A Matter of Physics

They took our old D6 bulldozer off us supposedly because the maintenance costs were too high, even though it hadn’t cost a penny for a couple of years! It was all part of some big plan we weren’t party to, the upshot being we shared a flash, new Komatsu with power shift and all those bells and whistles new machinery has. I preferred selecting a gear and pulling on a clutch lever, but new is supposed to be cool, eh? The only thing was, we had to share it with another forest and it came with its driver, so we had put old Mick off.

The flash machine arrived, but the driver had two weeks holiday, so I gingerly unloaded the thing off the transporter and was unimpressed using a decelerator, the opposite to a car’s accelerator! Anyway we were all in one piece! We had some urgent tracking to do so I drove the machine for some forty hours or so, learning as I went. Compared to the D6 it seemed a heavier, lumbering brute of a thing, give me a hand throttle any day.

When Dipstick arrived, I was pleased to get off the machine! I never came to know his proper name, he was dubbed Dipstick after some character in The Dukes of Hazard. Within a day or two he had flopped it into a tight U-shaped gulley, wedging him there tight as a bull’s bum sown up with a chain! We had to lift the machine by using the blade and rippers and packing logs under it. It took two whole days! I reckon to this day, once we got him turned and moving he tried his best to run me over while I was trying to guide him out! Hooks reckoned so too.

I thought he couldn’t do any harm ripping rock and stockpiling it for the crusher, but when I went to pick him up one Friday night, he had gone over the side, couldn’t back up and the only thing that saved the machine from cashing over a bluff  into the gulley, was a stout Manuka tree! It was all very precarious! Dipstick reckoned he’d jumped off it and then climbed back on to switch it off. Maybe, but he didn’t want to get back on to try to extract it. He had some urgent appointment in Dunedin so we had to leave the machine there.

I took him back to HQ and called on HJ for a favour. He had the only logging winch available within cooey, but it was on his small TD6 dozer.  We loaded it onto his old S Bedford and I trundled off leading the way. I was half expecting the Manuka to have given way, but it was still there! I hooked the rope onto the Komatsu ripper bar, but when HJ started the winch, the heavier machine pulled the smaller one backwards. While HJ scratched himself a hole in the rock to sit the TD6 in, I cranked up the Komatsu and dicky as to was, I set it reverse while HJ tried to winch me up. It was dark, snow was beginning to fall and it was cold as charity! I had shone my truck lights on the Komatsu and I didn’t like the rocking and the twinging of the rope, especially when the Manuka tree started to lurch! I hoped if it gave way, we wouldn’t both end up in the gully! But we were doing no good.

We went back down to the mill to pick up a couple of logging blocks – laymen call them pulleys. One was a double and the other a single. This was HJ’s idea. I rang Phil, a neighbour up there who owned a D6, hoping it was reasonably handy to the site. It was about an hour away from the gravel pit, so we had time for a coffee before we went back up. The snow wasn’t lying, just swirling around and we could hear the clanking of tracks meaning Phil was not too far away.

With no gloves to protect us from the cold on steel, we set up the pulleys in a watch tackle system, the single pulley onto the Komatsu ripper bar and the double one was going to be on Phil’s dozer when he arrived, which merely was going to act as an anchor. HJ parked the TD6 in a rocky depression and I parked my truck to provide light. When Phil arrived we hooked the double pulley onto him and he pulled it taunt with the thought of driving away, rather than being pulled backwards. Visibility was poor and snow was getting down my neck and I supposed the others too!

It’s a matter of physics: three pulley wheels equates one third of the work required to pull the same load. Or to put it the other way, it gave the winch three times the power! With ease, the Komatsu popped up to the top of the bank! There is some fulfillment in salvage and we all grinned but wanted to get out of there, away from the cold. We loaded The TD6 onto HJ’s truck and I took Phil to his ute, down the road, he had no cab on his dozer and he was freezing by now!

‘The good old days!’ These were the days of cooperation. There was no thought of charging for HJ’s or Phil’s assistance. Quid pro quo is how things worked with us. I had done favours for both as they had for me, we didn’t see the need keep tally. It’s a pity those days have gone! Anyway, I was dumfounded when I reported the incident to the big noise in conservancy office! Not a word of, ‘Well done!’ instead he said, ‘Silly buggers floundering in the dark and snow. You should have waited for daylight. If it went over the bank, too bad, we’d have to replace it!’

Yeah, with taxpayers’ hard-earned!

Risque Bathing

You’d think she would have at least showed some decorum! There I was plainly in sight, not only in sight but with my radio loudly on talk-back! Not three meters away, she took the time to eye me, check me out, and with only slight hesitation, she began to bathe! Every now and then she would cast an eye in by direction unconcerned at my gaze. Normally I would have lowered my eyes but her beauty was such, I just couldn’t look away!

I couldn’t resist that! I had been working in the nursery all day, while around me the birds went about their everyday rituals. There was the Kereru, our woodpigeon with blazing white breast. In the past a favourite food for Maori, but now like all our indigenous birds, they are protected. The pair fed on the leaves of the tree lucerne, and then flew onto the power lines to digest their fibre-rich lunch. Heads bobbing and cooing to the sound of the radio.

There was the grey warbler, Riroriro, with its plaintive, sweet call. Rarely seen, feeding on insects hiding among the branches and in bark fissures. Likewise the fantail, Piwakawaka, with a fan for a tail, which allows it to turn sharply in the air catching insects on the wing, I could hear its beak snapping shut! Always, good company because they flit about hoping my movement will send insects into the air. The little, green waxeye, Tauhou, a busy little bird in small flocks feast on small insects; aphids and mealybugs. They have good camouflage so you hear them before you see them. They aren’t shy, so joined me for a time.

The Tui, dressed in iridescent black with a tuft of white feathers under its chin, the obvious colonial name was parson bird. Tuis disappeared from around here for a couple of decades but in the eighties they began to rebuild, so now there is a substantial resident population. They have a noisy wingbeat and can be tuneful, mocking my whistles and the sounds of other birds. But when they really get going their song is a level that’s inaudible to me. When there’s nectar they will find it, but they eat insects too as well as berries and seeds. They are territorial tykes, which is why they chase off bellbirds, Korimako, which feed off a similar resource.

Joseph Banks, when he visited New Zealand for the first time with Captain Cook in 1769, wrote this about the bellbird. ‘…awakd by the singing of the birds ashore… their voices certainly the most melodius I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells but the most tuneable silver sound imageinable.’  Those glory days are over due largely to introduced predators; cats, stoats, rats and possums. I recall pig hunting during 1965 and 6 when my dogs bailed pigs, amid the evening chorus, I couldn’t hear my dogs barking below me for the vocalisation of the bellbirds! The evening chorus nowadays comprises only a few birds in the same area and is barely audible.

The male bellbird is a deep, glossy olive green colour with shades of purple on his face, sometimes the purple is enhanced by purple pollen of the tree fuchsia, which in season is a good source of nectar. A mate of mine did a thesis on bellbird calls, making recordings all over the country which proved they have localised dialects. The female is less flamboyant, dull olive-brown, with a slight blue sheen on the head and a pale yellow cheek stripe. Bellbirds usually mate for life.

I had been working in my small nursery listening to talk-back on a subject I had found interesting. Finished storing my begonia corms, I sat down in the last of the sun’s late autumn rays to listen to a wise authority of the subject under discussion. Not three metres away I have a half-drum, which is my water supply for the nursey and as I sat there a female bellbird landed on the rim of the drum. She was alert as all birds have to be, watchful of predators or a Tui, which is likely to zoom in on a dive-bombing raid!. Her small red eye focused on me and she changed position with a little hop to directly face me. Either confident I was no threat, or enjoying the talkback, she hopped into the water, while floating she turned to keep an eye on me then ducked under and flapped her wings in there. Hopping back out of the water she shook herself, and with the foot she either washed or expelled water from her ears. She repeated this process half a dozen times, unafraid of me but cautious. Each time before her dive, she quickly scanned of Tuis. It was a fascinating watch.

The last time she shook herself, cleared her ears, she hardly paused before flying off into the greenery to join her fellows in a search for insects.

Broken Tooth

Right from the start I didn’t much like the dental nurse tinkering with my teeth! There was a clinic at my primary school and she used to come into class to pick out her victim on what I reckoned to be a random basis. Everyone sank down in their desk when she was on the prowl! My turn to sit in that hard, wooden chair came around and I eyed the treadle-sowing-machine-driven thing she called a drill! The bloody thing slipped and cut the inside of my cheek! Ok, maybe I was squirming, but as well she had to power the drill by pumping her foot on the treadle at the same time holding a mirror in one hand and the business end of the drill in the other! Anyway she let me off, supposedly until my cheek healed! I guess she didn’t have another hand to mop my precious blood. To keep me quiet, she gave me a couple of drops of mercury to roll around in the palm of my hand, which was fun, but a bit of a health risk as well! After that episode every time the nurse popped into class looking for someone to victimise, I would puff out my cheek to let her know it was nowhere near healed.

As students do, I graduated to intermediate school where there was an upmarket dental clinic with an ancient, maiden dragon in charge of the welfare of our molars. Any wonder we called it the murder house! The drill wasn’t exactly pneumatic, but powered by electricity with strong cords and pulleys driving the grinding wheel in her hand! It had the whirring sound of speed that gave us all the creeps! Perhaps the designer hoped the machine would reduce the pain, but the sound of it became my association with pain! The maiden dragon didn’t like any of us, that was plain, to her we were all pests, so digging into our teeth seemed to give her a perverse pleasure!

Fast forward some forty two years: I was on the busy streets of Stonetown, Zanzibar looking for a battery for my camera, when in an electrical appliance shop window there was an image of Princess Diana with the dates 1961 - 1997 below! I realised then that she was dead! The next day morning we were booked on a daladala to travel to the east coast, to our beachside ‘resort’ called Page Ndame. White sand, azure sea and waving coconut palms was indeed a peaceful and pleasant setting. Women were out in the sea in their long dresses harvesting seaweed, for which they were paid a pittance. But it was their only source of income.

The staff at Page Ndame went to a lot of trouble to cook for us, because we were their only guests! Tasty and all as it was, there was an unfortunate, undisclosed bone in the meat, which snapped off my incisor tooth at ground level! We were well aware of the dentist sign along the road we often trod on our walks between The Haven Guest House and the CBD of Stonetown. So we piled into a daladala and headed into town for the repair job that was insisted upon by those with me but had my mind working overtime thinking of excuses not to have it done.

The large gate was closed, but there was a one-person-door, which was easily negotiated. Inside was a long, shady alleyway, I had to walk alone with my thoughts. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred… I knocked on the door to be welcomed inside by a pleasant Indian woman in traditional Indian dress. Cautiously I stepped inside, hoping she would not close off my escape route. She did! I scanned the surgery and was immediately taken back to the fifties and the maiden dragon! The pit of my stomach lurched and my brain screamed, ‘Run!’ The chair was the same cream-yellow colour and there was the power-drill, the same colour with the same cords that eventually drove the over-size grinder-bit! I have seen people back home nowadays using these machines to carve bone into shapes for the pendants sold at craft fairs.

The woman recognised my body language and wild eyes so she set about to calm me. She told me that she had trained in the UK and had worked in a dental surgery in London for a dozen years. So what? The machinery here isn’t being used in London these days, I bet! She told me that although she could afford a modern, high-powered, water-cooled drill the Stonetown water supply was not clean or safe enough. She didn’t even trust boiling the water so instead she used pure alcohol to sterilise her implements!

Despite all of this I bravely opened my mouth a wee bit for her! Tense I was! She didn’t offer an injection, I would have refused anyway! The drill bit was sharp and yes, the grinding was painful! I had trouble holding my head still, but concentrated hard to avoid injury to my cheek or tongue! She didn’t have the gadget the maiden dragon called, Johnny-round-the-fence, the sharp thumb-screw thing they put around your tooth before they pour in the metal that becomes the filling, so she packed it and shaped it with her fingers. No, she didn’t use amalgam, it was that flash, white stuff. Anyway, it felt comfortable and she did a good job because the mock-tooth she installed that day is still there doing its thing. The really good thing was that it was cheap!

I have a dental check-up due in a couple of weeks’ time! I will try my best to avoid it because I still don’t like them poking their way around my mouth hoping they will find crevasses in my molars to fill, which invariably empties my wallet!