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The ground shook October 2nd long before we noticed the cloud of dust on Gobabeb's afternoon horizon. Piqued, along with a few other staff, I wandered from my office to the front of the station. I squinted into the gravelly North. Five miles away, above the layer of undulating desert heat, a twisting wake of dust crept into the air. As time passed the rising spray grew nearer. Before the cloud wailed a pick-up truck, dwarfed by an ensuing trailer. We knew, inside the belly of the beast, shifting the gears and manning the helm, sat Visser, our new Center Services Manager.
One night soon after Visser's arrival I ran into him on my way from my office to dinner. He extended an invitation to his newly furnished pad for a whiskey on the rocks. Although hungry, I couldn't refuse. We trod the sandy path, chatting about cars, deserts, and our respective countries.
Half an hour later I sat in his living room, he stood behind his handcrafted bar. My glass rested empty on one of the four glazed elephant-foot tables, cropped about 50cm or so above the ivory nails, that completed the room. I was about ready to go. I stood to say goodbye, but Visser wouldn't have it. He prefaced the next stream of words with a wild grin.
"Before Gobabeb, you know," he began, "I was helicopter dropped in Western Sudan, 200km from the nearest electricity, with nothing but a doctor, a diesel truck, and brick machine."
"Mmm," I said, not having heard this story, but thinking of the far exit and my dinner.
"The American military asked me to build a base, right on the sand, right in the middle of the desert, during a civil war. I said 'no problem.' I had to recruit all the laborers from the nearby villages, but I couldn't speak a word of Arabic. Can you believe it? I had to teach them everything using nothing but my hands." His gravelly voice rose in timbre, and my interest grew.
"No translator?"
"Nay, man. They didn't know what a brick was! I had to teach them. They had never seen a straight line before! I had to teach them. They only live in grass huts. Nothing but sandstorms and donkeys out there."
"How long were you in Sudan?"
"Eight months. I had eight months to build a whole, functioning military base from rocks, sweat, and sand, all by myself. And I finished the job on time." Now he paused for a moment, and his eyes glistened, "By Christmas, I'm going to turn this station upside down. Gobabeb will be running like a well-oiled machine."
***
Last quarterly report I mentioned the impact a goat can make on a station as small as Gobabeb. Well, bigger things have happened since then. Visser has been here for almost two months. A few hatched schemes: twin towering pygmy river-wood obelisks, kilometers of secret underground tunnels, a Gobabeb bandstand (for a Gobabeb band as yet unformed). Visser's first week was spent compiling a meta-tome of fix-it jobs. He is a man of action - his breath rolls like a diesel engine, words fall from his mouth like bricks from a kiln. I have no doubt his time at Gobabeb will unfurl like a great epic.
I know where Visser is coming from. Ambition rides easy at Gobabeb - unrealized projects with huge potential lurk like ghosts in the station rooms. Take, for example, the dried husk that was once our solar desalinator. Or our outdated website. Or our unanalyzed, disorganized water consumption readings. (Just a few of the projects I've signed on for but haven't begun). Straight outta college, recent grads - most of the Gobabeb staff - are especially prone to snatch up any alluring project in sight, and the assumed workload can border ridiculous.
That being said, cool projects like planting desert tomatoes are but a fraction of my day. A note to future Gobabeb applicants: your work hours are filled with pixels and plaster, keyboards and meetings. As true with any job anywhere, there is a swamp of incumbent duties you must wade through to reach to any real business. One example of bureaucracy turned perilous happened a few weeks ago, when I had to clear my schedule for a four day (!) driving course for certification to drive Gobabeb vehicles.
Meet Hans, driver instructor from the nearby town of Walvis Bay. A religious soothsayer with a pot belly that boldly struts the line of physical impossibility. With God at his side, he ushered myself and other Gobabeb staff away from our offices into the treacherous terrain of Namibia's road system.
Time: 8:00am. Setting: Gobabeb parking lot. Mission: My first Namibia driving test-run. In between speed bumps, we reviewed the rules: hands in the 10/2 position; elbows 15 degrees; check the mirrors every 8 seconds; and most importantly: never ever exceed 60 km/h. Hans was careful to stress this. National law. Also, he mentioned, normally, we should have working doors (our "Bucky," or pick-up truck, had two out of four), working lights (only had the brights), seatbelts (he couldn't fit into his), water for the radiator (two Cola Lites), a first aid kit (nope), and a tool box (definitely not).
Five minutes into the initiation, I was starting to relax and get used to the whole opposite side of the road thing. The hardest part was changing my mental space of the car to include a passenger at the left, and not to the right. Other than that, it wasn't too difficult. I was taken aback when he suddenly shouted: "GO! GO GO!! GO!"
"Whaaa?"
"Push it! Push it! Go! How do you do under stress?! 100. Go over a 100. GO!" He was really worked up now. Startled and confused, I pushed it. 80km/h. I glanced at him, and flipped the stick up into fifth. 90km/h. I edged past the 100 km/h threshold, he said, "Good," and calmed a bit. Skittering along now, silent, intensely focused, I was veering between granite humps and away from sand patches at an uncomfortable break speed. The ride wasn't a smooth one, but I was surviving. I was waiting for him to tell me to slow down when the boom happened.
BOOM.
The boom was followed by a raucous scraping. It sounded like the entire engine had fallen out of the car and was being dragged over the dirt road. It sounded like this because that's what had happened. We skidded to a stop and jumped out of the car. Running outside, we saw that the gas tank and a few nearby organs had slipped from their fastened positions. Diesel was gushing from the wounded underbelly of the truck; Bucky was disemboweled. I bolted, and was 20m away and running when he shouted, "Get Back! There's petrol leaking out!"
When the fiery flare-up seemed unlikely, we cautiously approached and shoved a few small boulders underneath the tank to prop it up until gas stopped pouring out. I pondered the situation. We had precisely no water, no cell phone service, my one leatherman, and were about 40 km from Gobabeb in the middle of nowhere. The afternoon sun was starting to get damn hot. I thought to myself, this is how dudes die. After a ten minute brainstorming session punctuated by a few "woooo....man's," we looked for (material) salvation in the pile of junk in the truck's back bed. Rummaging, our best options were to cut my seatbelt or using a few old rubber belts to fasten the tank to the truck's bottom. "Let's try the rubber belts first." I scooted under the car, and wove the rubber in and out of a few secure-looking rods. The tank was loose, bouncy, and drippy, but seemed high enough to miss the ground and strong enough to stick. We drove home at a tense 40 km/h and I got my driver certificate a few days later.
Sacrificing an entire work week to Hans was worth the ordeal, although we had no more near-death experiences. The following month I was able to transport my five GIST students on a ten day excursion to Rossing Uranium Mine, one of the biggest Uranium pit mines in the world. Through sheer fortune, this field trip culminated perfectly the end of my students' stay at Gobabeb, and their practical focus on environmental impacts in the Central Namib.
Alongside three professional "Biodiversity Assessors," my students and I were charged with designing "quick and dirty" projects to help quantify the soon-to-be-obliterated faunal diversity in Rossing's expansion areas. Watching me manage five students in the field no doubt evoked images of attempting to herd cats. Yet ultimately, things went swimmingly. After each brow-mopping day, five Namibia students, one American, and three South African scientists gathered about the campfire and reviewed our happenings and hindrances. Over meals of "Corned Meat" (ingr: "hearts," "mechanically deboned poultry," preservatives), mayonnaise, and Rooibos tea, we uttered things like, "Dave, did you find your Sparassid today?" "The night is young, friends! Who's coming bat-netting with me?" "I nearly stepped on a six-eyed crab spider today." All the while, over the nearest marble ridge moaned the Uranium mine that never sleeps, casting a reminder of looming destruction over our band of comrades (with restless clanking and
dynamiting that sharply recalled Frodo's foray into Mordor). Our discussions bounced from daily trials like foot blisters to complex debates like national mineral right ownership in a recently post-apartheid system. Animated late-night cross-cultural exchanges like those at Rossing justify the absurd hoops like driver training and paperwork that are so common at Gobabeb.
To my horror, the half-way point impends. Or, in the words of Jaimie, "It's already been five months! We're practically half-way! If you round to the nearest year, that means we're already done. GAAAAAA!!!" The time is nigh for me to make like Visser, assess my ventures, chose a handful of noble pursuits, fill out their budgeted cost-benefit SWOT board-approved analyses, and check them from my list. Until next time, over and out.
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