The Drill Site

After attempt for the better part of a week to reach the site in the bush (as it’s called in these parts) where my friend Arthur operates some drill rigs in search of copper for the, I am finally here. The reason this post can reach you from where I am is that they’ve got a satellite uplink they use to send spreadsheets on mineralization statistics and diesel consumption and so forth to the head office.

The place is about 3 hours’ drive from Ndola, the last hour of which runs through a forest over a rutted red track best negotiated in a Land Cruiser or similar. But like I said, it took me most of a week to make the trip. Not the journey, mind, but the logistics leading up to it. It was a matter of organizing a ride with someone who was going out to the site.

It began with Arthur beseeching me—I use that word because the requests were repetitive, and there was a plaintive tone to them—to come visit while I was busy with an assignment last week. I had been contracted to aggravate the greenhouse effect by breaking down complex German documents into simpler English analogues, plus methane (A friend suggested in that regard that I paper my translation site with a background suitably illustrative of this chemico-linguistic conversion, something along the lines of DE à EN + CH4, along with a bunch of cattle grazing ant one end on suitably abstruse German words like Verwohlfeilerung or Versinnbildlichung and releasing the English equivalents, plus methane, at the other). The point being that I had to keep delaying the visit until I’d run a sufficiently large batch of words through the Teuton-Anglo converter to secure a handsome credit to my bank account. Lange Rede, kurzer Sinn: Once I was ready at the end of last week, I began trying to organize a ride.

The first attempt did not work. Arthur put me in touch with the drilling company’s office manager. A whelp of a white South African. He told me he could give me a ride on Saturday, but he had a hard time finding the diesel he was supposed to deliver to the site, and ended up leaving at 4 A.M. on Sunday. This did not suit my diurnal cycle. He was difficult to track down throughout Saturday, and I ended up with the impression that he was unconcerned about expediting my errand. Arthur phoned to say there was another truck going in on Tuesday. A Zambian geologist by the name of Kelvin. I called him up to arrange the lift, and he was as nice as could be. On Sunday he said he’d be by to get me at about 10 in the morning the following day. This being Zambia, of course, 10 in the morning turned out to be three in the afternoon. He had been detained by the police on the way from Lusaka for talking on his cell phone while behind the wheel. Quite an ordeal. He also had some errands to do around town, so it was around 4 PM before we pushed off on the final leg.

Most of the way there was on a road I had taken before, on my way to the chimp orphanage with Simwinga. First we drove past Kitwe, Kitwe with its abominably dirty copper smelter whose column of sulfurous smoke announces the Copperbelt’s industry like a cipher for all to see for 30 miles around. Next we passed Chingola, another town choked in a cloud of smoke: Drifts of diesel, smoldering brush fires where land is being cleared by villagers, belching smelters. There we stopped so Kelvin could negotiate the purchase of fuel for a road-grader he was bringing in to the bush. This took longer than expected, and night had almost fallen by the time we got into Chililambombwe, the town closest to the site. Kelvin was apologetic when he said he thought it best if we spent the night there before pressing on. It wasn’t just a matter of him being fatigued from the long journey—our proximity to the lawless Congolese border meant bandits, who would be more than happy to take Kelvin’s spanking new Ford Ranger over to their side of that border. A dilapidated guest house seemed preferable to trying our chances with Congolese bandits, so I assented.

Milyashi Guest House had a sign out front that identified it as ‘the place to be.’ I’ll allow that it was the place I was at. There is little to say about it, and what little there is to say runs the risk of verging on litany, so I’ll confine myself to saying that the shower water was not hot. One thing about the place made me feel good, though, and I’ll say it. It was the only place I’ve ever stayed in Zambia where the tops of the perimeter walls were not lined with crushed glass. Which says more about the relative calmness of the town than it does about the quality of the accommodation itself.

We left Milyashi behind in the morning after several more delays. Riding with us in the Ranger were two police officers armed with AK-47’s and several clips of ammunition apiece. Despite the guns, both were as jovial and low-key as the Zambian stereotype would have them be. I was sitting shotgun, with one police officer in the backseat and the other in the bed. We drove first to a police checkpoint and then turned off into the scrub. At first the track ran through a seemingly endless village of hardscrabble huts and wide-eyed children. Men were coming and going on bicycles between the various sections of this run of villages, some carrying passengers sitting side-saddle, others using the bicycles for advantage in transporting large loads of charcoal, cornmeal, even small palettes of bricks. There were also women transporting water and hay and bundles of cloth and what-not using that great carrier of African loads—their gracefully poised heads. As we drove by these people, many of them stopped and gave us what to me seemed baleful stares. When I at length remarked to Kelvin that these people did not seem happy, and he translated my comment to the police officer in the back, we learned that one of the geologist trucks had run into someone on the road that day and put him in the hospital. Which was unfortunate, but it was still a relief to learn that the grievance was specific—and that I was not just seeing things. Once we had gone in about ten miles and had put some distance between ourselves and the site of the earlier crash, the charged atmosphere cleared. I soon found myself waving hello and being greeted by a gleeful peals of ‘Mzungu! Mzungu!’ For that is what I am. Mzungu is a widespread Bantu word meaning ‘white man,’ and which connotes confusion or aimless wandering.

As usual with these blog entries, I find that I have piled on the words hand over fist before getting to the interesting part, the rub. But I trust in your forbearance, esteemed readers. So: Just after catching up to the lumbering grader that Kelvin had been organizing fuel for the day before, we pulled into the camp. On first impression, it was very similar to the one I had stayed in on my Botswana safari. It was a clearing in a teak forest with a number of tents for sleeping and for working, a food prep area, and a generator. I got out of the Ranger and thanked Kelvin for the ride.

Arthur is the site manager for the two rigs manned by the camp. It was nice to see him in his element among the drillers and the machines, and not just gadding about town. He enjoys a position of unquestioned authority—so much so that the drillers immediately took to calling me ‘boss’ by way of association. He told me he was glad to have at least someone around who wouldn’t say ‘yes, boss’ every time he cracked a joke. We spent the afternoon doing our respective office work. His concerned drill depth and fuel quotas, while mine was preliminary to what you see before you.

The camp was sectioned off from the surrounding woodland by a strip of perimeter tape patterned a barbershop red and white. There were 7 or 8 military tents for sleeping, and a great tent that served as Arthur’s office. It had lights, a strip of electrical receptacles, freezers, and various spare parts for the drill rigs. Apart from Arthur, the men were wearing blue coveralls and white hardhats.

We drove to the first drill site at dusk. The bed of Arthur’s Land Cruiser carried the night shift to relieve the day crew, while I squeezed into the cab between Arthur and another heat-packing agent of the law. The site was about 3 miles distant, and to get there we backtracked along the road Kelvin and I had come in on before forking off through a strange meadow studded with thousands of elongated termite mounds that looked like nipples rearing out of the soil. They seemed to be standing sentry to something, whether to our passage or the sun’s setting or some entirely other mysterious event. The framing horizon was that very interesting and fleeting shade of pinkish orange bleeding into purple. We plunged into the woods beyond, at length reaching a clutch of men grouped around a tent and a small generator. This device powered a pump fitted to a nearby borehole, which supplied lubrifying water to the drill rig some 300 yards away. We stopped for a few minutes while Arthur exhorted his men to work harder, and never to let the generator run out of fuel. ‘We’re here to fucking work, you cunts.’ I’m not kidding when I say that there was something endearing about the way he said it.

The drill site was a sight, in a word. The contrast with the surrounding night was dazzling. It a clearing lit by several pillar-mounted halogen spotlights, and with about a dozen drillers alternately loitering and rushing about their barked assignments, it had the feel of a film crew shooting a scene by night. Either that or some esoteric industrial ritual, a séance to channel the mineral gods and call on them to make it a good run, a good year. When I stepped out of the cruiser, my feet could feel the earth trembling. Also noticeable was that the early night was already very cold, easily in the thirties. The temperature was marked by steam trailing from men’s mouths and from several parts of the roaring drill rig. Tthis may be Central Africa, but it’s still the winter, and I’d guess that we’re higher than 7,000 feet.

There was something about this rig roaring away in the night, something to remind one of pioneering days, of the elemental struggle of man against indifferent nature. Where the night was dark, here was light. And where the surrounding woods were cold, silent and ominous, here was the din of hopeful industry. The men gathered around this great sputtering machine were working its levers and monitoring its levels hoping that what it pulled from the earth would be fruitful and lead them to better places.
The rig at that site is a diamond rig. The bit is studded with diamonds, and the drilling work is lubricated by a bentonite slurry that is pumped down through the structural tubing to the drill head in such a way that the soil/rock core in the sample tube can be pulled out intact. It has hydraulic jacks, hydraulic outriggers, and runs on diesel. The company that makes it is Boart Longyear.
The operation struck me as chaotic at first, with lots of yelling and running around. B ut observation revealed a rhythm. They worked in sections of three meters, meaning that as soon as the first three meter section of tubing (the section to which the diamond drill bit is attached) had been bored into the earth, the drill head would be unscrewed from that tube, then retracted up the mast to accommodate another tube for insertion between the it and the first section of tubing. Yet before the next section is attached, an independent “sample tube” is reeled up from the structural tube. The sample tube’s contents are then removed and placed in trays in sections of a meter apiece. The process continues until as many as a hundred three-meter sections have been driven into the ground. The samples are then taken to a lab for analysis, and if the mineral content is rich enough, what started as a narrow hole may one day become a gigantic excavated pit.

After I had been silently observing for some time, and thinking about these things, Arthur sidled up. “Pretty dumb way to make a living, isn’t it mate? It doesn’t take much to plunge a hole in the ground.”