A History of Mining

You are sitting in the passenger seat of a truck, wearing bright orange overalls and a helmet with a head lamp. You were looking out the window at the immaculate desolation and realised that you were not paying attention. “Do you know anything abut the history of mining?” asks the driver. Who is he? He’s driving the truck. The driver, maybe. No, wait, you already know. He works in the services department. He’s been working here for 5 years now. Here. Where is here? Norseman: one hundred and ninety kilometres south of Kalgoolie, which is seven hundred and fifteen kilometres from Perth, which is 15636.20 fifteen thousand, six hundred and thirty-six kilometres from where you are now reading your book. Or was that seventeen thousand, two hundred and twenty-six.

    So you close the book. Ah that’s right A History of Mining. It wasn’t a title that would normally grab your attention. In fact, you can’t even remember picking this particular book up. But you stop worrying about that and keep reading.

    The service worker was asking if you knew anything about the history of mining. You answered ‘No.’ Of course not, you only arrived here. Maybe twenty minutes ago. You found yourself in a plane, landing in Norseman to begin a very short lived career as a geologist. So how could you possibly know anything about the history of mining. The service worker then goes on to tell you that years ago, before water was used while drilling, the chemicals from the broken rock would float around the enclosed spaces, four hundred meters under the surface and asphyxiate the miners. They called it ‘The widow maker’, you both said together.

    You stop.

    How did you know that? You know nothing about the history of mining. In fact, you’re not even there. And you’ve never been there before, in that town, or met those people. You close the book once again and look outside. You see Finland. That’s why you don’t know, you’re not an Australian geologist. You live in Helsinki and have just borrowed the book from the library. You live in Mexico, in Guadalajara. That’s your home. Sure there are mines in your country, but you’ve never been to them. Maybe you drove past them on your way home to Cali. Of course, exploration is not Colombia’s main economy. Rain starts tapping on the window which give you no pause in your native Brazil. So finally, you’re convinced that you know nothing about the history of mining and outback Australia is a foreign and uncomfortable environment.

    “The widow maker? How unfortunate.” That’s all you can seem to think to say. It’s not much, but what else do you talk about with these people. They’re not your type. You are even convinced that their conjugation of English verbs ranks second to yours and it’s not even your first language. So who is your type here? The wife of the café owner is a closet lesbian. You find that interesting, but that’s all. It’s a little more ‘city’ you decide and leave it at that. What would you have to talk to her about, really?

    But how did you know that about the café owner’s wife? Have you met her before? You know nobody here. You’ve never even visited Australia. You turn around and see the café owner’s wife in the back seat. She must have been there since the start. You just forgot and she has been talking to you about the seedy underbelly of a town with only five hundred and thirteen people. The underbelly has already calculated that the town has the highest percentage of homosexuality per capita in the state of Western Australia. “Wow,” you reply. This you do find very interesting. “The former gardener of the primary school had an illicit affair with one of the local drunks. If he wasn’t an aboriginal the whole thing would have been swept under the rug. But we prefer to remain an underbelly.” So the café owner’s wife was making this trip in the truck quite interesting. But for the life of you, you didn’t know where you were headed.

    The west entrance to the mine. That’s it. That’s where you’re going. Just as you thought you had lost your way, you found it again. After a few more pages you come to realise that this is a common occurrence in your reading of this book. Maybe it’s just the type of book. It’s completely different to anything you’ve read before. But for the time being, you decide that you’ve had enough for one afternoon, so you go outside and play. You put the book down on the coffee table, next to the arm chair you were curled up in and go outside.

    While you are away from the book, your mother comes in the room and notices the title A History of Mining, and is intrigued. She starts reading it and enjoys the odd prose the author decided to go with (but whose name was conspicuously left off the cover). Your mother sees the book mark you left and has only a few pages to reach your mark. She increases her reading speed as the story becomes more fulfilled and rich. Then she stops and puts it down and believes that the reason you stopped in that particular place was because the author had not finished the book. After that, the pages are blank. She then returns to whatever it was she was doing before and you come in to continue reading.

    You are able to continue reading because you never looked past your own spot on the page because you didn’t want to spoil the surprise of the next word or the next line or the next page. So you keep reading at the present, never looking forward to see that blank space that your imagination is about to fill.