a minute), while border controls with non-member states are strengthened.

The agreement also introduced a swanky information system shared between member states, along with a variety of other acquis. In short, it takes a lot less paperwork to hop around Europe now than it did in pre-Schengen days. However, you now have to play by Schengen rules or risk some pretty steep consequences.

The 26 Schengen countries are the following:

The countries on the list are a strange subset of EU countries, coupled with several (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein) which are not. The UK and Ireland are not on the list, having opted out during the Treaty of Amsterdam for complicated reasons having to do with their being large islands. Also missing are Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Romania, but they’re mandated to join the club by July, 2012 (Cyprus is putting up a fight because of concerns surrounding Turkish Cypriots).

So the Schengen visa will serve as a single visa for all of the listed 26 countries, with the addition of probably three more by July, 2012.

Who it affects

Short answer: if you’re a Canadian or US citizen, kinda. Long story: if you’re a passport-holding citizens of one (or more) of the following countries, you can travel anywhere in the Schengen Area visa-free, but only for visits of up to 90 days out of every 180:

Not on the list

If you’re not from one of the above visa-free countries, you need to apply for a Schengen visa to move freely about the Schengen Area for up to 90 days. This can be tricky, and it’s frustrating that international mobility is hindered simply by birthplace. It’s also not the focus of this particular article, but I encourage anyone in this boat to read How to travel on a third-world passport.

90 days is the limit

If you live in one of the visa-free countries or have a Schengen visa, you can now stay in the Schengen Area for 90 days out of every 180-day period.

This one’s the kicker, folks. The year-long-EuroTrip-ruiner. A common misconception is that tourists in Europe can simply duck into a non-Schengen country like England or Morocco for a day or two and then re-enter with a brand new 90 days to play around with. Not so. You’re allowed to stay in the Schengen Area for 3 months out of every half-year. That’s it. This effectively eradicates (or causes serious problems for) the “perpetual Euro tourist.”

If your goal is to travel for years at a time, you can spend 3 months in the Schengen Area, then a minimum of 3 months elsewhere (Morocco? England? Nepal?), and then re-enter the Schengen Area with the clock reset.

Visa overstays

And what if you overstay your 90 days? Experience dictates one of the following things will happen:

1. Nothing. Many travelers report that during inter-Schengen border crossings, officials don’t add up the passport stamp dates, and they can get away with more than 90 days in half a year. Apparently this is more common at some borders than others, particularly those states who have joined the Schengen Area recently (like the Czech Republic). However, if officials do check, as they’re supposed to on entry and exit, and do increasingly often…
2. You’ll get fined (anywhere from $500-$1000, varying by country), possibly deported, and possibly even banned from the Schengen Area for up to 3 years. Ouch.

Stays of more than 90 days

If you want to stay in the Schengen Area for longer than 90 days, you need to apply for a long-stay visa for a specific country.

If you apply for and obtain a long-stay visa for a particular Schengen Area country, you can stay in that country without eating into your 90-day Schengen time. This option’s viability depends entirely on the nature of your work/travel in the specific country.

Most long-stay visas require work permits or residence permits, which often in turn require concrete offers of employment or proof of permanent housing. This makes it difficult to get a long-stay visa if you’re a tourist, WWOOFer, or other itinerant job-seeker. Further reading: How to get an EU work permit.

Long-stay visas have myriad application requirements, varying by type of visa and by country of issue. Many countries, like Norway, allow applications for long-stay visas while you’re already in the country on a 90-day visa; others, like Italy, require that you apply from your home country. Be sure to check how long application processing takes and apply long before it’s critical.

There are many types of long-stay visas. Student visas are fairly standard for those enrolled at a foreign university. Others range dramatically, from Germany’s general employment visa to Norway’s seasonal worker visa to Spain’s non-lucrative visa for really wealthy people. Search in online forums for specific country and specific visa requirements that cater to your situation.

Wrap-up

Find out if you need a Schengen visa to move about the Schengen Area. If you do, get one. If you don’t, you’re all set.

Roam freely in all Schengen Area states for 90 days out of any 180-day period.

If you need or want to stay longer in one Schengen country, do your research and apply for a long-term visa.

“ALWAYS BE PREPARED.” It’s not just a Boy Scout motto – the staff at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo apparently live by this saying as well.

The zookeepers and police recently conducted an emergency drill on dealing with an escaped rhinoceros. Clearly the logical way to handle such a drill was to have two workers suit up in an enormous papier-mâché rhino while others poked it with sticks, shot at it with fake dart guns, and eventually netted it, all with a demeanor so calm it suggests a tranquilizer was taken by everyone involved.

“A lesson was learned after the disaster at the nuclear plant in Fukushima,” says the zoo’s director in the Associated Press video. “You should never be too confident about security measures, so it is important to put in practice in daily operations to be prepared for something that is unexpected.” ~Yahoo!

Sky News states that Ueno Zoo has only had four animals escape in the last fifty years. If it happens again, let’s hope the real rhino is this sedate.

THIS GUY LOVES HIS BIKE. Or maybe that is putting it lightly? If we believe this video, Guillaume lives and breathes life from the seat of his mountain bike.

You don’t have to be a die hard cyclist to love this video, it is so fun and so creative that I can pretty much guarantee that it will put a smile on the grumpiest face.

Guillaume on his video project:

“I love being on a bike. It helps me feel free. I get it from my dad. After 382 days spent riding through the streets of Montreal, being sometimes quite cold, sometimes quite hot — and sometimes quite scared, I dedicate this movie to you, Yves Blanchet.”

Video created by Guillaume Blanchet

Screenshot from video

AFTER WATCHING THIS FILM, I considered tossing my laptop into the nearest river.

With wages remaining stagnant for almost 40 years and high unemployment threatening to keep it that way, having an unfulfilling job is getting less and less appealing. Stress is going up. The standard of living is going down.

Under its “this is what I did” guise, “Breathe” is a call to action. This one film may not be enough to make someone cash it in and hit the road, but it does highlight what is missing from so many people’s lives: a hierarchy of what’s important: Sanity over dollars.

For anyone on the edge, let this film tip you over.

Video created by RC Cone and Imago Fly Fishing.

BACK WHEN I WAS WORKING in the corporate world fixing computer problems, my team’s and my “success” was measured with statistics. The number of tickets taken, the number resolved, the amount of calls picked up, time spent on the phone. Those kinds of numbers. I was consistently a top performer and took pride watching those numbers climb each month, until one. I’d broken a record; I’d fixed more PC problems than anyone else in recorded history that month.

You know what the first words out of my manager’s mouth were? “Let’s see if you can break it next month!” That was the moment I stopped trying so hard. It was when I truly learned that our idea of success, in the way that it’s taught in our society, can never be reached. And if one were to associate happiness with success, then that means happiness can never be achieved.

If happiness is on the other side of success, your brain never gets there. What we’ve done is we’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society.

Shawn Achor gives a witty, entertaining, and intelligent 12-minute talk about the concept of positive psychology and how it ties into the work we do in our lives. In traveling to 45 countries and working with schools and companies, he picked up on a trend, a common formula that was being taught to students and workers, and one that is ingrained in how we parent, manage, and motivate ourselves:

If I work harder I will be more successful, and if I’m more successful, then I’ll be happier.

The main problem with this, he notes (and what I concluded from my own work example above), is that “every time your brain has a success you change the goalposts for what success looks like.” This is prevalent in how we do our work, and it’s prevalent in our personal lives and consumerist lifestyles. There always seems to be this sense that on the other side of something (a new thing, a completed task, someone treating you a certain way) is where happiness lies. “If only I had this, I’d be happy.” “Once I reach this goal, I’ll be happy.” “As soon as she tells me she loves me, I’ll be happy.”

Photo: Camdiluv

From your experiences in life, when you’ve thought like this, has it ever been true? I’m guilty of this train of thought, and it always seems like I’m waiting for something. Can I bring happiness to the present, instead of striving for it over the horizon? Shawn thinks so. According to him, the fields of neuroscience and positive psychology are discovering that our brains actually work in reverse to the notion that success bring happiness. It’s being proven that happiness is what drives success, not the other way around.

That’s all fine and dandy, but how does one go about bringing happiness to the present if we’re so trained to seek it in the future? By re-training our brains. Shawn’s specific suggestions to go about doing this are the following:

• Three gratitudes – Make note of three new things that you are grateful for every day.
• Journaling – Recall a positive experience that occurred over the last 24 hours; this practice allows your brain to re-live it.
• Exercise – It teaches your brain that your behaviour matters.
• Meditation – Sitting still trains the brain to get over our “cultural ADHD,” and helps bring focus.
• Random acts of kindness – Email one person in your social support network, praising them.

Willing to give it a shot?

THE BLACK HYUNDAI bounced along Highway 21 en route to the eastern Ukrainian mining city of Torez, each pothole tossing me from my seat. I peered from behind as Alex, a journalist and friend of mine, carefully navigated the car around dump trucks, gas trucks, and 18-wheelers. With just one lane in each direction and no shoulder, every passing maneuver seemed especially precarious.

Denis, another journalist, rode shotgun. Every once in a while he’d turn around to point out something in the distance.

This is a metal factory. That is the home of Rinat Akhmetov — Ukraine’s richest person. This was the childhood home of our national finance minister. He recently named the street it’s on after himself.

We drove past roadside kiosks where locals were selling potatoes, onions, eggs, and all things pickled. Decrepit Soviet-era apartment buildings and steel factories popped up every ten kilometers or so. An elderly man watched his goats graze in a nearby field. In the distance, smoke billowed from the coal refinery chimneys dotting the horizon. We were on our way to visit the men working at one of the area’s clandestine illegal mines or, in Russian, kopanki.

Torez is located in the Donets Basin, also known as the Donbass. The hard-knuckled industrial region is a 13-hour train ride east of Kiev, the country’s capital. It sits in the plains of the lower Dnieper and Seversky Donets rivers, a vast area both blanketed in sunflowers and marred by smokestacks.

It was here in August 1935 that the Donbass’ most famous miner, Alexey Stakhanov, mined a record 102 tons of coal in under six hours, igniting an industrial boom known as the Stakhanovite movement that over the next 40 years brought a flood of mining and manufacturing jobs to the region. On December 16th of the same year, his face graced the cover of Time magazine. Inside he was profiled in a story titled “Stakhanovism’s Great Stakhanov.”

In the decades to come, coal shaped the Donbass into an industrial mecca, with Torez playing a central role. Record amounts of coal were extracted at record speeds. Apartment homes couldn’t be built quickly enough to accommodate a growing population. Toward the end of the coal boom in 1978, nearly 100,000 people lived in Torez, with even more residing in neighboring Makeevka and Donetsk. Torez, which still flies a flag emblazoned with a piece of black coal, once had more than a dozen large-scale mines, employing tens of thousands.

Now, though, Stakhanovism is long gone, as are many of the jobs it created. The development of coal, oil, and gas in resource-rich Siberia, which began after the 1917 revolution and accelerated in the 1960s, came at great expense to the Donbass region. Independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 all but finished the Donbass off. Ukraine, as an independent country, didn’t have the money to invest in the industry and was forced to close many of its mines. Others were sold to the country’s oligarchs, who invested little in them, interested only in squeezing out what they could to line their own pockets, leaving the mines unprofitable and insolvent. All in all, the industry is in about $200 billion of debt — more than a year’s profits.

The 12 large-scale mining operations that once dotted the area have been reduced to just four. In their place, hundreds of tiny, illegal mining operations have sprung up.

Since then, thousands of residents have left the area in search of remunerative work. A 2001 census showed Torez’s population to be 72,346. By 2004, that number had fallen to 68,230. The most recent census data, gathered in 2011, shows the population to be 60,032.

Now, Torez is surrounded by slag heaps and small, weathered village homes. Driving through town that October morning, I noticed the faded pastel-colored paint peeling off their walls, shutters dangling from the window frames. Across the road two men covered in black dust drank from beer bottles at a bus stop, broken glass strewn about at their feet. It was 10am.

Alex pulled over and asked a young man for directions to the quarry, and he pointed us toward a street two blocks back. We drove down flooded dirt roads speckled with glimmering coal dust and littered with empty mayonnaise packets, and arrived at a large pit filled with water.

As our car neared the edge of the quarry, I spotted a man clad in flannel and wearing a backpack emerging from the bushes. His wild red hair jutted out in all directions from under his Rasta-colored knit beanie. His beard was bushy and matted from months — maybe years — of untamed growth. Alex motioned to me to open the rear passenger door and let him in. “This is our guide.”

Settled into the back seat next to me, the man said, in deep-throated Russian, “So you’re the American. Nice to meet you.” He smelled musty and of cigarettes. We shook hands. His skin was cracked and callused. “I’m Nikolai.”

Despite having an apartment in Donetsk, Nikolai’s lived the past two years in a small shack at the edge of the quarry, which he shares with one other man. A former journalist and current president of the Donetsk-based “Cohort of Light,” a non-governmental organization focused on helping recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, Nikolai is a respected community member. He’s also pals with many of the miners who extract coal from the kopanki. Some of them he’s even counseled.

Before we were to meet the miners, Nikolai suggested we stop at a shop to pick up a few things. In Ukraine it’s customary to bring gifts when dropping in unannounced.

On our way we passed a conspicuous mine sitting just off the road. Denis asked Nikolai if this was a kopanka. It was not. Despite its primitive appearance, it was a legally sanctioned mine. But like the kopanki, most mines of this type operate with numerous violations. Their owners, often public servants or businessmen in bed with them, have either forged or paid for proper documentation and fabricated production numbers. It’s because of this that they’re allowed to operate as normal during crackdowns on the kopanki. Nikolai suggested we stop to see if the men working it would mind speaking with us.

It turned out they did. From inside the car I couldn’t hear the conversation, but one miner waved Nikolai off, as if shooing a pesky cat away. After that, the miners retreated inside a small shack, peering out a window at us as we pulled off, their darkened faces illuminated by the light of burning matches held to cigarettes.

At the shop, Alex and Denis waited outside while I ran in with Nikolai. With a glint of gold in her teeth, a woman behind the counter wearing a blue apron asked what we wanted.

“Ten beers will be enough, I think,” Nikolai told her. “Let’s get cigarettes and two fish, too.”
The car bounced back and forth and bottles clanked in the space between Nikolai and I as we made our way back down the rutted road.

We paused briefly for a woman and her goats to cross; we pulled over to the shoulder so a tractor could pass. And then a little further on down Nikolai instructed Alex to stop the car and park.

We trudged five minutes through the forest, kicking aside fallen tree limbs in our way, across a rickety footbridge spanning the width of a narrow creek. Spindly, naked branches of the canopy disappeared into the fog. Crows cawed around us. Approaching a clearing in a small ravine, I could hear the clinks and hisses of something mechanical. The noises grew louder as we got closer.

Then, as the ravine opened up slightly, the mining operation appeared in plain view, just 20 meters from where we stood. Nikolai turned to me. “We’re here,” he said. “I will do the talking first.”

In the days of the Soviet Union miners were treated as celebrities and given their own holiday, Miners’ Day, the last Sunday of August. They even had a football team — Shakhtar — named for them.

A Ukrainian friend’s mother once told me to be a miner was to be a hero.

“We celebrated them,” she said. “Because they gave us everything.” Until the mid 1970s, one-third of every household in Ukraine was dependent on coal — and the coal miner — for power.

Miners used to be some of the highest paid workers in the USSR. Now their wages are in line with the nation’s average — about $300 a month. Those working at the kopanki, however, pocket maybe $200 each month.

Much like the miners do, Nikolai believes Torez itself is descending into a black hole. Each year there are more empty houses, fewer people, and even less coal. It’s been estimated that just 10 years of reserves remain here. Because of this, along with fewer public and private investments, the city — and its mining heritage — is at risk of disappearing. Already, it’s a shadow of its former self.

Residents have only themselves to blame for the deterioration of the city, Nikolai told me. “They squandered all their land in order to mine.” Instead of seeking alternative solutions, residents have opted to mine until the coal is gone.

“Poyekhali!” Let’s go, shouted a stout middle-aged man named Viktor, flipping the switch of a generator that powers a four-cylinder engine taken from a Soviet-era Lada sedan. Smoke puffed out as the engine bellowed and rattled. A winch began to turn, slowly hauling a weighty object to the surface from deep below ground.

A few minutes passed, and then a shell of a bathtub appeared from the black opening in the earth. Inside was a heap of coal, some pieces as large as a shoebox. The winch pulled the tub to level ground and lifted one end in the air, spilling its contents into a pile.

Viktor switched off the generator and, swiping his forehead with his forearm, said, “There it is — our black gold!”

This was what he and his fellow miners called “the hole,” one of hundreds of kopanki in eastern Ukraine.

Viktor’s mined for so long he can’t remember when he began. He didn’t always work in the kopanki. Like many older miners in the region, at one point he worked at a legal, government-operated plant. It wasn’t until he lost his job there that he resorted to mining illegally. “I wasn’t able to do anything else.”

The hole was as wide as a small elevator and nearly as deep as a football field, its opening supported by medium-sized fir trunks and old fence boards nailed together. Tubs attached to a rusted cable carried men, equipment, and coal up and down an earth track compacted from years of use. An engine more than 20 years old powered the entire operation.

Another miner, Aleksey, said that six men work the hole. His skin and clothes appeared mostly clean, except for a few black swipe-mark stains on the thighs of his pants. While speaking to me he sharpened the head of a jackhammer bit on a grinder. Despite sparks shooting off in every direction, he didn’t wear protection of any kind.

Three men were inside the shaft, carving away at the walls, filling the tub with coal and sending it back to the surface, all the while trying not to breathe in too much black dust, cause a cave-in, or ignite a methane pocket. That day, Aleksey had chosen to remain above ground with two other men, though it meant pocketing a little less cash at the end of the day.

“They’ve got the difficult jobs,” he told me, pointing toward the miners inside the shaft. In the time I was at the hole, from late morning to evening, no one mining below ground came to the surface. “If you want to see them, you will have to go down.”

“Poyekhali!” Viktor shouted again.

Another bathtub was being hauled up with the winch, its rocky contents dumped on the ground. I watched as Ruslan, a well-built 25-year-old miner, scooped the coal with a large, flat shovel into the bed of a truck. Around him hung a shadowy cloud. His face, hands, and forearms were blackened from the coal, but I could still make out the hastily drawn flames of a tattoo on his forearm. It took less than 10 minutes for him to shovel it all in.

Afterward he lit a cigarette, drew slowly from it, looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

I asked why he mined.

“The money is good and studies are a waste of time,” he explained. “And this is Torez.”

While speaking to Ruslan, Aleksey sauntered over. I wondered aloud how much a truck of coal was worth, and he began doing the math on his fingers.

“About 100 dollars for one ton,” Aleksey said. “And this truck can hold 10 tons, so maybe $1,000, every day.”

But this is split between each miner, with those down in the hole pocketing a slightly larger percentage. A majority of the profit — about fifty to sixty percent — goes toward expenses such as gas, repairs, and paying off local law enforcement.

Ruslan’s been doing this now for the better part of a decade. He left school to begin work and help support his family.

Aleksey began mining illegally when he was 18. He is now 32, and admitted he’ll probably be mining for the rest of his life. “Or until [the coal’s] all gone.” His reasons were much the same as Ruslan’s.

“I didn’t like school,” he said. “And I didn’t want to leave [Torez] and my family.”

Aleksey said he makes good money mining the hole, though he didn’t say exactly how much. He has a car, a house, and a beautiful young wife and child. He can afford to buy them the things they need.

A typical workday might last eight to 12 hours, sometimes longer even, depending on how many men are working. But they don’t think about time at the mine, Aleksey said. “We’re finished when the truck is full.”

Once the truck has reached capacity, the load is taken to a nearby storage center. From there, coal from the kopanki is mixed with coal from select legal mines in the region. All together, there’s no telling it apart.

Eventually, the coal’s shipped across the country; only some might be sold locally. In Torez, most people make less than the national average, and coal is expensive. A popular anecdote, the miners told me, goes like this: A miner works all day extracting fuel to heat the houses in the rest of the country, only to come home to find his own family freezing.

Aleksey turned to me and asked that I watch my step. A third tub was on its way up from the mine and I was standing in its path.

Ruslan tossed his cigarette butt to the ground and pulled on his gloves. The wench lurched to a halt, the tub spilled the coal and the shoveling began again.

Taking a break, I followed Aleksey over toward the miners’ shack, where Alex and Denis were snapping photos and taking video. Aleksey took one of the salted fish we brought out of its white paper wrapping and laid it atop a stump. With a large knife he pulled from his pocket, he slit the fish up the belly to the head, cut out the insides and tossed them on the ground. Then he chopped the fish into pieces to share with the other miners.

I asked about the police, and whether or not there’s a chance the kopanki could be closed. He said he’d explain the situation to us, but only if Denis, who’d been recording parts of our conversation, switched off his video camera.

As with many of the kopanki, he explained, about 30 percent of revenue from the hole goes toward paying off local law enforcement and government officials. Intermediary firms that are owned by people in positions of power, including some of the same authorities, buy the coal that goes to the storage containers. In that way, the kopanki are also protected.

Aleksey doesn’t expect that the kopanki would ever be shut down; there are just too many of them to regulate. It’s more likely that the coal will run out.

There was a time, not long ago, however, before current president Viktor Yanukovich came to power, when illegal mines were at risk of being closed.

During Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency, from 2004 to 2010, a large-scale plan was enacted to shutter hundreds of illegal mines and fill them with water, rock, or other materials. A fervent opponent of eastern Ukrainian politics and Yanukovich’s Party of Regions, Yushchenko promised to put an end to the corruption and lawlessness that plagued the country, which included the kopanki of the Donbass.

But the closed kopanki didn’t remain that way for long. The defiant miners dug out their holes. “It’s not difficult to pull out rocks or pump out water,” Aleksey said. “We knew there was a chance [the authorities] could close us again, but we needed the money.”

He and others working at the mines breathed a sigh of relief in 2008, when Yanukovich won a tight presidential race against ex-Premier Yulia Tymoshenko. His hometown of Donetsk, as well as the rest of the Donbass it seemed, would be safe to conduct business as usual.

Officials, though, still want the public to believe that they’ve taken a strong stance against illegal mining operations. In September, the Chairman of the Donetsk Regional Council, Andrew Fedoruk, went as far as to say that all the illegal mines in the Donbass region had been “eliminated.”

Standing atop small, scattered pieces of coal, 10 meters from the opening of a pitch-black shaft in which men were scraping away at the walls for more, Aleksey laughed at the mention of this.

“Do you ever worry?” I asked Aleksey. “Isn’t this work dangerous?”

“Yes! Of course it’s dangerous,” he chuckled. “You don’t know what can go wrong down there. But it’s worth it, right?”

Alex, Denis, and I stood silent.

“Anyway,” he added a moment later, “usually it’s just the drunks that find trouble.”

Many men drink on the job. And those men, along with the safety risks and the poor image they foster, are the reason the authorities want the greater public to believe the kopanki have been shut down.

As we chatted, Aleksey was drinking a beer. But he pointed out that beer wasn’t the problem — the problem was samigon, or moonshine.

“Some miners drink samigon while they work, and– ” with his middle finger he flicked his throat, the eastern European sign for wasted. “That’s when accidents happen.”

And accidents happen frequently. Ukraine has Europe’s highest mortality rate among coal miners, according to Iryna Kurylo, head of the Department for the Quality of Demographic Processes at the Mykhailo Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Research, Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences. Since Ukraine became independent in 1991, nearly 6,000 people have died in mining accidents, and those just in the legal mines. The statistics for the illegal mines are unknown, but thought also to be in the thousands.

When I asked if there have been accidents at the hole, Aleksey grinned but didn’t answer. Asked if he knew anyone who’d died in the kopanki, he nodded. “Of course. We all do.”

The causes of death in the mines range from explosions and collapses to cardiac arrest caused by methane poisoning. Colorless and odorless, methane is difficult to detect. And being lighter than air, it’s extremely flammable; a single spark can ignite a fireball within the mineshaft.

This past July, east of Torez, at a legal, large-scale mine near the city of Lugansk, an explosion more than 3000 feet underground killed 28 miners. Officials believe it to have been a methane explosion. In 2007, a methane explosion at another nearby mine killed more than 100 people.

“It is very important to be safe while working here,” Aleksey said, taking another tug from his bottle of beer.

“This work is not for everyone.” But it is for many, especially those lacking higher education. Plus, Aleksey added, there isn’t much else to do. “Here, we mine. That’s it.”

But for how much longer is anyone’s guess.

My close friend Igor once told me, “Ukrainians live day to day.” Though the country is now independent, the Soviet mentality of ‘whatever is done is for the better’ still exists. “We can’t know what will come tomorrow,” he added. “But we believe it will be good.”

With coal production rapidly depleting and the Donbass’ once-great industrial esteem no longer extant, the region has taken measures to ensure its mining legacy.

Stone monuments to the once-thriving industry dot the region’s city squares: Alexey Stakhanov, in the city named for him, with a jackhammer slung over his shoulder and his eyes on the horizon; in Donetsk, an anonymous miner offering a piece of coal in his outstretched hand; and in Makeevka a group of three miners standing stoically at the entrance of a mine shaft, equipment in tow. The Donetsk Shaktar football team, owned by billionaire mogul Rinat Akhmetov (he also owns Krasnodonugol, one of the country’s largest coal companies), has become an international success, winning the UEFA Cup in 2009. (This is due mostly, however, to the team’s $400 million, state of the art Donbass Arena and its imported Brazilian football stars, which Akhmetov himself financed.)

But it’s unclear what, if anything, has been or is being done to ensure the future of Torez and its people. When the coal is finally exhausted — and mined at its current rate, it will be soon — what will people in Torez do?

“Torez will be dead,” Aleksey said. “After coal, nothing. We can only wish this will happen after our time.”

It was nearly five o’clock in the evening and the engine thundered on, despite having been working for more than eight hours, and despite the fact that it was Saturday. The wench kept turning, tubs continued to be hauled up and emptied, and Ruslan kept shoveling.

I followed Alex, Denis, and Nikolai back through the forest and over the footbridge, fighting the cold the whole way. The sun had ducked behind the trees and dense clouds had rolled in. I could still hear the roar of that Lada engine, though it faded into the distance with each step I took toward the road. Soon, the only sound was the leaves crunching beneath our feet and our heavy breathing.

Smoke from village burn piles wafted through the forest and around the skinny trees. I watched two men shuffle down the road as we approached, tattered rugs filled with leaves slung over their shoulders.

We dropped Nikolai off where we found him, at a thicket near the edge of the quarry. We waited there for a few minutes until his friend came across in a raft to meet him.

Back on the highway, we passed trucks with beds filled to the brim with coal. Darkness covered the steppe and the refineries – ever so faint in the distance — spewed smoke. Somewhere beyond them, a wench reeled up a bathtub full of Torez’s black gold, one closer to the last.