Tag: South Africa

The last shift.

My last shift working as an underground geologist wasn’t planned. It just sort of happened. In October 1987, I had 1 month left on a 3-year contract in South Africa. I was looking forward to a change of scene: 3 years in Apartheid-era Transvaal was enough and I needed to get out. I was feeling disconnected from the UK and needed a London fix. I’d already applied to the University of Alberta to enrol for a master’s degree program and the signs were good that I was heading to Canada so mentally I was checked out.

I had the first 2 months of the rest-of-my-life all planned out. Young and stupid with an interest in history, I was off on a once-in-a-lifetime five-week trip backpacking around Egypt and Israel. And then it would be back to London to hang out with my girlfriend for a few months of beer, concerts, and fun! fun! fun! But first I had to negotiate the perils of the Last Shift.

Me in Egypt. Honest.

There was a lot of superstition surrounding the last underground shift. People didn’t telegraph their last one; they tended to keep it quiet. No need to tempt fate and encourage the Rockburst Gods or the Demons-who-make-shit-fall-on-your-head by blabbing about how it would all soon be over, right?

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WTF Is Pseudotachylite?

A Brief Science Diversion

Hands up if you’ve heard of pseudotachylite? No? Neither had I until 1984 when – as a fresh faced geology graduate- I landed my first job underground in the South African gold mines. To be honest, I’d never heard of tachylite let alone pseudotachylite. One’s real and the other a poor copy? I didn’t have a clue. Then at 21 I started a 3-year contract working down a deep hole in the Witwatersrand Basin where pseudotachylite – which I’ll call PT because I can’t be arsed to write it out every time- became part of my every day geological life.

PT in all its glory. Photo from Kevin.

The Wits mines exploit ancient gold-bearing gravelly rocks accumulated in a huge sedimentary basin; a 2.7 billion-year-old accumulation of what were once sandstones and conglomerates but are now metamorphic quartzites. The basin was big, possibly 300km or more along its long axis and the experts tell us it looked a little bit like the photo below. Huge fan deltas formed where 5 or 6 rivers flowed into a large depression or basin.

South Africa looked kinda like this once…
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Kevin And The Ostrich Of Death.

Full credit to Kevin Broomberg for writing this down, sending it to me, giving me permission to publish it, and putting up with my simplistic edits.

When I grow up I want to be an ostrich.

Here in the urbancrows e-rookery we get a lot of comments about the blog. Granted most are spam bots, or messages from lonely ladies in Russia offering me pictures of themselves au naturale if I just click on a link (which is very nice of them), but every now and then something I write attracts real comments from what I believe are real people. Strangely, I got the most comments after I published the “Field Dump” story, which either 1) tells us something about the human obsession with the act of coiling a rope, or 2) highlights a worryingly low level of maturity in geologists’ humour. Or perhaps both.

To date, I hadn’t received a comment that was compelling enough to make me want to publish it as a full post. They’re mostly short anecdotes, or nice feedback that might add texture to a story, but they lack sufficient detail to make the cut.

That changed the other day thanks to my new mate Kevin Broomberg in South Africa. Kevin’s note pushed all the right buttons for me. He spun me a tale about what happened to him and a few colleagues when they met a rather ornery 8ft tall death chicken. The ripping yarn included dangerous wildlife with nasty big claws, misplaced avian sexual desire, and a remote field camp -how could I not publish it? The only thing missing was zombies (which I wasn’t able to write in to the tale, try as I might.)

Full Patch Death Chickens looking for trouble.

So, with his permission, a few of his photos and a bit of editing, here’s his true story about a randy ostrich that made life very difficult for Kevin and his crew. Full credit to Kevin for this piece. I’ve done some editing but it’s 99% his work. Sadly, he tells me all the photos he had of this poultry incident (sorry) were fried in a shipping container which baked in the sun for 4 weeks during a move from Dar es Salaam to Johannesburg so we’re having to make do with whatever pictures we could find.

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