In the southern reaches of the outback sits the small town of Coober Pedy. Much of the world's crystal fire opal is mined there, and nearly all of it is pulled out using hand tools. Individuals stake small claims and team up with one or two other people for safety. I drove the several hundred kilometers north of Adelaide into the red desert.
The flat plains wore the extravagance of distance and simplicity. Scattered scrubs crouched low beneath the sun. Groups of twisted mulga, eucalyptus trees, hunched over like sinners awaiting a papal viewing. Tapered leaves cloaked the trunks and flashed whip-edged in the wind.
Here and there abandoned vehicles rested forever beside the road, stripped and rusted, sun-bleached and somehow haunted. One had flipped onto its roof, clearly an accident; others sprawled on their hubs as if victimized by some mythic mechanical beast.
Long hours passed until the hypnotic landscape changed. Coober Pedy sprouted in lumps from the horizon, looking as if an army of mutant ants had been very busy. Mounds of pale dirt scattered on the opal fields marked abandoned claims. The town exuded the final asthmatic wheeze of a bust farm community, gilded in red grit and vaguely ramshackle, much as California's towns must have been during the gold rush. Dust puffed through the air. Greenery disappeared entirely within the town limits and lawns were nonexistent. Water was far too precious to waste on such vanities.
Mary's daughter Marie had sketched a mud map to her house. While working, she had cursed the fact that her street had recently been named. She and her husband David grumpily conceded that the town might soon have a traffic light.
Their idea of urban blight, however, did not include paving the road. The talc-like dirt called bulldust became a pasty muck whenever it rained. During the Dry season, the dirt tracks shook loose every screw and bolt. Even machines spared the abuses of the rough opal fields fell to ruin from the insidious dust.
Everything about Coober Pedy was rough and ready, and mining operations were no exception. David and Marie shared a claim with some other folks and took me along one day. Open shafts stippled the fields and the mine rescue squad spent much of its time saving shutterbugs who backed into shafts. Groups were no longer allowed off the buses while in the fields but the rescue squad had already pulled three tourists out of the ground that year. David fixed me with a bug-eyed stare, his handlebar mustache twitching even before his lips moved.
"Every bloody one of them an American," he declared, "and a woman."
One of the women they hauled out had been soaked in blood. All the blood had come from a small cut and she was fine. Another young lady bawled non-stop for her mama during the rescue, leading the team to assume she'd be fine. A minute after she reached the surface, she collapsed. She was dead. The fall had burst a vein near her spinal column and she'd bled to death internally.
Experience in the fields didn't guarantee safety. During my stay, a miner was working alone, crouched next to a compact rock driller. When shiny pieces appeared on the outside of the bit the machine was removed and mining continued by hand. When a large chunk of opal flashed in the bit, the miner snatched at the gem.
The bit caught the miner's sleeve and pulled his forearm into the auger, twisting and crushing it off and shattering the upper arm. Tucking the limb under his ruined arm, he hopped into the winch harness, rode slowly to the surface, and stumbled to the only nearby mine being worked that day. The clinic could do little more than pack the arm in ice and prevent further blood loss. The Royal Flying Doctor, an emergency airlift that provided the only ambulance service throughout the interior, arrived within an unexpectedly short two hours. The Royal Adelaide Hospital reattached the limb and within 72 hours blood flow was miraculously reestablished.
No one doubted that the miner would some day continue his quest for the pearls of the earth.