The Power of One (74 page)

During the day, until three o'clock, when the day shift ended, the three Fritz wives, each one as big as her husband, worked the Crud Bar. They were known as Mrs. Fritz collectively and remained unnumbered. Husband and wife, it seemed, never got together, and it was a source of constant wonder among the crud that the Fritzes among them boasted fifteen fat blond children. The joke going around was that when the Fritzes left the crud bar they were going to buy the whole red light district in Hamburg.

At the end of three months, only eleven of the eighteen men who had joined the school of mines with me remained. We were eligible to take our blasting license, choosing either the international or Northern Rhodesian version. Thomas, in a rare show of kindness, suggested that I sit for the international, as he hadn't had a student pass the international in seven years.

“If you pass you'll be the youngest ever, which would be a feather in Mr. Jones' cap, and I might even take a pat on the back myself, boyo.” The rugby season had begun and Thomas had discovered that I could play and in the trials I was selected for the first team, where he and Jones were selectors.

The examination was held at the office of the Department of Mines in Ndola. It consisted of a half-hour written examination and an hour of verbals. This was because many of the men were not much good at writing but could answer most of the questions put to them directly.

Most of the guys with me were frightened to the point of paralysis. If you failed you returned to the school for another month, and failure after that and you were out of the mines. I had been coaching them for the last month and had come to be known as Professor Peekay. On the bus into Ndola I fired endless questions at them.

All but a huge Boer from the Orange Free State obtained their blasting licenses. The Boer, a likable enough bloke but thick as mahogany, was out forever but cheered himself up with the knowledge that he had been accepted as a stoker on Northern Rhodesian Railways. Thomas and Jones had followed us to Ndola by car, and after the morning's examination we all repaired to Ndola's only hotel, where just about everyone got very drunk and ended up telling Thomas what a good old bastard he was. I had passed the international license and must have consumed a gallon of lemon squash just responding to the toasts the men kept proposing to Thomas, Jones, and Professor Peekay. The more drunk they became, the more effusive, until toward the end Thomas had become a certain candidate for sainthood and they all swore that they would protect me against all comers and that there was nothing I couldn't ask them for.

My life as a grizzly man commenced the next day. I went underground on the eleven
p.m
. to seven
a.m
. shift on my own for the first time.

The workings of a grizzly need to be briefly explained. Imagine, if you will, a funnel pointing downward toward the ground. The top bit of the funnel before it narrows down to the spout is the stope, which is, in fact, a huge underground hole. The spout from it is used for getting the rock, blasted off the sides of the hole, out of the hole. This spout is sixty feet long and leads directly to a main haulage. The bottom of the funnel or spout is fitted with a steel door worked with compressed air. Halfway down it, that is, thirty feet from the main haulage and the same distance from the beginning of the stope, a set of six tungsten steel bars are fitted across the funnel spout with a narrow walkway cut sideways into the rock leading to it. These six tungsten bars are known as a grizzly, the reason being that this system of extracting ore was first used in the Yukon; hence the bars, made from tungsten steel, are known as “grizzly bars.” The ore drilled and blasted from the sides of the stope by the diamond drillers is funneled down the spout at the bottom of the stope and comes rushing down, with the smaller bits falling through the grizzly bars and filling the bottom half of the funnel spout. The bigger bits fall onto the bars and need to be blasted through them into a suitable size for loading onto the trucks in the main haulage. Underground trains pull up to the compressed air door and operators standing on the main haulage open the door at the end of the funnel and fill the trucks with ore. It's really a very simple operation but also a very dangerous one. The grizzly man works the bars, which are directly under the mouth of the stope, which is capable of disgorging rocks the size of small motor cars without warning.

The grizzly man works in the dark; his miner's lamp attached to his hard hat with the battery clipped to his webbing belt is his only source of light. He has five Africans to help him lash the rock through the grizzly bars and to prepare mud for the explosives. Occasionally he will get the muck flowing from the stope and it will continue to run all night with only an occasional blast or a little work on the bars with long crowbars to keep it going. But mostly it's gut-wrenching work laying charges and working ore through the bars, sometimes as many as forty or fifty blasts a night until a powder headache caused by the sweet, sickly-smelling gelignite sticks threatens to tear your head off your shoulders. Only diamond drillers, who use more gelignite than grizzly men, get worse powder headaches, sometimes being reduced to a state of unconsciousness or temporary insanity by the terrible pain.

A grizzly man works on the bars, which are about six inches thick and two feet apart. Safety rules require that he be attached to a twenty-foot chain that clips to the back of his webbing belt. But the chain, like so many safety procedures, is a Catch-22: if a man slips and falls through the bars into the bottom half of the funnel, his back will snap like a piece of celery as his fall is broken by the chain some fifteen feet below the bars. If he doesn't break his back and the muck starts to run, the ore coming through the bars will tear him into mince. A good grizzly man takes his chances on the bars without a safety chain and learns,

even in the dark, to be as agile as a monkey, jumping from bar to bar all night carrying a five-foot steel crowbar in his hands.

Grizzly men always work the same grizzly, knowing their lives depend on their intimate knowledge of the character of the stope and the funnel. Each grizzly has a personality of its own, and a good grizzly man can read his grizzly as though his mind is tuned into the very rock it's made from. A slight leaking of pebble in a hang-up and he knows to run for safety as a hundred tons of rock is about to come down directly over his head. The wrong pitch in an echo from the stope and he knows a single rock may come hurtling through to smash him off the bars. His reactions are as finely tuned as those of a top racing car driver, and his adrenaline pumps all night. At the end of a shift a grizzly man will have lost four or five pounds in weight and will be in a state of total exhaustion. At the end of three months he is taken off grizzlies for a spell of two months before he is allowed to return. While the money is enormous, most grizzly men elect not to return and take a lower-paid job as a pipe fitter, timber man, or ganger.

One particular job on the grizzly leads to the final unnerving of even the most courageous of men. Sometime during most shifts and often three or four times, the rock becomes blocked at the mouth of the stope, that is, at the very top of the funnel spout, some thirty feet above the grizzly bars. In mining terms, this is known as a hang-up or a bunch of grapes. Rocks of every size jam the mouth of the stope. The safety procedure required to dislodge the rock and get the stope flowing again is to make up a parcel of gelignite. This is then tied to the end of a thirtyfoot bamboo pole. The sticks of explosive are then wrapped with Cordtex, which is explosive made into a cord that looks like white electrical flex. The idea is to push the parcel of gelignite against the rocks jamming the mouth of the stope, then to light the fuse attached to the end of the Cordtex, which has been trailed from the parcel of gelignite to the level of the grizzly bars below. Whereupon, if you're very lucky, the blast against the hang-up dislodges the rocks, causing the mouth of the stope to open again and the muck to flow.

But life on a grizzly isn't meant to be easy, and dynamite or gelignite, when it is not sealed with a mud pack, blasts outward, away from the rock, taking the line of least resistance. Blasting a hang-up with the bamboo pole technique is seldom successful.

The pressure on the grizzly man is enormous. He must get the muck flowing, and using the bamboo pole technique he could blast away unsuccessfully all night. He is paid by the truckload, and if he doesn't empty his stope the diamond driller will lose his day shift, which often results in a grizzly man losing a couple of teeth by way of an envoy sent to beat him up. Apart from all this, the grizzly man's pride is involved. A grizzly man who leaves a grizzly hung up is the lowest form of life in a mine. As Thomas would say, “It's just not fuckin' done, boyo!”

After unsuccessfully trying to bring a hang-up down with a bamboo pole bomb, the grizzly man fills the front of his thick woolen miner's shirt with mud and a gelignite bomb strung with Cordtex and scales the sheer face of the funnel until he reaches the hang-up. This is the dangerous part; if the hang-up comes down while he is fixing the explosive against it, the grizzly man is dead, thrown sixty feet down through the bars to be buried under fifty tons of rock. Fighting the panic of being totally committed with nowhere to go, you find a jamming point between the rocks and insert the gelignite bomb. Then you wind the Cordtex around it and let enough of it fall to the grizzly below so that you can attach a fuse to it. Finally you seal the bomb with mud to make it airtight so that the blast will go inward into the rock. Having set it and packed it, you then have to come down again, each precarious step up and down the sheer face of the funnel a gamble that the hang-up will hold. Back at the grizzly level you connect the Cordtex to a fuse, signal your number one boy to blow the warning hooter, and light the fuse with a cheesa stick, a flare the size of a thick pencil which, once lit, cannot be extinguished. Then you have thirty seconds to retire into the safety tunnel before the blast goes off.

If the hang-up still doesn't come down, you are forced up again, aware that with the added blast it could be teetering and on the point of crashing down. You soon learn to make only one trip up the funnel, laying several blasts across the face of the hang-up and stringing them together with Cordtex. This means you spend ten or fifteen minutes up against the hang-up, each second increasing the tension and the danger. But this way, when the four or five bombs go off simultaneously, you have a good chance of bringing the hang-up down. It all depends on nerve— yours. If you have the nerve to stay up the funnel for fifteen or twenty minutes, carefully laying a blast pattern and sealing each bomb with mud, it takes a very big hang-up to defeat you. In the year I worked grizzlies, five of the twenty grizzly men working the mine were killed when a hang-up gave way while they were up the spout laying charges against it.

Mine rules did not permit grizzly men to climb up into the mouth of the stope: being caught doing it meant instant dismissal. But because you were forced to at least twice during a shift, the shift boss would stay away from the grizzly levels so that he wouldn't catch you. Everyone's copper bonus depended on the grizzly man getting the ore out of the stope. No shift boss would police the rules when he knew that the bamboo pole technique was so ineffectual that a hang-up might remain all night and not a ton of ore would be moved out of the stope.

When I wasn't shitting myself I took a perverse pride in being a successful grizzly man. I was the youngest in the mine, with one of the best ore tallies. The diamond driller who worked the stope above my grizzly was an Afrikaner named Botha whom I never met as he worked day shift and I worked nights. The diamond drillers were the underground elite and never spoke to the grizzly men personally; the work was too dangerous, and a driller didn't want the responsibility of knowing who was working his stope. But if you kept your ore tally up and his stope empty, he would send you a case of brandy at the end of each month.

A case of brandy from your diamond driller was the badge of honor every grizzly man worked for: in the crazy crud world of the Central African copper mines it became an approbation even more important than money.

I gave the brandy to Rasputin, the giant Georgian who lived in the hut next to me. Rasputin worked as a timber man on the same night shift as I did, and we cycled to number seven shaft about three miles out of town, where we both worked. From the night he had saved my rear-end virginity, we had been friends, our friendship based less on words than on the things we shared. Rasputin spoke very little English, and rather than learn any more he simply didn't talk. He'd sit on my
stoep
or I on his and we'd play chess. He was a good enough player to keep me interested, and if I lost concentration he would sometimes take a game. Often we would simply sit and I would read a book or he'd play his collection of Tchaikovsky symphonies and concertos on his new portable record player. He never played anything but Tchaikovsky and would sit with a huge block of native timber in one hand and a kindling ax in the other, and without ever releasing the block of wood he would chip away until three hours

later it became a perfect ball. Rasputin was almost as tall as Doc had been, but he was twice as broad, even bigger than the Afrikaners, and the ax would have weighed five pounds. The act of carving the block of wood into a ball was one that took almost unimaginable strength. When Rasputin wasn't carving a ball he was sharpening the ax. He would work away to the music, going through the entire repertoire of concertos and three symphonies. Sometimes silent tears would roll down his cheeks and spill into his shaggy beard. These he never bothered to wipe away; he would simply continue to carve at the block of wood, occasionally putting down the ax long enough to pick up a tin mug filled with V.S.O.P. brandy which he would half empty in one gulp and then refill to the brim, or to change the record. When Tchaikovsky came to an end, which meant sitting through all three of his piano concertos and his violin concerto and at least three symphonies, mostly his number one in G minor, number two in C minor, and always ending with his sixth, the grand and brilliant “Pathetique,” a bottle of Botha's brandy would be empty and the wooden ball would be complete.