by Paul Carter
The pilot tried to drop out of the weather, falling fast for a few hundred feet into clearer air. When we were only about fifty feet above the tree tops, skimming over the canopy, we rose up sharply and started popping in and out of the low cloud like a confused pigeon. This went on for fifteen minutes, up and down, up and down. Every time we popped into clear air there was nothing but jungle as far as you could see. The pilot came on the speakers in our headphones, and in a calm Louisiana drawl said:
‘I don’t know if you boys have noticed, but I’m having a little trouble eyeballing the rig. We have lost some instruments and need to do dis approach by line-of-sight, and I’ve got a master caution light on my fuel, so I would appreciate it if y’all could yell out if you see da rig, okay fellas.’
Before he had finished speaking all eight men were craning their necks in all directions, desperately looking for the rig, but it was like trying to find a pin in a sea of broccoli.
Many of the chopper pilots who work in the oil business flew in the Vietnam War and possess a kind of ‘dynamic lethargy’ that makes them very calming to fly with. Our pilot radioed the rig and asked them to release red smoke, which allowed us to vector in on its exact position, touch down and disembark. We arrived to a muddy location and a disturbed crew chief. I was just happy knowing I didn’t have to make the flight back.
The crew chief, John, was indeed locked in his cabin. I banged on the door and eventually I heard the key turn in the lock. I kicked off my muddy boots, put them on a piece of cardboard by the door and stepped inside. It was a standard port-a-cabin, twenty by twelve feet, with two small beds at either end, two lockers, and a table and chair between them. It was in a real mess; rubbish everywhere, dirty plates and empty cans littering the floor. There was no window; it was dark inside, the only light coming from a lamp that was angled right down an inch from the desk. Big moths whizzed in and out of view, occasionally crashing into the desk lamp. I tried the main overhead light but there was no bulb.
John was sitting on his bunk in his underpants, just staring at the floor. He had not shaved in a few days and looked like he needed a good meal. I told him to get dressed and start packing up his gear. Walking over to the desk, I saw what looked like little piles of insect body parts, wings and heads in one, legs and mush in the other, and a razor blade and tweezers sat under the desk light.
‘John, you’re on this chopper mate. It’s going as soon as it’s refuelled and they’ve done some minor repairs,’ I lied.
He just looked up at me and grunted ‘Okay’.
I sat on the bed opposite him, wondering where to start cleaning up, as it was now my cabin. John was getting his gear slowly, pulling his towel off the handrail by his bed. Then I sensed movement by my feet. Looking down directly between my bootless feet in the dark, I focused on what looked like a very hairy human hand crawling towards my right foot. It was the biggest spider I had ever seen.
Adrenalin shot through my body, and soon I was airborne grabbing the first thing I saw—my boot. This thing was a monster, the size of a cricket ball with legs, so I proceeded to bash it to death with my safety boot. Whereupon John proceeded to bash me over the head with his safety boot. Apparently, it was his pet, and John had been locked up in his cabin at night catching bugs and feeding this thing for weeks. He named it ‘Walter’ and he and Walter had become firm friends.
Most of Walter was now decorating the floor and the heel of my boot. John and I lay on the floor, he was crying and my ears were ringing and blood was running down my forehead. He was still crying when the medic sedated him and put him on the chopper. The storm had blown itself out. I watched the chopper disappear through the green tube in the jungle canopy, my head throbbing in time with the rotor blades, but it would heal, unlike John’s.
WE SETTLED IN AND started the job.
I loved being back in the jungle. I loved the smells and the sounds, and its intense green presence. At night floodlights illuminated the site attracting every type of nocturnal creature. During the monsoon season moths the size of dinner plates would whiz around the rig doing acrobatics that occasionally ended with someone catching one in the head, the impact knocking off their hard hat and leaving them looking like they’d just come off badly in a custard pie fight.
Monkeys would get braver every day, eventually hanging around the rig like groupies after a concert. I would leave my former-little-shop-of-insect-horrors cabin and pass a dozen monkeys all eyeballing me. ‘Hey buddy . . . got a smoke?’ they would chatter. I would have a pocket full of nuts, always something, which I’d throw to gain safe passage, remembering from my experiences with Joe that pissing them off was dangerous.
All the guys on my crew were locals. My derrick-man, Ambu, is an Iban, a descendant of the headhunters who originally ruled the jungles of Borneo. His grandfather lopped off his fair share of heads during the Japanese occupation in the Second World War. Ambu has the ‘bamboo’ tattoos of a headhunter around his throat but says he only took a few heads in his forty years in the jungle. I always had time for Ambu. His ability to work in any condition made him invaluable on a job. He is not afraid of anything because he has his power. His power is a thin leather belt decorated with teeth and charms made from lead fishing weights. As long as Ambu wears the belt, he cannot die. Remember The Lone Ranger? Well, talking to Ambu was like having a conversation with Tonto.
‘Come . . . we go.’
‘Come . . . we eat.’
‘Ambu . . . cannot die.’
Born and raised in the jungle, Ambu possesses the intimate knowledge that only a lifetime of living there can give you. Nothing in the jungle follows the rules as we understand them. Dogs don’t chase cats, cats don’t chase mice. Monkeys don’t ask for bananas, they want cigarettes. Ambu, for example, arrived at the workshop in the village once with two dogs in tow. One was a big shaggy dopey-looking thing with a perpetual drool problem and the other was a small scruffy multicoloured guy who walked under the bigger dog. I asked if they were his dogs. Ambu pointed at the big one and said, ‘She’s Kuching . . . She my dog . . . The other one is Kuching’s dog . . . His name Arnap.’
‘Your dog has a dog?’ I asked.
Ambu nodded.‘She bring him home one day.’
It was on this job that I got my first taste of Ambu’s amazing skills in the jungle and his ability to bullshit as well. We were shut down, waiting for another service company to fix an equipment failure. Everyone was bored brainless and sitting around in a small clearing at the edge of the site. Ambu pipes up, ‘I can make the mouse kill the scorpion.’
Ambu was known for his little statements, so I said, ‘Okay Ambu, off you go.’
‘You wait . . . I bring to you.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ I said.
‘Come . . . we go.’
He was excited to have me tag along and promised to show me something only a few white men have seen. I had to bring a roll of gaffa tape, a flashlight, a painter’s mask, my sneakers, a small wood saw, goggles, gloves and rags. Stuffing all this and some water into a backpack, I grabbed a walkie-talkie from the radio room and we set off.
Ambu took off like someone does in the supermarket when they can’t find the bread. I was lost after five minutes. I could hear the rig, but the jungle was so dense I had no idea where it was. The canopy blocks out a lot of light but that didn’t stop Ambu from moving fast between the trees. Climbing around the rocketship fenders of a massive moss-covered tree, I found a beaming Ambu. He grabbed the backpack and pulled out the saw then plunged it into the centre of the trunk, as if stabbing an enemy with a sword, turning his head to spread a betel-nut smeared grin at me. That’s impossible, I thought, the tree was not a tree, but something else entirely. I looked more closely. It had once been a tree, a long time ago, until a strangler vine crept up and slowly but tightly coiled itself around the trunk, spiralling from the base all the way up to the canopy. Over the years, the vine, like a vegetarian python, had throttled the life out of the tree a
nd eventually the tree rotted away to nothing, leaving a hollow tightly coiled rope tube to the sky. Ambu cut a neat hole in the vine, tipped the contents of the backpack on the floor, pointed at them and said, ‘Put on’.
The gloves were taped to my sleeves, the rags were wrapped around my head and taped to the mask and goggles, my collar was taped to the rags around my head, and everything was taped to everything else. With the flashlight in my top pocket, I climbed in. The darkness made it easier to cope with the slimy insect-riddled walls, but it was still revolting. My goggles steamed up quickly so I took them off, and by the time I was halfway up sweat had soaked through everything and I was wet down to my undies. When it got too tight to keep going, I pulled the saw from my belt and cut my way through. Finally I was at the top and able to stick my upper body out.
At first all I could do was pull off the rags to get some air onto my face. I felt instant relief, like letting go of your end of a fridge on house-moving day. I was sitting in the jungle canopy on the roof of a world untouched by man. It was breathtaking. I felt like I did when I walked into the Sistine Chapel and looked up at Michelangelo’s panels. I was awestruck, my senses overloaded with the beauty of it, despite the vines digging into my bum and the bizarre crawling monsters spewing out of the vine tube. You see the jungle is the wrong way around. All the things that make plants grow and help sustain life in the jungle from slime to great apes, come from the canopy. It’s so dense that it traps all the sunlight, water, everything. If you want bugs at home you kick over a rock, here you climb a tree.
Ambu was shouting something from below. I had been up there too long; Ambu had already found his scorpion and was eager to go and find the mouse. The climb down the vine was much more fun than climbing up—just imagine getting sucked down a giant vacuum cleaner hose.
I was too tired to go mouse hunting so Ambu walked me back to the rig and went on his own. It took him until the following evening to find the right mouse. We were sitting in the clearing, smoking and drinking coffee, when he turned up with a metal garbage can lid, some tongs from the kitchen and a metal ammo box. He made a little circle of rocks in the centre of our clearing, up-ended the bin lid and placed it on top of the rocks. We all fell silent and crouched down to watch the show.
Ambu flipped open the ammo box lid and using the tongs pulled out a big black scorpion. Everyone backed up a few feet, it looked so evil. The scorpion was placed in the centre of the bin lid, its pincers were raised and its curved tail, with the poisonous stinger, hovered over its body. Big enough to cover your hand, it could kill a man in a few minutes. Then from a small cardboard box in his pocket Ambu produced a tiny mouse and dangled it by the tail over the scorpion. It was just a little ball of fuzz with a pink tail, no bigger than a golf ball.
‘So you’re saying that puny thing is gonna kill the fuckin’ scorpion?’ one of the boys asked.
Ambu nodded and waited for the boys to start placing bets.
The kitty was up around a hundred bucks when he dropped the mouse in the lid. The scorpion went for it, but it was like a forklift truck and couldn’t turn fast enough to grab the mouse, who just ran around the scorpion in ever-decreasing circles until it was directly behind the tail. The scorpion could only turn in its own space, it just wasn’t fast enough. The mouse ran up the scorpion’s tail, and, hanging on to it, started biting through the tip. In less than a minute, the stinger and poison sac were bitten off, then the mouse ran down the scorpion’s back and bored its teeth into the scorpion’s head. The mouse hung on, staying out of the pincers’ reach, until the scorpion lay dead.
Ambu collected his money, then announced, ‘You want to see the scorpion kill itself?’
We were all mesmerised by then.‘Yeah sure Ambu.’
So he lit a small fire under the lid and tossed another scorpion in. As the heat slowly started cooking the poor thing alive, it could no longer alternate legs to stand on, and speared itself in the belly, dying instantly. I had no idea there was a creature that given no choice would kill itself.
The next trip home to Perth became my last. Ruby had decided to move to Sydney and asked if I’d go with her to help her find a flat and get settled in. I was happy to go as I had never visited the east coast before and a few weeks later we arrived in Sydney.
It didn’t take long for Ruby to find a flat she could afford and she also found work in the first week, pouring beers in a bar in town. I was due back in Brunei in a month which gave me time to look around. Sydney was a change of pace from Perth, and I loved it. I decided to make it my new home on my next crew change.
I looked up my friend Barry who pushed tools on a Brunei rig and was home having some time off. He introduced me to his sister Louise, a successful businesswoman running her own advertising agency, who was as much fun as her brother without the spontaneous loud outbursts. It was then that Louise first raised the possibility of being creative for a living. She saw my paintings; I had been painting for years in my spare time, but never showed them to anyone. She loved them and invited me to her office to meet John, the company’s creative director. We all got along so well that whenever I was back in Sydney I would drop in to the office and talk with Louise and John. Eventually, over about twelve months, this turned into work. For an hourly rate I would sit with John in the studio and brainstorm concepts, think up ‘tag lines’ for print advertisements and write ‘copy’ for all kinds of things. I loved advertising, the whole process, from an initial idea to walking down the street or opening a magazine, sometimes months later, and seeing something you worked on. It gave me a lot of satisfaction.
For me Sydney can be a cage with golden bars; it’s easy to fall into a complacent stupor. I’ve even caught myself becoming interested in architecture! If I’m not careful I will soon have the mind of a backpacker. In Sydney, if you can get past the day-to-day living stuff—you know, can’t find a parking space I can competently drive into, there’s no credit left on my phone, and the dog’s just been sick on the dash—life is easy, especially after spending months on a rig.
I did miss Perth for a while, but when I returned to finish packing up all my belongings to send over to Sydney I saw Perth differently. It was close to Christmas, and deserted, because everyone had gone somewhere else for the holidays. It looked just like a clean giant version of Bondi with no people. I spent the whole time playing ‘spot the locals’. No people, no cars, no-one open for business. Preparing for the holidays in Perth is rather like sorting out the household after a thermonuclear weapon has gone off. You’re going to need everything from stockpiles of petrol to one thousand rolls of toilet paper.
I hired what seemed like the only vehicle left in Western Australia and thoroughly enjoyed driving down Perth’s deserted streets. On those rare occasions when someone did pull up behind me and the lights turned green, they would patiently sit there and wait for me to leisurely push in the clutch, slide the stick into first gear and peel off without a care in the world. In Sydney you’d better be riding the clutch and completely in sync with the traffic lights so that your car is already moving as they turn green. If you’re not, the bastard in the car behind you will be battering the horn and spitting all over the windscreen as he screams his pre-emptive road rage verbal attack.
During my last week in Sydney it rained constantly, turning Ruby’s small street into a river. One night Louise was having a party at her house in Balmain, following a dinner in a harbourside restaurant. I was having an absolute ball. She really knew how to entertain friends and family, and it made me not want to go back to the jungle village and deal with the boys.
At the end of the night I jumped in a cab and set off through the rain back to Ruby’s flat, near Kings Cross. The flat was on the top floor of a renovated Victorian two-storey building. The tin roof, however, was as old as the rest of the external structure and had rusted through. I was sitting on the toilet, reading the sports page from the weekend paper, when I heard a loud crack.
During that rainy week, water
had accumulated in the space between the rusty tin roof and the renovated ceiling. I looked up, registered what was about to happen, and immediately started weighing up the odds of wiping first and running . . . or just clenching and running. I made a grab at the toilet roll but the whole ceiling split through the middle, dumping what felt like tonnes of cold water and gyprock on my head. Ruby just laughed when she got home. We had to use an umbrella to go to the toilet for the next few days.
A week later I was standing on the drill floor in the pouring rain telling the story to Erwin; Ambu came up to relieve the derrickman.
‘I go up stair now,’ he said and grinned.
The derrickman is the guy who works up in the big tower that juts out of every rig rather like an industrial Eiffel Tower. It’s a tough job in bad weather and inherently dangerous. Working in the derrick is all about timing; everything that the driller does affects what everyone else on the drill floor does, especially the derrickman as he’s got nowhere to run. His only escape device is a static line tethered from the top of the derrick to the main deck below. Usually set at a tragic angle, this line, called a ‘Geronimo’ or a ‘Tinkerbell line’, has a handle that you grab and hold onto as you ride the line down to safety, controlling your rate of descent by moving the handle braking lever.
While he’s up there, one of the derrickman’s jobs is to ‘stab’ the pipe. This routine process involves the roughnecks on the drill floor lining up the pipe at waist level with the last joint of pipe sticking out of the rotary table. They need the derrickman to help line up the pipe so it’s straight from the top end, therefore enabling them to screw the threads together. The derrickman releases the ‘stabbing board’, a pivoting plank like a diving board, then walks out to the very end and, wearing a safety harness called a ‘belly buster’, leans out at a horrific angle to make sure the pipe is lined up straight. So basically the derrickman spends a fair bit of time dangling off a board ninety feet above the drill floor. Having a good head for heights is a bonus.