In the evenings I fielded questions on American culture. Nearly every person I connected with during the trip asked the same questions: Why is America so violent? Why does everyone own a gun? I couldn't say much to alleviate Marie's head-shaking and tongue-clucking.

Eventually she changed the topic to everyday life, specifically food. She requested detailed directions for brewing iced tea. You'd think that any culture built on the superiority of tea would know how to make iced tea...but no. Neither Aussies nor Brits could make a glass without brewing it into sludge.

Eventually Marie asked what we Yanks ate for dinner. "Hamburgers, right?" she chimed before I could respond.

"Well...."

I certainly was reluctant to destroy all that international marketing by the omnipresent burger chains.

"More like steak and potatoes, I guess," I said. "Although we eat a lot of chicken and fish now. Healthy stuff. You know." 

She asked about breakfast. I joked that coffee and donuts usually fit the bill.

"Yea, what about donuts?" she asked. "What are they?" 

"Those round thingies with holes we saw at the bakery today," I said. I mentally added another item to the list of things for which Aussies used different words.

"Cakes?" she squawked. "You mean you eat cakes for breakfast?" 

"Oh, they're not really cakes, see--"

"Are they the kind with the icings and sprinkles or just plain?" 

Perhaps she thought there was hope yet.

"Both, really. Depends on the person."  I told her it was patriotic to load up on caffeine and sugar to jump-start the day.

She didn't believe me.

Marie's brother-in-law Graham noodled the slag heaps every day. He took me with him one day in the company car he'd driven out to Coober Pedy for his vacation. Bumping over the fields, he was careful to avoid open shafts, particularly as he had already knocked off the tailpipe on a rock.

"But I'm on vacation," he sighed expansively as he parked, "and can't much be bothered about the little things." 

We clambered a miniature mountain of slag. The dust was incredibly fine and we sunk past our knees. Every now and again, we'd slide backward in a powdery avalanche.

Our equipment was basic: sunglasses to protect the eyes, a filter mask to protect the lungs, and a pan with a wire mesh bottom. Scooping up a dish of dirt, we swirled the grit into the wind and examined the remains for the brittle heat of color. Like gold mining without the water!

We worked separate piles to stay clear of each other's billowing dust streams. The solitary work, the wind like a rustling animal, and the panorama of empty plains made it clear why Graham spent his vacations noodling. The opal was just a bonus, a souvenir.

We returned to the house looking as if we had been dipped in flour. Everything had turned stark white...clothes, shoes, hair and hands.

Graham stored my pickings in a jar filled with water. Large pieces of potch and opal will crack if allowed to dry, and the water accentuated the lustrous bars of lime and candied apple.

Coober Pedy's exquisite crystal fire opal was so enchanting people had shifted and sifted the earth for decades around the area. The town's name was rumored to be a local tribal phrase meaning "white man down hole." 

And all that long history, all that intense labor, all that cruel desire driving men underground had been distilled into an old honey jar. The grit in my sinuses and under my nails were the only evidence of opal's true cost.

 

"How'd ya like mining, then?" David's wife Marie asked over dinner. "Dirty work, hey?"

"Yeah. Reminds me of a temporary job I had as a maintenance worker. Not too mentally challenging but at the end of the day I could step back and point to all the things I did. That's the kind of job that'll last a lifetime. Good physical labor, working outdoors...so long as you dig up enough to get by every year, it'd be great." 

"I don't know about great," Marie said with an amused look at David, "but it's a living." 

The nightly soaps distracted us for a time.

"Mark offered to buy me a drink if I'm still around Friday night," I offered during a commercial. I was hoping to hear the lowdown on the dashing fellow with whom I had sweated in the mine all that day.

"No matter who it is or what anyone offers," Marie commanded, "you don't go anywhere in this town without one of the family." 

Her intensity was far different than her usual relaxed manner.

"There's a killer in Coober Pedy." She looked me over as if to gauge my level of belief by my body more than my face.

The killer had apparently taken two women already. At first, when a traveler passing through town disappeared, they thought another traveler had offered her a ride. Hitchhiking was incredibly common in Australia, and very few individuals who hitched rides came to a bad end.

But the second woman to go missing was a young Aboriginal woman. She never would have gotten into a car with someone she didn't know. That meant only one thing: someone in the community was a killer. 

"Trouble finding the bodies," David said, "is there are too many abandoned shafts on the mine fields. One bomb dropped down after the body will make it look like any other mine. Nobody keeps records on how deep they are and ya can't search 'em all anyway."

He told me other tales. Sometimes a fellow would blow out an area and go down to find bones in the rubble. Often the miners blow a second time to cover the bones. They switch to the other side of the vein in a hurry. When I asked why they wouldn't report it, he shrugged.

"Ya have to stop mining so they can investigate," he said. "No telling how long that will last. Most people can only afford to work one claim at a time, and an interruption like that would break 'em." 

Even though bones uncovered that deep most likely were ancient specimens of interest only to archaeologists, the haste with which death was dismissed was chilling. The Wild West was alive and well in the outback.

A nook to the left shielded the equipment during blasting. The action occurred further down the tunnel. It was a slow-motion chase after sedentary prey.

The men took turns following the vein with pickaxe and a small jackhammer. They chided each other genially during the shift change but became subdued as work resumed. All eyes strained after the tiniest glimmer, willing the green and red fire to materialize like a fever dream.

"Come on, come on,where is it?" David muttered. "Where's the bloody opal?" 

His inquiries echoed unanswered through the cold air. When the shimmering vein of potch and opal finally appeared, his buddy Mark drilled five deep cavities under the vein. Explosive charges would be sunk into each then linked with a single fuse. I abandoned the shaft as Mark tinkered with the detonating caps.

Gathered on the surface we waited. David was unusually quiet.

"No matter how many years I mine," he finally remarked, "the first explosion always makes me jump." 

The wind swirled in the powdery dust. Bumph!  The ground trembled briefly like a horse shaking off flies. We stared at nothing and counted, relaxing only after the fifth charge detonated.

While the blower removed the poisonous fumes from the mine, we sat on the piles of dross left over from previous blows. We munched sandwiches and snacks, wasting little time in the important business of prospecting.

A fellow with a face wrinkled from years of squinting into wind and sun doddered from a gritty cloud blowing over the plains. He lived in a trailer on an old claim and eked out a living by noodling, sifting the slag for overlooked opal. Half a dozen motley dogs were his only companions.

David offered the man packets of tobacco and rolling papers. In return, the old fellow watched for poachers whenever David's group was not there.

Although miners usually abandoned a vein when they drew close to its borders, avarice was as alive under the ground as above. Drilling into someone else's claim could draw fines of $1,000.00 AU per foot but the criminal could always say someone else must have dug after he'd abandoned his mine.

An unwritten miner's law was occasionally enforced.  A week before my arrival a blower, a $50,000.00 AU piece of equipment, had mysteriously caught on fire one night.  The owner had allegedly been caught poaching a few months before and had evaded traditional law.

Frontier justice was not so easily avoided. 

With these disaster stories in mind, I stuck close to David as he explained daily business in the fields.

To prospect for opal, a drill rig first punched through the desert like a spiny echidna crunching through a termite mound. The soil was examined for opal and potch, girasol which had not yet developed the colorful fire humans craved. If the claim had potential the driller bored a larger shaft for human entry and the narrow tunnel became an exit point for slag.

David led me to a gaping hole straddled by a pole supporting the steel ladder. The ground sloped toward a dark maw that didn't bottom out for seventy feet. An electrical cord and a few ropes snaked into the burrow. The loose shale shifted beneath my boots and my breath caught in my heart as if to hide.

A little daunted but as crazy as ever, I told him I'd have a go. We hovered over the truck bed and assembled explosive charges from a few sheets of newsprint, fertilizer, a length of fuse and masking tape. The detonating caps, which would be snugged gently onto the fuses, were left to the more daring Mark.

"Last year," Mark mused, "fellah lit up a cig while crimping caps and a hot ash fell in the box. Only the caps blew but there wasn't anything left to retrieve. No real pieces, ya know. Just sorta wiped him up, like."

"I should have an explosives sign on the truck," David remarked as he tamped the nitrate. "If ya go down to the drive-in ya see the sign at the entrance says No Explosives!"  He taped the end of another tube then turned his grin on me.

"Fellah who owns the theater got tired of the bloody idiots who drink too much and smoke in their cars. Too many explosions." 

Mark warmed up the blower, a huge vacuum bolted onto a flatbed truck that would dump the dross a short distance from the entry shaft. We descended by turns, gently pitching forward from a crouch to catch ourselves on the crossbeam. David nabbed the back of my jacket in case I slipped.

"Never, ever look up th' shaft," he harped. "If ya do, you'll likely get a smack from a rock. Edward did it all the time until one day I called 'clear' and chucked a wrench down the hole. He poked his bloody head up the shaft just in time to catch it with his mouth." 

The cold rungs rose monotonously past my vision as I felt for each foothold. A constant rain of dust and rock pinged off my hardhat. After a time I heard only the oddly metallic echo of my movements.

A tumble probably would not have been fatal because bumping into the sides of the shafts would break the fall but I was careful nonetheless. My toe finally scraped earth instead of steel and I faced the cool underworld.