I reached the mine site

This morning I managed to sleep in until 4am, and roll out of bed at 5am. It's almost the time I want to be getting up at, another day or so and I'll have adjusted I think. Now it is 7pm and I'm feeling pretty tired already, but I've got a fair few things to get done before I can go to sleep, this post and some work-related activities, and trying to get my camcorder to take photos.

After waking and getting ready, having breakfast, then the 7am team conference call, I headed out to the mine site. It's about 15 minutes from Gallivare, so nice and close to get to. The sun was actually out yesterday evening... by this morning though it was back to the drizzling rain. I drove out to the mine site, and got let in through the turnstile and waylaid people until I found the building containing the person I was after. Inside, I walked into peoples offices until someone took me to the one I was after... and she wasn't in yet. I wandered around saying hi to everyone until one person stopped and stared, then I knew I'd found my mark. "Strange man in building, must be the foreigner". Everyone has been very friendly and approachable, lots of smiles and greetings from strangers, it's been pleasant.

Only a couple of funny phrases I heard.. one was "hold your thumbs", which had the same meaning as "cross your fingers", and the other was where the term "floaters", being used to describe everyone who wasn't fixed to a crew which works a specific shift, was translated as meaning "transvestites". Well, you know those truckies...

After some hours of discussions and initial reviews of the new software, I had lunch at the site's cafeteria. Uninspiring Sausage was on the menu! After ducking into town to get some DVDs for my camcorder, I got taken on a tour of the site, in a truck down into the pit. Down, down and down, into the deep pit through the rain and mud. There was little activity, an enormous rope-shovel was spinning back and forth on the spot, it wasn't clear what it was doing... but this machine had a shovel big enough to scoop the vehicle we were in right up. We went near another inactive shovel, but there were active rockfalls happening around it so we didn't chance going near it to climb aboard. On the other side of the mine we finally saw some of the trucks in action... enormous things, the wheels are literally two storeys high, and each truck has 8 wheels. They carry 50-100 tons per load, and I got to see some of them being loaded up and dumping their loads into the crushers.

When I was young, and we were living in North Luffenham in England, my father took my brother and I out to an abandoned dragline. It was the biggest machine I'd ever seen. I still remember it vividly. It was so big it didn't have wheels... instead it had legs, two on either side and a pedestal in the middle. The whole thing moved by walking, one enormous step at a time. This particular machine was sitting abandoned on one side of a valley, near a roman aqueduct. Several times we went out to visit it, and managed to break into it. We explored around the inside of the machine... I remember bats flying overhead in the engine chamber, and the crackle of mica insulation under our sneakers. I remember climbing up to both of the pilot cabins... one on either side, they kept in touch with each other through radio, because there was no one vantage point which could allow a single operator to pilot the machine effectively. The boom out the front of the machine seemed to be a hundred metres long, and a cut-off power cable that trailed from the machine like a tail was as thick as my thigh.

Now, over 20 years later, I'm seeing these machines again, alive this time, instead of decaying in a field. There's something about standing next to a bulldozer that's so big it could literally tip a suburban house over. The "Big Iron", as they call it in Cat. I've not yet fully grasped what it is that impresses me about these machines, but I do get a sense of awe and excitement being around them. The people I'm working with seem to be surprised when I express anything regarding it... I think they've been exposed to the huge machinery for so long they're no longer awestruck. Perhaps it will pass in time... I hope not though.