Day 261 | passing the days in Alice: just getting stuck into the muck
One thing cycling touring prepares you for is extended periods of tedium, at least with these long, vacant, distances across Australia, where you are forced to engage, or is that disengage, your mind and entertain yourself, which comes in useful in my current vocation.
I’m engaged on a high rise construction site, yeah, even here in Alice, admittedly it’s only 4 levels, a $40m project, being built by a Korean speaking construction company using Singapore architects for a Malaysian syndicate using the United Nations of workers, but it’s already one of the tallest buildings in town with another level to go.
The boss is a Korean and half the workers are non-English speakers of similar origin, but the foreman, the one aware of the local building process and regulations, is an Aussie, a Good Bloke.
My team is a motley collection of Bogans, (rednecks), who are engaged in concreting and wall construction. There’s a few hard drinking locals who have worked for all the other building companies in the lower half of The Territory and ended up here as a last resort having exhausted possibilities elsewhere, some hard drinking, older, imports from the depressed region south of Sydney, and a collection of hard drinking youthful, coarse talking Irish backpackers.
Oh, and there’s me, who rolled up on a bicycle and asked for a job.
It’s a disparate lot, if you end up doing building works for a Korean company in Alice Springs, well, ambition ain’t your primary driver.
It’s a standard 9.5 hour day, just the 6 on a Saturday, which makes having much of life beyond problematic.
Lunchtime conversation is usually in the vein of: how much their wife/partner hates their (excessive) drinking, bring me another one, love; maintenance payments for seldom seen children to different mothers; how to fit a snorkel to your 4WD, I’ve learned they ain’t much good for dust evasion, rather they concentrate the particles and the air filter clogs up real quick, you just need them for driving through deep water, not a whole lot of that around Alice and, an unspoken subtext, looking masculine; the merits of various 1970s cars, whether the 2 door Charger trumps the HO, or GTO; cracked pistons and running the car on 7 cylinders, etc, the consensus is cars are a money pit almost as deep as the wife/partner, ie, it’s all a bit blokey.
We’re up pouring concrete on the roof currently: big, hard slog, days.
There’s few more explicitly Y chromosome style activities on the planet, other than warfare and, maybe, a footy Grand Final, than laying vast tracts of concrete, testosterone a major ingredient to the brew, the Alpha males instantly sort themselves out, the pecking order readily apparent: Number One Male on the end of the gushing concrete pump pipe, boom at full stretch, oblivious to the symbolism, self awareness ain’t a common commodity out here; Number 2 leading the screeding, Number 3, the one with the brains, organising the concrete levels; Number 4, it’s quite a cast, on the vibrator; then the assortment of the less charged, the less experienced, mostly with shovels and red faces, all attempting to prove their manhood, but actually the objects of derision due to their incompetence or lack of the ability to sustain the hard yakka standing around furiously in the muck.
Key to fitting in here is the ability to work with a sardonic ciggy clenched in the teeth, or, just hanging from the side of the mouth. If you touch it with your hands it’s generally between thumb and forefinger, often hidden by the hand, the psychologists would make quite a bit from that display behaviour.
It’s brutal, physical work for the blokes, 6 or 7 hours on the go once it commences with little respite, no lunch, a gruelling pace.
In these temperatures, ie, hovering around 40°C, even with the retardant additives there’s only just enough time, any mistake has considerable consequence.
When the rush is over Number 1 and 2 stand around laughing about the minor disasters that have been one way or another overcome and direct the traffic, Number 3 gets to spray some fluid on the rapidly hardening surface, Number 4 invariably ends up wrestling with the helicopter. Those lacking numbers find ways to get rid of the excess concrete, clean the screeds, shovels, etc.
For the most part I’m an observer, clear for the outset that I’m somewhat of an intruder in this world.
My task is usually to direct the concrete pump boom, ie, signal to the pump operator 4 storeys below, where to move the boom with the 4 inch hose and most important when to cut off the flow. Qualities required that are in short supply around here could be easily listed: not being easily distracted, no phone calls, or, more usually these days when talking to someone is somehow much too direct, no texting, no rolling of cigarettes, no idle chatting, disappearing briefly, or just vagueing out.
My success in this post has been the ability to discern and interpret whatever random movements, flickers of the eyes, or gestures, might mean and then direct, or kill, the pump accordingly.
I’m really living out this Jack London style Little Adventure out here in the middle of not much at all.