Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

  ‘I’ll bet it does. What do you think Carlos wants me to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, he wants you to manage the place.’

  ‘What, all of it?’

  ‘God no, we’ll do the geology. He just wants you to manage all the men.’

  I should have guessed from the manner in which I was hired that I wasn’t going to walk into a formal graduate geologist’s training program.

  I lay awake that night listening to the drone of jungle insects. I had gone from running a platoon of 28 highly disciplined British troops to managing a camp of 110 men from an unfamiliar culture with limited education; this was going to be interesting.

  Just before dawn, I was awoken by the most alarming and deafening noise: an ululating howling sound, as if a dozen people were being attacked somewhere nearby in the forest. It was still dark and nobody else in the accommodation stirred. What was that noise?

  As dawn broke I went out to investigate. I followed the noise, entering the chilly damp forest down the main bush track. The great trees rose far, far above me. I kept walking down the track, but no matter how close the noise sounded, I could not work out its origin. As the sun rose, the noise abated.

  Back at the camp, I ran into Bob cleaning his teeth at the communal washbasin.

  ‘Hey Bob, what was that racket this morning? It sounded like a mass killing.’

  ‘Howler monkeys, mate. Loudest animal on the planet.’

  As per Bob’s advice, I didn’t have to worry about my lack of geological knowledge, because Carlos threw me straight into the thick of managing the camp and coordinating the field crews. As I got stuck in, it soon became clear that there was indeed quite a bit of chaos and skiving going on, partly because there was an almost complete lack of middle-management.

  The national sport in Guyana is emigrating. Those with get-up-and-go had already got up and gone, including the better-educated people. So although Guyana had good rates of literacy, beyond the basics there was a real lack of skills.

  The only Guyanese person in the camp who was well educated was Stamford, the nurse who had studied at the general hospital in Georgetown in the mid-1970s. He told me that every couple of weeks he had helped deliver a baby from women who came up from Jonestown, and the surnames on all of the birth certificates were put down as Jones.

  Over the next few days I watched the crew. Carlos and Randy told me what needed doing, and I spoke with the camp cooks, storeman, mechanics and others, to get some feedback on their issues. Then I called a meeting with the team leaders. These guys were most receptive at this meeting, probably because they got the novel experience of giving feedback.

  I listened and listened and listened, as the sins of the world were poured into my ear:

  ‘We don’t have enough toilet paper.’

  ‘The food is full of rats’ piss.’

  ‘The water pump is busted.’

  ‘Our boots are rotted out.’

  ‘That scunt banka driller went with my girl last night.’

  The last complaint was probable, given that the girl in question was a prostitute living on the opposite riverbank.

  And so it went on.

  Finally I had to call a halt just to get the damn day’s work started.

  I addressed all of the men to give some encouragement and also to go over some bad practices that needed to be stopped. These included using the company’s boats to visit the girls over the river, selling company fuel to the dredge operators in return for gold, drinking contraband rum while working, going into the kitchen and taking whatever caught your fancy, stealing tools to take out with you when you went on break, smoking marijuana while operating the drilling rig, and so on and so on and so on …

  ‘Right, any questions?’ I finished up rhetorically, keen to get the show on the road.

  Twenty minutes later I again called a halt. These guys really loved asking questions.

  After a few days, things began moving more smoothly. Everyone seemed happier that they had a clearer direction and also had the chance to give input into the planning. As a result, my life got easier, and the men followed my orders and worked more efficiently.

  The quid pro quo of this, as had been hammered into me at Sandhurst, was that the men’s welfare and other issues thus became my responsibility. At least that was how I saw things. Not everyone at Golden Star had the men’s welfare figuring so highly on their priority list so I did my best to assist in situations that could be improved.

  Health was the number-one issue. Many men had serious diarrhoea, so I started in the latrines. These toilets were long drops, holes in the ground dug out by hand, over the top of which was fixed a cut-off oil drum with a wood plank on top for a seat. A portable wooden shelter provided privacy.

  My first excursion to the latrines had provoked an instant gag reflex. They were overflowing, with some evil brown discharge oozing out from under the drums. A thick haze of flies welcomed me at the door.

  I organised the digging of new and deeper pits, and then we moved the cleaned-up drums and shelters over them. I got the carpenters to make closable seat lids to keep the flies out.

  Next priority was the cookhouse and food store. I sat down with McCabe, the head cook. He was filthy and beleaguered, and so were his staff.

  ‘So, McCabe, what are your issues?’ I asked.

  ‘Rats, Mr Jim.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No, just rats.’

  We walked through the lean-to shed that made up the cookhouse. I noticed an unpleasant acrid smell. The food preparation area was diabolical, and the washing-up spot was rancid. I delved into the shallow wooden tray that held the cutlery and my heart skipped a beat. The bottom, which the cutlery was resting upon, was carpeted in rat droppings.

  As I looked harder, I had a horrible dawning realisation: rat droppings covered every surface, nook and cranny.

  ‘Show me the food store,’ I said to McCabe.

  McCabe took me to the wooden store with its deep shelving. In the semi-darkness, the walls appeared to be moving: it was a sea of black rats.

  We were in the middle of a rat plague of epic proportions. Every time I moved a box or tin, a rat or three would scurry out. The smell in the kitchen had been rats’ piss. The food was not just inedible, it was downright dangerous.

  ‘McCabe, we are going to fix this,’ I promised the cook, and he looked relieved.

  My country upbringing had included summers catching rats in the neighbour’s grain stores. This experience now came in handy.

  You cannot trap or poison a fat and contented rat. They are way too smart for that. First you have to cut off their food source and make them hungry, so they start to take a few risks. Then you do them.

  We had no wire mesh, so the carpenters spent a day plugging every hole, crack and gap in the food store that was the epicentre of the plague, and then we physically hunted the rats out of the store with clubs.

  At the end of each day, we buried all waste food and ensured any kitchen leftovers were placed in the metal, rat-proof food bins. After three days, the rats were getting hungry and it was payback time.

  We had held off to that point, as we didn’t want to educate our cunning opponents. But on this third night we deployed all of our anti-rat measures: traps, poisons, glues and pits.

  It was slaughter. Two more nights and we had cracked it. After a final big clean-up, the kitchen crew all looked a lot happier, and everyone in the camp was relieved when the diarrhoea subsided.

  With the most pressing camp issues now under control, I took more of an interest in the fieldwork support. The gold project area was about 2 kilometres away and every day we had to collect the drill core from the drilling rigs.

  There were three of these rigs, each about the size of a small car. The drilling produced the drill core, which was a cylindrical sample, 63.5 millimetres in diameter, from the rock below. The geologists could then assay this core and work out the location of mineralisation and its gold content per ton
ne (grade).

  So this core was the raison d’être for our whole operation. The core was the proof of the gold deposit under our feet and the basis upon which the gold resource calculations would be made. You did not want to lose or drop these precious boxes of core.

  On my first trip out to collect the core I was driving our battered old Toyota pick-up, and it was raining hard. For assistance, I had with me Menzies, a dour Guyanese of east-Indian descent. At the rig sites we loaded up the open wooden core boxes onto the Toyota, getting soaked in the process.

  The road was just a mud track through hilly jungle. I went into a corner on a steep downhill part of the track and felt the bald tyres lose their grip. I braked, and in slow motion we slid towards the edge of the track, which fell away sharply.

  Upon reaching the edge, the pick-up toppled, driver’s side first. As we went over, I looked down at the 20-metre drop into the creek, and braced: this fall was going to be bad, and possibly fatal.

  BANG! The car was pulled up short.

  We were hanging on a convenient tree and I was nearly falling out of the window – well, there was no window. I grimly clung to the wheel. I could see trays and core scattered all over the creek and valley below. I was happy to be alive, but Carlos was not going to be happy at the loss of the core.

  I looked over to Menzies. He was gone. So I clambered over to the passenger side of the car, climbed out of the window and scrambled up the slope onto the road above.

  ‘Mr Carlos no like this, Mr Jim,’ Menzies informed me.

  We walked back to camp in the pouring rain.

  Menzies was right, Mr Carlos did not like it.

  Thirty metres of missing core now had to be documented and explained to every resource geologist that would ever use the data. It was not a good look, not to mention the money it had cost to drill the core in the first place.

  The vehicle was OK. We just dragged it out with the bulldozer, and a few more dents didn’t make any difference. The only good news from this incident was that I didn’t get fired, but I would have to be damn careful with the vehicles from now on.

  The logistics chain at Omai was tenuous and the ordering was all done by radio. Back in 1990, in the good old, bad old days before the luxury of satellite phones or internet, the standard method of communicating for remote area work was the HF radio. This equipment operated best during dawn and dusk, due to atmospheric conditions that otherwise made things a bit hit and miss.

  We placed our orders for food, fuel and materials by radio and just hoped it would turn up. But things were getting progressively worse. The boat arrived from one resupply trip with the food coolers full of fish heads. McCabe the cook called me in and I snapped. It was late in the day and we had radio communications.

  ‘Get me Brendan, over,’ I barked into the radio.

  ‘Yes, Mr Jim, Brendan here,’ came the reply.

  ‘Brendan, we are transporting fresh food halfway across Guyana, we have one hundred and ten men to feed and instead of fillets of fish you send us the heads of fish. What the hell is going on? Who is going to eat that crap?’

  The radio is not a good medium through which to have an argument and Brendan did not take this critique too well. It went downhill from there. McCabe and the radio operator loved it, as they and everyone else had been on the receiving end of poor rations for months.

  The bane of all these logistics systems was their susceptibility to corruption. Inferior goods would be supplied, and the money paid for the suitable goods would then be split between the supplier and the company representative.

  Brendan had overplayed his hand on this occasion, and I followed through. Eventually he saw the writing on the wall and tendered one of the more personalised resignations I have seen. He commandeered a company car, rammed his way out of the Golden Star compound in Georgetown and trashed the vehicle in an alcohol-fuelled night of vengeance.

  The safety culture at Omai left a lot to be desired, and Stamford was kept busy with a constant stream of accidents. I went out to pick up the core one morning and I came across the surveyors’ motorised trike and trailer, which had just had an accident. Men lay groaning everywhere.

  The coupling bolt used to attach the trailer to the trike had jumped out of its socket and the trailer tow coupling had sunk straight into the dirt. The trailer had then acted like a trebuchet and catapulted the five crew over the top of the trike to splat onto the road. The trailer itself had landed on the trike driver.

  All six guys were just first aid cases and thankfully not worse, as it took a full day to casevac any serious injuries back to Georgetown. Even there, the best medical care was still terrible.

  At various times we had to deal with burns, electric shocks, crush wounds and lost fingers. A tree branch fell on a driller in a storm one night, and he was only saved by his hard hat. When I called the electrician in to fix a fluoro light in the office, he took out the electric starter, licked two of his fingers and touched them on the live connectors. Incredibly the light came on and he just sauntered off.

  On top of all this came a steady stream of malaria patients. Golden Star had a good system for treating malaria. Every bed was made from a rough timber frame that supported a cot with zip-up mosquito netting. Each camp also had a microscope and a qualified nurse who was trained to do blood smears, recognise the types of malaria parasite and treat accordingly.

  Our malaria fight was not aided by some local beliefs. Many Guyanese are superstitious and some of the men were convinced malaria was caused by bad water or bad spirits. No matter how much we tried to convince them otherwise, they were unshakeable.

  I had done the informative health and hygiene course in the army and so had been primed on the challenges of combating malaria in remote camps. I tried to remember some of the tips from this useful training that had been imparted to us by a humourless colonel from the Royal Army Medical Corps.

  ‘You are stationed in Belize and the malaria rate of your unit is double that of every other unit. What do you do?’ the colonel had enquired of us.

  A bored young cavalry officer had said, ‘Rather than try to halve your own unit’s rate of malaria, sir, I think it would be rather easier just to double the rate of all the surrounding units.’

  We’d laughed, and he was rewarded with extra duties for a week for not taking the course seriously.

  But some knowledge from the course had stuck. I performed a regular camp inspection at Omai to get rid of any standing water where mosquitoes could breed. Old tyres were a classic place for collecting water, as were buckets, the tops of oil drums, folds in tarpaulins, gutters, puddles, the drinking water of captured pet caged birds and many other places.

  The banka drillers were most susceptible to malaria. Observing these men in action, it was possible to see why. The banka drilling tested the gold-bearing alluvial gravel deposits and so operated in the low-lying, swampy, mosquito-infested areas.

  I went out to mark up some further banka holes that Carlos wanted drilled, and observed one of the crews at work. The seven banka drillers operating their rig were almost naked and covered head to toe in mud. The men were up to their waists in sludge while pushing around wooden poles threaded through a central spigot. The turning of the spigot rotated the pipe, causing it to drill into the ground.

  Perversely, a host of exquisite blue-and-golden butterflies danced around the men in the faint speckled rays of sunshine that penetrated the forest canopy.

  There was something medieval about the banka process. It required strong and robust workers, who could keep going all day, week after week. The crew chief was a tough customer who could lead from the front and keep his men in line.

  You didn’t mess with the banka drillers. Nevertheless, the malaria parasite was no respecter of physical health. Within hours the disease could reduce these hearty men to shivering wrecks.

  It didn’t help that malaria was endemic among the itinerant river population surrounding us. They beat a constant path to our door and i
t was in our interests to treat them. Stamford was a busy man, and not just treating malaria. We were also the first and only option for treating every other exotic complaint.

  I walked down to the landing one morning and found a powerfully built man dragging himself along the ground towards our clinic. Concerned, I rushed over to help him, but he waved me away.

  ‘No man, I’m fine, I lookin’ for da nurse,’ he said in a friendly manner.

  ‘But your legs – let me help you.’

  ‘Legs? Nothing wrong dere, nah. I just need injection for a little venereal problem. I been horsing around with dem girls.’

  This man was famous on the river as one of the best dredge divers in Guyana. His childhood polio didn’t matter as a diver and he had built up quite a reputation as a ladies’ man.

  I met many inspiring Guyanese people like this, men and women who had cheerfully overcome the most adverse or cruel circumstances life could throw at them. Mind you, there were plenty of others who sank.

  The rainforest at Omai was stunning. The trees were up to 2 metres in diameter with huge flanges coming off their base that extended out several metres. They were about 70 metres high and formed a continuous green canopy, through which occasional rays of direct sunlight penetrated. As a result, the forest floor was relatively clear and easy to move about in. It was cool too, with the canopy providing a massive air-conditioning system.

  The area was teeming with capuchin and howler monkeys, sloths and anteaters, scarlet macaws and toucans. Labarrias – poisonous and bad-tempered snakes – ended up in our latrines on a regular basis. Even more feared than the snakes were the vampire bats. These flying mammals had teeth so sharp they could bite you in your sleep and you would not even wake up. They then licked up your blood and, as their saliva contained an anti-coagulant, the gift kept giving. We had the netted cots to protect us, but were all extremely wary of these creatures and their potential for transmitting rabies.