Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

8 FOSSICKERS

Chuck’s first Christmas in Australia gave him some culture shock. Since Christmas came at midsummer, the holiday mainly revolved around swimming pool parties and barbeques. Instead of citrus and fruitcakes, the fruit most often served with holiday meals was mangoes. There was some turkey served at Christmas, but prawns and crayfish predominated. There was a lot to like about Australia, but it took some adjustment.

Although he missed his home, Chuck took infrequent vacation trips to see his family in Texas. Part of his reluctance to travel was his frustration with the U.S. government’s TSA agents, who made his life miserable. Because he worked regularly with explosives, all of his clothing, belts, wristwatch band, and even the exterior of his luggage were perennially contaminated by trace amounts of dBX and PETN—the explosive filling used in detonating cord. The legions of blue-gloved “Scope and Grope” TSA drones were endlessly swabbing pieces of passenger luggage and running the swabs through their spectroscopic scanners. It all got worse in 2012 when the TSA fielded their Picosecond Programmable Laser scanners. These scanners were particularly sensitive. And, instead of scanning just a few random swabs, they were able to scan the clothing of everyone who walked by.

Many times Chuck missed his scheduled flight because he was shunted off to TSA back rooms for “interview” interrogations and secondary searches. He would often be left to sit by himself for what seemed like ages. He would mumble to himself, “Two by two, hands of blue,” and watch the minutes tick by on his wristwatch. The process was always agonizing.

Invariably, the TSA agents would seem hesitant, consult among themselves, and then push his case up the chain of command. A senior TSA agent would then personally interview Chuck, who would again have to explain the nature of his work. He’d then be released as “free to go,” but without any apology.

Chuck lived in a one-bedroom leased cottage in Casuarina. He had originally looked in the nicer adjoining suburb of Tiwi, but he couldn’t find a cottage in his price range. He didn’t need much space because he had brought just a few possessions with him from the United States. These were mostly boxes of books, clothes, and a couple of guitars. Even though it was a long drive from most of his job sites, he chose the town because it had good shopping and a seven-screen cinema. He was not much interested in shopping personally, but he knew that shopping malls and movie theaters attracted young women. The shopping malls, he reasoned, were his best chance of meeting a potential spouse, since it drew shoppers from as far away as 125 miles. Of course, once he met Ava, his proximity to the malls no longer seemed very important.

The evening after their first meeting, Chuck lay anxiously in bed, thinking about what Ava had said to him. Finally, realizing that he would get no sleep, he turned on his bedside light. Normally when he had trouble sleeping, he would get out his twelve-string guitar and play familiar tunes or improvisations until he felt sleepy. But tonight what she had said was hounding him. He dug through one of the boxes of books that he’d had shipped from his parents’ home in Texas but had never unpacked, and found his dusty Bible.

“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,” he recited, as he turned to the book of John. He began to read. At first he tried to remember exactly what Ava had said, as if it was a note jotted down in one of his college lectures. “Personal Savior” was what she had said. But then he just got into reading. Chuck recognized John 3:16. Yes, I believe in Jesus, he thought. I’m smart enough to see that none of us would be here if it wasn’t for God making us. But moving on to the next verse, he saw that there was more. It said that whoever did not believe would be condemned. He pondered the word condemned. That has to be something more than just being mistaken—condemned to Hell? he wondered. He came to chapter six and was perplexed by Jesus’ bizarre sermon about his body being bread. That story had confused him in Sunday school, and it was not any clearer now. But as he read the rest of the book, it began to come into focus. Jesus was the good shepherd. He really was born on Earth to die for sinners.

Over the next few days, Chuck kept reading. He raced through the book of Acts, amazed by Paul’s conversion. He reached Romans, and everything fell into place. He would later learn to love Paul’s epistles for their depth and brilliant insight. Paul spelled out in concrete terms what Chuck had been trying to understand. He was a sinner. This sin was much more than the porn that he’d watched until he got his life straightened out during his freshman year of college. He realized that his indifference was a dishonor to his Creator. He prayed quite simply, “God, Lord, I’ve been going the wrong way, ignoring everything you’ve done. I’ve only been interested in my plans, and not cared at all that you made me. I’ve been your enemy! Thank you for showing me that. Thank you for dying for me. That’s insane! But I need it. I need you to forgive me and save me.”

One evening, a month after he had become a saved Christian, Chuck called Ava’s cell phone number. He told her earnestly, “I do know where I stand with God now, Ava. I had always reckoned that if God took care of His business, and I took care of mine, we’d be all right. But I get it now. John’s gospel is about God coming to us and saving us. The fact is, I thought I had it together, but I was flat wrong. I kept reading and got to Paul. I realized I was dead—absolutely dead in my sins! God showed me that I needed Him. Christ died for my sins so that I could live with Him. I can’t ignore that! He’s given me real life.”

He could hear Ava weeping. She said, “Thank you, Lord, for this answer to prayer.”

Chuck’s Jeep had nearly 187,000 miles on the odometer. The vehicle’s left-hand steering arrangement was a constant source of amusement. With amazing regularity, someone from the oil company would attempt to jump in as a passenger, on the driver’s side. This would be met with comments like “What, are you chauffeuring today, sir?” Even better was when Burroughs brought his brindled Great Dane with them on their fossicking trips. Chuck would sit behind the wheel in the left front seat, the dog would sit in the right front seat, and Burroughs and Drake would sit in the back. They loved seeing the expressions on the faces of the motorists in approaching cars, because to them it looked as if the dog was driving.

When they had begun working for Nolan, both men were in their early thirties, divorced, and recovering alcoholics. Chuck did his best to keep them away from beer. His main weapon was his ice chest, which he constantly kept full of their favorite soft drinks. For Drake, it was Bundaberg Ginger Beer, and for Burroughs it was Solo brand lemon soda.

For himself, Chuck usually carried ice-cold water in a pair of Coleman wide-mouthed backpacking water bottles that were so well worn and battered that their markings had been completely rubbed off. He found that avoiding sugary sodas was best for maintaining his desired body weight. But on particularly hot days, he liked to have a Schweppes Passiona. He tried to keep a couple of those—or the Kirks brand Pasito equivalent—in the bottom of the ice chest, but he often found they had been filched by his men.

Chuck Nolan’s employer, AOGC, had begun focusing on true rank-wildcat exploration in recent years and had started an aggressive seismic exploration program to find areas for future drilling. (A “rank” wildcat venture was exploration of a long distance from existing wellheads.) Chuck did most of his prospecting work in the Bonaparte Basin and Daly Basin, south of Darwin, or in the McArthur Basin, east of Darwin. Occasionally, he would work as far south as the Birrindudu Basin, but it was a long drive into hot and dry country, and he dreaded every trip there.

Chuck particularly liked the exploration style of AOGC in that they relied upon conventional 2-D seismic data, which required far less manpower and “men on the ground” than the large, manpower-intensive 3-D surveys he previously led back in the United States.

While some of the other seismic prospecting crews transported enormously heavy 58,000-pound peak force seismic vibrators, he preferred to work with his explosives team. Depending on the terrain, this work was less time consuming and required only a small crew and, as Nolan claimed, gave a stronger and higher-resolution image of the underlying formations. He often said: “My idea of the perfect day of fossicking is to get in and get out fast, make things go boom, and leave big dust clouds. I like to start early and get home early.”

Typically, he would go on preliminary surveys by himself or with just one assistant to survey the terrain and to lay out future seismic surveys, recording GPS coordinates along the way. Another crew would methodically drill the shot holes, in patterns of up to thirty-six bores. That same crew would also lay out the thousands of feet of cable and geophone jugs, to receive the reflected energy from each shot.

After the crew had finished, Chuck’s team would return to the completed shot holes, set up their recording instruments, and carefully lower the large Geoprime dBX explosive charges into the holes. The company had started out using gelignite, but in more recent years, partly because of environmental regulations, they had switched to Geoprime dBX, a high explosive that was specially tailored for seismic acquisition. The explosive was made by Dyno Nobel. The Geoprime dBX variant they used was packaged in thirty-four-inch-long bright yellow plastic cases that were five inches in diameter. The cases were threaded at the end, so multiple charge cases could be combined by simply screwing them together, to provide a detonation of the desired force.

Just before the detonation they would “roll tape” while igniting the charges—although in the modern context, this meant high-resolution digital recording rather than the magnetic tape equipment of years ago. Later, this recorded digital data would be painstakingly processed by AOGC’s “boffins” into 2-D seismic sections or data volume of the earth’s underlying structure, which would then be analyzed by the company to assess the economic potential of hydrocarbons in the area. In addition to oil and natural gas, the company also searched for coal and coal bed methane gas. As Nolan frequently told folks, the process was similar to a medical ultrasound, which creates an image of the internal human body. In fact, ultrasound technology was based upon oil field seismic technology.

Chuck was often called in to help with the interpretation of the data. The boffins tended to work hacker hours, wandering into the office as late as two P.M. and staying as late as midnight. To Chuck, who liked to start work at six A.M. and be home by three thirty P.M. on his office days, the disparity in hours was frustrating.

Every major oil company had a specialized seismic group in their exploration departments, and each company carefully guarded their secrets for advanced imaging and interpretation technology. One of AOGC’s reasons for hiring Chuck was to capitalize on his 2-D interpretation skills. Much like a radiologist interpreting an ultrasound or CT-scan image, Chuck had a particularly keen eye for assessing the hydrocarbon potential from a set of seismic images. Seismic interpretation was as much an art as it was a science.

Aside from Chuck, most of AOGC’s oilfield and survey crews came from bogan backgrounds, although given their high salaries, they were often called CUBs—cashed-up bogans. Chuck found their culture rather interesting. Many bogans, he noticed, had Southern Cross tattoos. The tattoo’s familiar pattern of stars from the Australian flag, however, had become synonymous with racism against the aboriginal population and their deep dislike of immigrants, an attitude Chuck openly disagreed with.

Despite their diverse backgrounds and differing opinions, Chuck got along quite well with the men on his crew. There was plenty of joking and some good-natured teasing, as well as discussions about current events, sports, celebrities, and different brands of cars. Whenever they mocked Chuck for being an American and driving a Jeep, he would crack jokes about popular Holden cars, which were either built in Australia or imported from other countries and sold under the Holden name. He was fond of saying “Holden isn’t a family name, but an acronym that stands for Heap of Lead Doing Essentially Nothing.” During a conversation with a drilling crew foreman, Chuck couldn’t help but ask, “Why do Holdens have heated rear windows?” The foreman, always game for Chuck’s jokes, shot him a questioning look. Chuck paused a beat before answering, “So their owners can keep their hands warm when they’re pushing them.”