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Memory of the month the way things were (Part Twenty Four)

Saudi Arabia 2

Saturday 06.00, the first day on the job they put me on a vibrating roller so not too much skill needed to operate that, but as the day wore on the metal of the machine became really too hot to touch so I had to wrap my arms in rags to stop getting burned as no sun shade on it, the temperature in Sakaka at that time of year is 44c to 45c and maybe higher in the desert, other than that an uneventful day. The shower system at the house was quite good and consisted of a large water tank on the roof heated by the sun with gravity feed and worked well and was very welcome. It was still very hot at night so difficult to sleep but after a few days they got a desert cooler installed which is a curtain of cooled water with a fan blowing through it and that worked very well. My room mate was the fitter and at six feet seven, even taller than me and huge with it, and at one time used to throw the hammer for Poland.

Next day I was on a Cat grader but what they wanted me to do was beyond the machines capacity to do, that was to spread lorry loads of sand and gravel for the road bed but it was coming in too fast to cope with as the Arab drivers dumped it in a pile rather than driving forward and tipping at the same time, the trucks were filled by capacity not weight so big piles. No matter how fast I went they were just burying me, a Cat D6 would have been an ideal machine for the job. 

After a few hours I saw the American earth moving superintendent striding towards me as I was reversing at full speed in third reverse, at the last minute I thought hell he’s not going to get out of the way so stopping as quick as possible I got out and looked over the back of the machine and he was hanging on the ripper with his legs underneath, seeing me he let go and fell on the ground, getting up he picked a rock and said I’ll break your f****** leg, I said will you be buggered! I was just going to jump down on him from the back of the machine when he dropped the rock and ran, I guess he thought I looked a bit ugly, but what fool walks behind a moving machine?

I don’t even if it’s stopped with the engine running, anyway I heard no more of it so I presume he realised it was his mistake, I thought later I would have had cleared the ripper when I jumped so it was a good job he cleared off, I just carried on spreading and three weeks later they gave me his job. During the day there would be numerous vehicles driving through the desert from pickups to Rolls Royce and where you and I would go around a small sand dune they tried to drive straight through and of course got bogged, they expected us to pull them out, this took time and after a while we were told to stop and just leave them, so we did.

On the way home, we had to pass a small military base where we were stopped and arrested, ostensible to check our passports and work permits etc but it was really a message to tell us to pull out the cars, after 90 minutes they let us go and next day we resumed pulling. The police and the military are the same thing there.

Most days a dust storm blew up about 3 O’clock and one afternoon I was sent to pull out some Pakistani engineers stuck in the sand with a Land Cruiser, I was told to head for the low hills in the distance several miles away and I’d see them, crossing the desert was easy until about half a mile from them, where the sand gradually got deeper & deeper the closer I got, until I could barely get through it myself, the hills acted as a barrier so the wind dropped sand. I managed to get a chain on the truck and with a struggle pull them out, and then to my annoyance they just drove off in another direction and left me, they didn’t give a damn if I got stuck. The only way to find my way back was to follow my tracks and hope a sand storm didn’t blow up and hide them, luckily for me it didn’t.  The co-operator