This fuckup didn't happen today, it was back in 1992. But there’s a lot of stories about medical professionals and their quiet acts of often invisible heroism in the news right now. I thought that this week, I would share one of my own stories about them. Because while they are absolutely heroes in our midst, some of those life-saving stories and incredible acts come with a laugh or two along the way.
These laughs, as they often do, come at my expense. It’s a price I gladly pay to give you a much needed moment to breathe in all of the hell we are enduring together throughout the world right now.
Enjoy, Chris
Yes, I know, I’m a complete fucking idiot. Let’s just get that out of the way from the start. My only defense was that I was a teenager in the 90's at the time, and my dick was doing most of the thinking for me. On the whole, I’m a reasonably intelligent guy. My dick however, is much like one of those morons you meet who is all balls, no brains. Despite the fact that thinking with my dick got me through highschool at the top of my class, it has proven itself repeatedly to have no memory, no conscience, and what I will simply classify as “questionable moral fiber”.
An obscure, late 20th century English philosopher known for his ballistic dentition once said “Dicks have drive and clarity of vision. They’re not clever.” and he was correct. But like most people who are all balls and no brains, that kind of decision making invariably leads to collecting good stories, and occasionally being scarred for life.
This is one of those good stories, and it’s about a scar.
I was sixteen, vacuously stupid, and the world as I knew it revolved entirely around my radiant affections for one hell of an awesome girl. She was short, beautiful, built like a soccer player, and had curves in all the right places. Miraculously, she was also my steady girlfriend. We had a magnificent system that involved a standing weekly date. This almost always consisted of exactly three things: dinner, a movie, and the furious, passionate, awkward sex that only inexperienced young lovers can have in the contorsionistic confines of an automobile.
Good times.
On the right day of the week you could catch a 2nd run movie at the Alpine Twin for just a couple bucks. Urban sprawl hadn’t reached far enough yet to consume all the best spots for privacy, and we knew every one of them. It was a great time to be young and in love.
God is not without a sense of humor, however, and one particular week fate would throw me a curve. A movie had just come out that her father wanted to see. In a tormentative moment of parental schadenfreude, they decided it would be a great idea to join us on our weekly movie night for a wholesome double date.
I was trapped. I couldn’t say no, her dad was a towering giant of brooding scowls who instilled the fear of God in me. He was an incredibly kind and funny man, but he commanded my respect and there was absolutely no doubt he held the fate of my love life at his whim. I was a nerdy, country kid from the wrong side of the tracks and he made it very clear that I was dating his daughter only so long as both her and him deemed that acceptable. She adored me, he tolerated me, and it was my lowly position to be grateful for the opportunity.
I was fine with that. I was spending every Saturday night with her sowing my wild oats, and going to church every Sunday with him praying for crop failure.
So we all met at her house, the whole family piled into their car, and off we went. We didn’t go to our comfortable, low-budget, second-run theatre out on the north end of town with the thin crowds that encouraged sitting towards the back well away from anyone who could see wandering hands and notice the whispers of young lovers. We went out to the fancy first-run theatre, the gigantic cineplex and shining star of the lower west side, Studio 28, where we would be packed side by side with strangers and held to much higher standards of socially acceptable behaviour.
Studio 28 was massive. Thousands of people filled its acres of parking lots and watched the latest movies on twenty different massive screens with reclining seats in air conditioned comfort. One movie cost more than what we would spend for a month's worth of dates at Alpine - including food. But her dad was funding the entire expedition and I was happy to just be with her.
My lovely girlfriend however, was a hormone-driven, devious genius, and happened upon a simple idea that changed my life forever. She noticed that they list not only the start times of the movies, but the duration as well.
It had never for a moment crossed my mind that we didn’t all have to go to the same movie. Studio 28 was so massive that not only did they have a ton of different movies playing, many of them shared the same start times. She found a completely different show to catch, sorted out the details with her dad, and off we went on our own. She had stared into the bleakness and brilliantly wrought forth for us the greatest commodity of young lovers who live with their parents: privacy.
For such a monumental day in my life, I don’t even remember what the movie was. But I do remember spending an hour and a half in the dark getting each other as worked up as we dared. The lines of socially acceptable behaviour were a lot tighter back then, but we were enjoying them to the best of our youthful ability.
Our movie got out, and we made the long walk to the back-forty of the parking lot hand in hand and hopped in the car. We had no concrete idea when her parents' movie would get out, so we were just hanging out, waiting, and of course sharing only the most chaste and pure of good Christian thoughts.
Just her, me, and our collective sexual tension that burned with the power of a supernova. It really was only a matter of time before it all reached criticality.
Because sitting in a glass bubble in the middle of a thousand cars is totally the best possible place to be doing such things. I was a little on edge, but that didn’t stop her. It certainly did, however, limit our options.
The good news was that I at least had a clear line of sight all the way up our row, and would easily see anyone approaching from the theatre. I kept a watchful lookout, and she decided to take action.
In a matter of a few seconds, she was sucking my dick like it was filled with her father’s acceptance. Not a moment later, I saw the crowd of people start pouring out of the theatre doors. It didn’t take me long to spot her parents, hand in hand. Her dad’s bright blue shirt stuck out in the crowd, even though they were still a quarter-mile away.
And then, at that exact moment, is when I fucked up.
That’s when I did one of the dumbest things in my entire life; I made a split-second trivial decision that would leave me scarred forever.
Now, what I could have done is simply reach down, gently pull her head out of my lap, and have a mildly disappointing end to some fun, gone on with my day, and been just fine. Hell, given how far away they were, the hair-trigger of a teenage boy, and her skillful abilities we could have likely finished without pushing our luck.
The problem with wisdom is that you don’t get it until five seconds after you need it.
What I did, in a moment of youthful stupidity, was say “Your dad’s coming!” and sit up straight in my seat.
And that, my dear reader, is the exact moment that shit got real.
Please understand that what I’m about to describe is much like a car crash. It will take me far longer to describe it than it took to actually happen. All of this transpired in just a moment, but that moment is burned into my brain forever. I apologise now, that it shall be burned into yours. When you share this story with your friends, you’ll know they got to this part when you see them adjust themselves in their seat. No man is immune to this effect.
In one smooth powerful movement driven by pure reflex and fear, without a moment’s conscious thought, she snapped her head up, bolted upright in her seat, and while making that transition from laying on me to sitting next to me she stuffed my dick back into my jeans and ran that fuckin zipper all the way home with the power of an angry linebacker.
The problem is I had never unbuttoned my pants, and it was a lot smaller when it came out ten minutes ago than it was when she decided to cram it back in through, what was now, much too short of a hole. She fought it in there in half a second, it just wasn’t situated as well as it needed to be.
Then, with the delicate touch of a bricklayer she had yanked that zipper though several inches of my most delicate sensitivities and made me one with my Levi’s.
It happened in the blink of an eye.
I was absolutely convinced I was going to die.
The pain was far worse than what you imagine right now. It was radiant and consuming. She had caught roughly…very roughly...the entire front of the most sensitive skin I own and interlaced it down nearly the full length of the zipper. I could glimpse a thin line poking out the front, and there was nothing I could do about it but sit there with tears running down my face and her parents approaching.
She immediately knew what had happened, subtlety is not a skill I possess even on my best days. I think it may be when I levitated, shooting to the ceiling, howling in pain that she got her first hint that something was wrong. She was mortified, I was in agony, and the shitshow had just begun. I untucked my shirt to cover the obvious injury, and wiped my tears.
It was hard travel across the great prairies of the parking lot. I heard they lost five good men, and at one point had to start eating the horses to survive. But eventually, months later, her parents finally made it to the car.
The first battle was the parking lot. Several hundred people had all gotten out when we did and had to find their way to the exit. It took half an hour of stop and start agony while we all shuffled into place and trickled out onto 28th street - a bustling busy main thoroughfare of the lower-west side.
And the fun was just beginning.
Florida makes oranges, Idaho makes Potatoes, and Hollywood makes movies. But Michigan, we make potholes. Northbound 131 is a washboard of suspension testing craters that can knock your teeth loose. Because of the complicated interaction of freeze-thaw cycles, capillary action of water retention in asphalt, and the fact that we run snow plows for a third of the year there is a regular pattern of patched sections on the highway spaced at predictable intervals for miles on end.
And I felt every one of those sonsabitches as we launched and bounded from pock to pock, all along my dick.
It took about thirty minutes to get from Studio28 to their house. That was the longest half hour of my life. I felt every bump in the road in between my own heartbeats as I throbbed in agony sitting awkwardly in the back seat. The only saving grace was that her and her mom were making small talk about the movies they had each seen and my opinion didn’t matter. I sat there sniffling and rubbing my swollen, red eyes. When her mom asked me if I was okay I uttered the only word I could manage on the entire ride home.
“Allergies”.
We made it to her parent’s house, said our goodbyes, and she walked me across the street to my car. It took more work to get into my mom’s old boxy beige Pontiac Grand Prix than it did to get out of her parent’s SUV, but I made it, tenderly.
Mission two accomplished, her parents had no idea. So that crisis was averted.
Now, I had to choose. I was on the edge of The City. If I went East, I could fight my way through traffic to the giant gleaming state-of-the-art hospital located right downtown and wait in line in the emergency room. If I went West, I was heading towards home and in my own small country town was a little Med Center staffed with only a handful of people whose main job was helping people with minor bumps and bruises, and keeping the critical patients alive long enough for the ambulance to get there and haul them off to one of the much larger neighboring cities.
I headed towards home. It was farther, but faster. I hopped on I-96 and blasted into the night more scared of hitting a deer than being pulled over for speeding. I figured if any cop pulled me over, all I had to do was show him my situation and there wasn’t a man in the world who would fault me for being in a hurry. I had a much higher chance of getting a police escort to the Med Center than getting a ticket, so off I went as fast as Mom’s old Pontiac would carry me.
I arrived without incident and walked gingerly through the front door. I’d never been to the Med Center before. My parents were on the rescue squad of the local volunteer fire department so anything short of a sucking chest wound in my house was dealt with by someone running for the jump-bag in Dad’s truck. Any sort of injury was handled on only the best of equipment: the kitchen table.
Life’s different in a small town.
That’s why I wasn’t even slightly surprised when I walked in the front door and the triage nurse at the front counter stopped typing, looked me straight in the eye with genuine concern on her face and said “Chris, are you ok?”.
It was my mom’s friend. Not only did this woman know me, she’d known me since I had training wheels on my bike. I knew she was a Nurse. Half the women in my world were Nurses, my mom was a Nurse. She worked at a nursing home filled with other Nurses. How the hell was I supposed to remember that one of her best friends just so happened to work at the Med Center.
I should have gone East.
“No Ma’am” I said, and quickly added, wincing, “please don’t tell my Mom”
“What happened, show me what you did”
Now, I grew up around trauma and emergency medicine. Back then they were dispatched with one-way pagers the size of a brick that looked like walkie-talkies. There was only one channel for the whole county, and every department had its own unique series of musical tones that told us who the message was for. It squawked and whistled all day and night and you never even noticed it.
But when the BEEDEEBEEDEEBEEDEEBEEDEE-DOOOOOOOOO-----DEEEEEEEEEEEE sound that designated our unit came over that radio, it would take you out of a dead sleep before they got to the “COOPERSVILLE UNIT TWO-OH-FIVE” part of the message and Mom, Dad, or sometimes both, were headed out the door on a dead run before it stopped talking.
If this happens while you’re out somewhere with Dad in the truck, you’re along for the ride. It was somewhere around age twelve when “stay in the truck” just didn’t work for me anymore. I’d learned where babies came from by watching a screaming Asian woman have one on the tailgate of a Subaru in the McDonald’s parking lot. I’d seen bodies mangled and I knew first hand why they called the people who ride crotch-rocket motorcycles “Organ Donors”. I’d learned the smartest and most heroic humans alive fly in AeroMed, and I knew that rescue crews have no problem working up to their elbows in your blood and then going out for pizza half an hour later. It’s just meat.
I was also well aware that the strongest, hardest, most stoic, most unimaginably un-fucking-fazed woman you’ll ever meet, is a Triage Nurse.
So I lifted up my shirt.
And, for just a moment, I saw her humanity crack through her professional stoicism.
I pray that you go your entire life and never once hear a Triage Nurse say “Oh Dear” when she looks at whatever injury you have. It’s up there with getting a prostate exam and hearing the Doctor behind you say “Aw, fuck!”. You don’t want any part of this situation.
There was no paperwork, and my ass never touched one of the beige plastic chairs in the tiny waiting room. She stood up and walked me through the door behind the counter and ten seconds later I was sitting on the crinkly butcher paper of an examination table with my legs dangling over the edge.
A Nurse who was only ten minutes older than I was came in just a moment behind me. Thankfully, I didn’t know her at least, but I’d have liked to under different circumstances. She held a BP cuff in one hand and a clipboard in the other and asked me how I was feeling and if I had any allergies. We chatted for perhaps a whole minute before she asked me what was wrong.
I lifted my shirt.
She took it well, just a tiny gasp before she got her shields back in place. But her blush betrayed her. She held tight to her professionalism and assured me that the Doctor would be right in as she stumbled gracefully backwards out of the room. However, I did notice that she never did get my BP, temp, or anything else.
The Doctor was indeed, right in. I had been sitting there less than five minutes when he strolled into the room and said “So, I hear you’ve had an interesting evening.”
He pulled up a little rolling stool, put on a pair of gloves, and scooted up for a front row seat between my knees as I sat sideways off the edge of the table. We discussed how I had gotten myself into this situation, and he surveyed the damage. I found it ironic that the one person who had shared this experience with me and who could truly appreciate what I was going through was the one person who was completely at ease with the situation. Of course…..it wasn’t his dick.
It was also the first time I’d gotten a real look at things myself, and it was worse than I’d imagined. The skin on the bottom of my shaft was peeking out through the golden teeth of the zipper all the way from about a half inch above the bottom of the zipper to the top. There was way more blood than I had noticed at first and it had stained my pants several inches in every direction. The total zipped length was nearly five inches, and it was under tension on the inside because the standard response to pain is for your dick to shrink up like a stack of dimes.
The added effect, because my brain is an asshole, was that the pain just intensified once I got a look at it.
He pulled out a pair of trauma shears and we discussed what he was going to do about half a second before he did it with a running commentary. He planned on cutting my pants off around the zipper. I was fine with this, off is good, let’s get this off - free me from my golden restraints good Doctor!
Deftly, gently, and with surprising ease the shears sliced right through the seams and folds of my jeans. He cut the bottom through several layers of denim and seams straight up to the base of the zipper, and sheared off either side about four inches away, leaving me with two flaps joined only by the teeth of the zipper and the button on top. He spun on his wheels, reached in the third drawer behind him, pulled out a pair of cutters like I would have in my toolbox, and snipped off the bottom half-inch of zipper entirely. It fell to the floor and landed with a wet plop.
He gently unbuttoned what was now a much smaller piece of my pants, and examined it closely for a couple minutes with a flap held in either hand.
Then he said something you never, ever, want to hear any manner of medical professional say to you.
“We’re gonna go on three...”
We’re…..WHAT!? Where? Whatthefuckare...
“One”
There was no motherfucking Two. Three was an outright lie.
The way out was as blindingly fast and traumatic as the way in. The entire process was loud, a wild blur of motion, and terrifying. In what I have absolutely no doubt was a process he had experienced before, he tore apart the two halves of my zipper with the haymaker strength of a farm boy and kicked himself away from the side of my examination table with both feet to send himself rocketing backwards across the tiny room well clear of the wild reflexive punch I swung through the space his head had occupied a split second before. He landed in a heap, half fallen off his rolling stool, with a piece of my jeans in either hand and an accomplished smile from ear to ear.
That all happened in less than a second. It took exactly the amount of time it took me to say “MOTHERFUCK-....eh?”
The good side is, it didn’t actually hurt all that much when he did that. The bad side was, the blood was now rushing to my dick and it was throbbing with every heartbeat. It hurt like all hell.
We both took a moment to compose ourselves and both spoke at the same moment, saying the exact same thing.
“Are you alright?”
I looked at the sad strip of hamburger laying in my lap, surrounded by a terrifying amount of dried blood in matted black hair. It looked like Edward Scissorhands had given me an old fashioned.
“No?”
I had visions of sutures, staples, and all forms of Spanish Inquisition cock torture that I was about to endure and was blissfully thankful that all he needed to do was clean everything off and tape a strip of gause to it. After the most unpleasant experience I’ve ever had involving my dick being cleaned, complete with being hosed down with Betadine, now it I just looked like I’d fucked an Oompa Loompa.
I asked what would happen if I got a hardon, would I bleed to death or something? He assured me that the last thing I was going to get in the immediate future was an erection. After a few days it would be fine all on its own.
I thanked him for saving my manhood, secured my pants with my belt, hid the giant square hole in front under my shirt, and headed home. I tossed my shredded jeans in the trash, took a shower that involved the creative application of a baggie and a rubber band that moments before had been holding the wing on my model airplane.
He was right, I didn’t have any danger of getting a hardon for over a week. The throbbing pain became a dull ache that would hover just on the edge of being actively conscious of it. Sleeping was complicated, but I managed. After a few days it didn’t hurt at all, and a couple weeks later I was back to normal. In the third week a full operational test proved that all repairs had been completed and that all systems were operating within nominal specifications.
But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I let a woman zip me up again. I’ll take care of that on my own, thank you.
The scar is considerable, tapering to half an inch wide at the base and running front and center along the bottom of my shaft up to the tip. It’s been the topic of more conversations and won more stupid bets than I want to think about. But it’s part of me, a part of my life, and I’m just thankful that despite the relentless abuse and poor decisions my dick has endured, that all in all, things are working just as they should thanks to the compassionate care of a young country Doctor and a small team of Nurses.
Thank you to everyone in the medical profession, of any rank and stripe, for enduring all that you do to help us fumbling idiots live to see another sunrise. You are awesome.
With my kindest regards, cb
---------Addendum Edit, Because holy shit my inbox.
In the end, like all good stories, things actually worked out alright. Her and I resumed our weekly Pontiac wrestling match and eventually as we gained wisdom, experience and the seasons turned warmer, found several much more comfortable places to explore each other’s bodies. All in all we dated for a little over a year in total. Our relationship ran the natural course of typical highschool lovers, and ended just as it should have. We both ended up dating each other’s friends, such is life in a small town, and went on with our lives.
Her Dad never really did like me all that much, and that’s ok. I was a shitty teenager and certainly didn’t have the best of intentions for his daughter. That’s ok, she wasn’t nearly the good little girl he thought she was. But we were, on the whole, decent kids and we came out alright. He was a good and righteous man and was worth my respect; though I wouldn’t learn the true depths of that until I gained a lot more maturity. He died years ago, far too young, from a heart that wasn’t worthy of the love he carried for so many people.
She’s married now, with a couple kids and what I hope is a good and happy life. I haven’t talked to her in decades, but I sincerely wish her well.
I healed up just fine. This all happened back in 1992. Over the years the scar has faded to being something that’s still there, but hardly noticeable. It looks more like a shadow now, or a slight discoloration. You can still spot it, if you look, but it’s something that doesn’t get mentioned by anyone unless we’ve been together for several months and they’re really exploring my cock. I have to think it’s fine now, as I’ve been complimented many times on it’s appearance.
I’d like to thank the many people who have read this and commented on my writing. I’m just starting out on the path to being an author, and I’ve been posting my stories here on Reddit to see if anyone liked them. It turns out, you really do, far more than I imagined. With all of my heart, thank you. Your support and enjoyment of my dopey stories means far more to me than I can adequately express. I’m still learning how to find my voice, but you’ve certainly helped me along on the path.
If you enjoy my writing, there’s much more of it out there, and even more coming. Check my profile and you’ll find half a dozen other stories scattered about the Reddit universe. You're welcome to follow me or friend me on here if you wish. I would be sincerely honoured and I'm working to earn an audience, and even someday a paycheck. You’ll also find my YouTube channel (I make science and technology educational videos as my day job), and my Patreon if you’d like to support my work. I’m a full time YouTuber now, and for the past year. Though after your responses to my stories lately, I think I’ll add Author to that as well.
And for the ridiculous number of people who have begged for a goddamned pic, fine. Go to Imgur, it's /a/WbCHtEw it's VERY NSFW
Yes, that’s really me. Yes, it’s real. No, I’m straight, but thank you.
TL:DR - A bit of adventuresex at a movie theatre resulted in a blowjob and I get zipped up epicly. Had to go to the Dr and learned my mom's best friend worked there. I was scarred for life. It's a long story but worth your time, read it, you'll like it.
submitted by Continuing… That being handled, I leave a wakeup call for 0430 as I want a shower and a couple shower-sunrisers before we leave. It takes me about 10 minutes to pack. I call home to let Es know what’s going on. She’s not in, so I leave a message. Same for my friends Rack and Ruin of the Agency. They’re thrilled so far with my reports.
The security forces here are absolutely going to freak if they reverse-review my phone records once we leave.
Covert? Schmovert. I’m too old for playing such games.
The next morning, after a sudsy shower and a couple of vodka-infused shower-beers; I’m in the lobby with all my kit, checked-out, and waiting on the tour leader. My passport was stamp-stamp-stampity-stamped here at the hotel, which I thought was weird, but after spending time in this here country, not all that unusual.
At 0545 on the dime, the tour bus pulls into the lot. Without a word, bellhops grab near all my kit and escort it out to the waiting bus.
After tipping each extravagantly, I fire up a huge cigar, and wander around outside, loitering by the bus. I see members of my team at the front desk, checking out. Everything’s been paid for already, they just have to sign documents that they’re not secreting hotel towels or televisions or errant nationals in their luggage.
It’s a weird country.
I see them loading box breakfasts for us as well as box lunches on the bus.
Hell, they’re actually doing ‘field trip’ correctly.
If the bus us fueled up, we can go for days at this rate. There are several coolers bearing the hotel’s brand and I sidle over to see what they’re carrying.
Case after case of iced-down beer and a couple of cases of various high-octane potables; and over there? A couple of boxes of mixers…ah, soda…pop…carbonated citrusy goodness.
“OK”, I sigh, “All is as it should be. Now the field excursion may begin.”
My teammates filter outside as does their luggage. I suggest they get out and keep what is necessary for preliminary outcrop excursions; such as a backpack or knapsack, hammer, acid bottles, field notebooks, Brunton compass, lighters, cameras, personal tobacco products, and the like in the bus. That way, we don’t have to go tearing through all the luggage at every stop.
I pull out a bundle of 100
Hubco™ large geological
dual-sample bags. That’s right: ‘dual’ sample…
I distribute these to everyone on the team. I ask that they devise their own numbering system and make absolutely certain I have a copy of it when we’re done. I’ll be correlating and curating all the samples when we get back to the world.
I ask that a cooler of drinks are left on board the bus, rather than in the hold. It’s humid, sticky, and muggy today. We must expend valiant effort in remaining hydrated and this will help.
Luckily, the bus has on-board lavatory facilities.
We are seated on the bus, my 10 collective team members, myself, our 4 ‘guides’, ‘Yuk’, ‘No’, ‘Man’, and ‘Kong’; our driver, relief driver, one incredibly shy national geologist, Myung-Dae Soo, and four of the shiny suit clan.
The hotel wheels out a large cart laden with pastries and a huge coffee urn. A bit of a “
Bon Voyage” from the casino and bar crowd, as they put this together for us when they heard we were leaving.
“Hey. That’s really nice of them.” Dax notes.
Dax handed over our raw “elevator waiting” funds as we didn’t have time to run it through the casino-machine before we left. We donated over 75,000 won to our friends at the bar, casino, and massage parlor. The ones delivering our going away present assured us it would be divided equitably.
“It best be”, I laughed, “You never know when one of us might be back!”
There was a collective horrified look on their faces for the merest moments. Then they all laughed and said that they hoped we would return someday soon.
“Nice folks”, I thought, “Stupid as shit country, but nice folks.”
We had all separately left tips for the room maids, bellmen, and matrons back before we checked-out.
There was a flurry of handshaking and goodbyes. Not a bad hotel experience here in the so-called land of Best Korea.
Serious dark coffee was passed out amongst the riders, but Ivan, myself, and Dax were already giving one of my emergency flasks a workout.
Ivan smiled and said: “We drink our coffee the
Russian way. That is to say we had vodka before it and vodka afterward. HA!”
Ivan and I are cut from the same bolt.
Faux-doughnuts, pseudo-bear claws and fake-long johns all distributed; the bus is fired up, and rumbling. We are exhorted to watch our drinks as we pull away from the hotel and into the wilds of Northern Korea.
I’m humming away:
On the road again -Just can't wait to get on the road again,
The life I love is bashing rocks in the field with my friends.
And I can't wait to get on the road again
On the road again.
Goin' places that we've never been,
Seein' things that we may never see again…
--
“Rock?”, Dax inquires.
“Yes?” I reply.
“Do please shut up.”
“Music hater”, I muse and comply.
We’re rolling down the highway, as it were, headed generally north. We all have cameras of one kind or another; and rather than relieve us of them, they quietly and without much fuss, slowly darken the windows.
They claim it’s to keep the sun out and temperatures down, but just before things go all black, we’re seeing sights and scenes of the true North Korea. They’re trying to keep us from seeing that en route to the outcrops.
This new bus has some sort of electronic tint-control gizmo for the windows. However, if one has a pair of polarizing sunglasses, as all good field geologists do, you see right past that and can view the passing scenery unencumbered.
I return from a quick beer-recycling loo trip and am amused to see 10 Western scientists, sitting in a blacked-out bus, all wearing polarizing sunglasses.
It was just the surreal note this trip needed as we left the confines of the capital city.
We traveled north, and the empties pile began to grow. We had a few trash bags we had liberated from the hotel, but the shiny suits were very insistent that every empty can, bottle, and bag, yes they had beer in bags…had to be repatriated to a box in the far back of the bus.
Evidently, they either were paid a bounty on each container or were accountable for each vessel. They were soon to realize just the capacity for drink that a group of 11 seasoned very Senior Field Geologists, and one stowaway geologist-in-training can amass.
As we ply our way northward, we see the agricultural side of North Korea. The contrast between rural areas and the capital was striking. There were miles of rice paddies being harvested by people with sickles in their hands. And no cars on the highway. It was most destabilizing for this Westerner.
I think we saw a maximum of three tractors, as most of the work was done with ox power, there was very little evidence of rural electrification. Oh, hold on. We saw many more tractors, I should correct that: we saw three
running and not rusted
into oblivion tractors.
The farmers we see are using equipment that is quite literally medieval - single-share plows pulled by large, cranky bovines; sweeping sickles to bring in the harvest, and twin-engine, bilateral, botanical-fired ox-carts to transport it. It’s hard to believe that this third-world level of poverty exists in the same country that’s capable of building rockets, nuclear weapons, and tall, well-appointed hotels.
But when we stop at a motorway service station for fuel - a bizarre alien spaceship-like building squatting over the empty carriageways - we do encounter a
jangmadang, or semi-official market. Here they are selling cans of knock-off Vietnamese Red Bull and Malaysian-made King Cobra™ Cola.
It reminds me of Russia right after the wall fell. Off the Trans-Siberian Railway in Krasnoyarsk, the Gateway to Eastern Siberia. You can buy Chinese hams, Chinese sodas, Chinese knock-off liquor, and those bloody delicious little bullets of Vitamin-C, Chinese mandarins.
Here, it’s similar. You can get most anything you desire, except it isn’t of Korean manufacture. That stuff is even too shitty to pawn off on tourists.
Instead, it’s knock-off Malaysian, Chinese, or Indonesian beer, wine, or soft drinks.
“Tiger-brand energy drink. Now with 40% more real tiger.” Here? I believe them.
Vodka from everywhere not known for its vodka distilling prowess. Rural hotel shops sell nastily stale crisps, gummy gummies, filling-ripping ‘chewy’ taffy or caramel, and biscuits with a severely limited choice. Rural hotels do not have full electricity so beer is warm and often tossed on the table, waiting for tourists to arrive - as is the food. We were warned to be prepared for cold rice, cold fish, cold potato – and plenty of kimchi and tofu.
Back on the road again, we’re passing small burgs that are not on any of our maps; even the ones we traded for back in the hotel that are specially marked: “For Internal Use ONLY!”.
They were amazingly the same. Clean. Bright. Uncluttered. And attended by cadres of prim, uniform-clad, though non-military people. They were all doing a day’s work keeping everything neat and clean.
There were no cars, trucks, forklifts…only rickshaws and ox-carts. However every one of these ‘towns’ were identical, and exactly, as Ivan pointed out, ‘X’ number of minutes apart.
“Watch! Is so!”, Ivan said. We passed one of these villages, and exactly 3 minutes later, an exact copy. Three minutes later? Another one. 3 more minutes? Xerox-city.
“What the fuck?” Dax asked.
“Potemkin village.” Comrade Dr. Academician Ivan replied.
A Potemkin village is any construction, literal or figurative, whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country which is faring poorly. It is for making people believe that the country is faring better, although statistics and data would suggest otherwise.
“Russia pioneered the process,” Ivan noted with no small amount of pride. “During Cold War with West, entire cities were built, moved, raised, and razed. Ever hear of Krasnoyarsk-25? Atomic Research City? Supposed place of weapons study and manufacture. Huge ‘accident’. Entire city demolished, total populace relocated supposedly, after massive nuclear calamity.”
“Is that true? Cliff asks.
“No. Not at all.” Ivan smiles, “Deliberate misinformation. At least for K-25. It was diversion for actual towns where accidents; nuclear, biological, or worse, had happened. West so concerned about K-25 because it was big, near big capital city of Krasnoyarsk and suitably located out in the taiga. Easy to spot, easy to watch. Kept Western satellites busy while real towns of I-33, U-10, and AR-13 out in the forest were quietly demolished and people relocated or mass buried after some horrible, horrible accidents...”
“You think it’s the same here?” I asked Ivan.
“No, Dr. Rock”, Ivan smiled, and helped himself to my freshly constructed, but untouched, Yorshch, “This is all fake and bluster. Make West think everything is all A-OK, is that right idiom?”
“Yep.” I reply, “Precisely.”
“Make West believe all is OK and green”, as he winks at me, “And bustling and growing. Cover up what is real case here. We all see it and we see right through. Shoddy even for Asians.”
We all had to snicker and smirk as the shiny suit squad, who sat up at the front of the bus, and were not supposed to be listening; reacted like every cell in their bodies were just hit with a drop of pure lemon juice.
“Comrade Dr. Academician. Decorum, please.” I snickered.
“Oh, fuck them!”, Ivan replied, “I am old Russian. They try and pull burlap over my eyes? St. Petersburg? Moscow? Krasnoyarsk.? I’ve been there, seen them. They think this display of tawdriness…Even goofy American and Canadian can see the fakes they are. Britisher? I’m not so sure…”
“Damn, Doctor., I said to Ivan, “You’re just making friends all over the planet today.”
We all knew it was in jest; but the shiny suit squad certainly had their feathers ruffled and either didn’t care or wanted us to know we were under their observation.
“Fuck them twice”, Ivan said, “Ask them for bottle opener. I’m too lazy to search for my field jackknife.”
I hand him my pocket Leatherman and he pries the top of another bottle of ‘Budveiser’ beer.
“They can’t even make fake the name correctly”, he smirks and drains the bottle.
‘Town’ after ‘town’ and even that parade gets uninteresting. We’re headed north and finally come to a crossroads.
The bus driver, who must be a regular paranoid-maniac because he actually stopped to look for oncoming traffic, which we have seen precisely none since leaving the capital city, made a hard right. We’re heading back and up into the hills, leaving the bright lights of the big city far behind.
After an hour or so of driving, we pull off to the left-hand side of the road.
“Rock, Ivan, Cliff…holy shit, look at this!” Dax was uncharacteristically excited.
It was an open field that leads to a series of low outcrops of polychromatic, obviously sedimentary rocks. Magentas, greens, purples, rust-reds, browns, blacks, olive greens…holy shit. A real sedimentary pile.
We filed out of the bus with our field gear. The shiny suit squad started in with a bullhorn.
“You will wait for tour guides!”
“You will listen to group leaders!”
“You will not stray from the designated paths set up…”
No one heard them as the group of 11 remaining Western geoscientists were already across the highway and hieing for the exposures like outcrop-seeking multiple-warhead re-entry vehicles.
“You must wait!” we heard from exasperated voices back at the bus. “You must stop!”
“You must piss off!” Cliff said, “This is what we’ve been waiting over two weeks to see!”
“They are very angry with us”, Myung-dae the young Korean geologist said. “I find that just too bad.”
“And you are?” I asked.
Myung-dae Soo, the young Korean geologist, introduced himself.
“Well”, I said, “Welcome aboard. I’m Dr. Rock.”
“They are very, very angry”, he repeats.
“So? Are you tagging along to give them internal reports?” I asked.
“No, Doctor”, he replied, “I too am a geologist. I want to get away from those assholes and see some real rocks.”
“Who are you with?” I ask, “What group?”
“I am 5th-year student at Pyongyang College. I am not
officially here. We were told in class that you were coming. I decided to see if I could join you. This morning, I was standing by bus and they thought I was hotel worker or orderly. I was given cooler full of beer and told to find place for it on the bus. I did and after that, just stayed in the back. I am stowaway. I am ashamed, but I had to see for myself. But, I like Western field trips so far!”
“No shit? Well, then”, I said, “Double welcome aboard. None of this ‘I am ashamed’ shit. You’re a geologist, but you haven’t even worked through your first field-evening get-together with us. But this is no pleasure cruise. It’s real work, real geology, real serious science shit. You savvy?”
“Yes, sir, Doctor Rocknocker from Sultanate in the Middle East.” Myung-dae smiled.
“And you fucking stay close to me”, I smirked.
I fired a couple of
BLAAATS! from my portable air horn.
“Field Meeting! Field Meeting! Assholes & Elbows!” I called aloud.
Everyone gathered within earshot.
“OK, guys, here’s the deal. We do not know how long we’ve got here. So, let’s split up into teams. Geophysicists, go do your structural thing. Stratigraphers? Field relations. Geologists? Let’s go talk to some ronery-rooking-rocks. No offense, Mr. Myung.”
Myung-dae was laughing up a storm. He got that reference. He later told us all around the campfire he thought ‘Team America’ was a “fucking hilarious movie.”
Oh, we are going to be a
real bad influence on this poor kid.
The groups spontaneously broke up into 4 or 5 sub-groups. They headed for areas they thought were important and they were photographing, measuring, pounding on rocks, and arguing within minutes.
“No, you idiot! It’s continental. Look at those adhesion ripples.”
“The fuck you know. It’s only a little low-level eggbeater tectonics. Where the fuck would you get continental collision-size energy around here?”
“Oh, the fuck you say. It’s non-marine. Those are mud cracks. Look at the sandy aeolian infill, fer chrissake.”
Formal? Proper? Detached Doctors of Geology?
Not when you’re in the field. It all goes out the window when different opinions collide like subducting plates.
“The music of my people!” I said to Morse.
“I thought that was the ‘Safety Dance’?” he chided.
“We’re a big family. We can have more than one.” I snickered.
We’re wandering around the site, with individual purpose.
We are looking for or looking at
items of interest.
We’re hacking at the outcrops.
We’re all looking at…
things.
It’s hard to describe. Get a load of geologists or geology students out of the office, lab, or classroom; stick them out on a bare expanse of heavily weathered rock and it’s simply…numinous.
We’re rebuilding worlds here.
This rock says this.
This rock says that.
And you’re not fluent in that dialect. Here, let me interpret for you…
We’re at each other’s throats, in the academic-metaphorical sense. Tempers have been known to run hot. There has been the occasional bloody nose or rocks sailing down an outcrop without the obligate “HEADACHE!” call. Hammers and Marsh Picks have ended up swimming without the owner’s knowledge.
But once we’re back; settled in the hotel room, tavern, or around the campfire, we’re all a Band of Brothers again. It’s an odd thing to watch; as if you’re not of the clan, you’d need an interpreter. It defies all boundaries: political, sexual, educational, geographical, linguistic, social,
et cetera.
We’re all geologists first. We share the common scientific bond of Geology.
That’s why Geology is
the First Science.
Plus we tend to drink a serious fucking whole bloody awful lot.
We’ve all been on that ‘crawlin’ home puker’.
We’ve also been to the ends of the earth: the deepest depths, the highest heights, we deal with the greatest pressures, the hottest temperatures; we’ve been to the mountain, we’ve seen the elephant, and we’ve held a bear’s nose to dogshit.
We wear the scars attained in our travels like badges of honor.
We’re God-Damned
Scientists.
Back off, man.
Geologist comin’ through. Anyways, I’m looking at the bedding-plane boundaries between the purple unit and the underlying olive-green unit. The upper unit it looks, to me, continental in origin. Fluvial, perhaps. The lower unit is much finer-grained. Marine mudstone, perhaps? But what age?
The cadged Korean Geological maps are worse than useless. They never would go down to the outcrop scale. Consulting them, they don’t even note these exposures in a field sense.
Myung-dae, who is working about 35 meters down-section from me calls out, “Doctors! Sirs! Look here! I’ve found something!”
We all wander over as he is hacking away at the dusty, eroded rock. He stands and dusts off his find.
It’s a very large, nearly 1-meter diameter, coiled fossil cephalopod.
I wander over for a closer look. Dax, Cliff, Morse, and Ivan do as well.
“Blimey! Will you look at that? Outstanding, Mr. Myung!” Cliff says.
“Well, that confirms it. This layer, at least, is marine. Look at that suture pattern”, I say, dusting off an unweathered bit.
“Look at the radius of coiling.”, Cliff joins in.
We’re slowly wresting information out of this silent witness.
“Ornamentation?”, Dr. Ivan asks. “Knobs, bosses, and excrutions?” Oh, yes.”
In unison, we declare: “
Hyphoplites!”
Morse adds, “And therefore…these rocks are middle Cretaceous. Marine. Not bad…”
“Need to get some samples for geochemical analysis. Dig deep, gentlemen, we need unweathered samples for TOC (Total Organic Carbon) content.”, Dr. Erlen Meyer notes.
With that, we have a relative age of the rock, a good idea of its depositional environment, and therefore extent, ideas of field relationships, and an indication of some of its fauna.
Could it be source rock worthy?
Samples? Best get diggin’, Beaumont.
That unit is right smack in the middle of this pile of rocks. Dax and I will work up-section and Ivan and Cliff will work down-section. We’re going to see what lies above, what lies below, what trends we can discern, and develop an idea of what happened here some 100 million years ago.
This is what happens when you get geologists out in the field with the proper amounts of field gear, outcrops, and alcohol.
Overall, the deeper down-section, and therefore, earlier in geological time you go, the more marine the rocks are. Conversely, the higher you go in the column, i.e., up-section, into younger rocks, the more continental it appears.
We find fragments of marine fish fossils, sea-crocodile scutes and teeth, heaps of mosasaur coprolites, i.e., fossil shit piles, and other indications that the lower, older rocks are Lower Cretaceous ocean basin-fill.
But up higher; we find mud cracks, rain prints, land turtle shells, land-snails (
Bellerophontid gastropods), and what may actually be a fossil feather. All indications of a more continental, i.e., fluvial (river), floodplain, lacustrine (lake), and paludal (swamp) deposition.
That’s my particular bailiwick.
I’m ‘elephant walking’ along the upper outcrops looking for fossils. You basically bend over at the waist and sweep from left to right as you take exaggerated step after step, scanning the ground looking for…well…it takes years, but once you see it, you never forget it.
“Fossil sign”.
A disjunct endemism. Something not
in situ. Something
out of place. A bit of a different, out of context color. Out of context texture. Out of context size. Out of context
context.
Something that looks like it shouldn’t ought to be there.
I’m picking up 1 cm. square hunks of what look like an ordinary rock. I taste them. Well, I stick them to my tongue. If it liquefies and runs away, it’s ordinary mudstone, shale, or the like.
If it sticks…well, it might just be fossil bone.
“PTWTWOO!”
“Damn right, Rock”, Cliff says from behind me, “Fucking North Korea tastes terrible.”
“Still, it’s the best way I know to…” I paused.
“Got something?” Cliff asked.
“Look here.” I said, “Anthill. Big, nasty buggers. Look around the edges. Pieces of flat, cream-colored rock on this gaudy purple stuff. Tongue test? They stick like cockleburs. Let’s look upslope, see if there’s a drainage…”
There it was, a nice little drainage incised about 1.5 meters deep into the nearly horizontal rocks we were walking on.
“Any float?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Cliff said.
We followed the weak, little drainage that was cut into the outcrop, up another couple of meters.
There were very scrappy, very small, very scattered pieces of that same cream-colored rock. Some were ornamented with a scroll-work or some sort of striations. Most un-geological. More biological. We followed the trail, up here, around here, over there.
Cliff noticed it first, a soccer-ball sized lump of completely out-of-place crème-colored ‘rock’ working its way out by gradual erosion of the variegated pastels of the continental rocks upon which we were treading.
I got there first and began to clear the area with my Estwing.
“Careful. Careful”, Cliff admonished.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mind your Mincies. [Mince pies = eyes]”, as I’m swinging away at the reluctant, reticent, rocks.
The excavation grew, slowly. From the rounded dome, we could see small sutures that had developed…
Then condyles, fenestrae, then more ‘bone’. Then a jaw, teeth, vertebrae…
“HOLY DOUBLE-DAMN SHIT!” I tootled my air horn. We needed the group to see this.
It was a skull. A dinosaur skull. A small, non-avian dinosaur skull.
Everyone has crowded around and looked at the small quarry we had just built.
“Whatcha got, Rock? Cliff?” Joon asked.
“Fuck me, but I think we’ve got us a dinosaur skull,” I said.
Professor Doctor Academician Ivan walked over and cleared the area.
As Professor Emeritus, he had pole position priority.
“I agree.” is all he said.
I cleared the area and let others take a whack at opening up the quarry.
We may have been low on power tools, but we had a surfeit of opinions.
“OK,” I said, “Let’s look at the facts…”
- Age? Cretaceous. Probably lower to lower-middle Cretaceous.
- Continental deposits. That’s very fine sand we’re hacking away. Fluvial, without a doubt. Or, possibly aeolian; there’s no such thing as a geological certainty. Dunes? Ephemeral creeks? Low floodplain? Geo-talk… .
- Small size. Potentially a juvenile?
- Nope. Not a juvie. Sutures are closed, fused. This is, well was, an adult; perhaps a subadult, given its size.
- In situ? In place? Or washed in?
Hard to tell when all you’ve exposed is half the critter’s brain box.
“Look at that!” Myung-dae exclaimed, “Squamosal bones and the inner parietals…temporal fenestrae. It had a frill; a small one.”
“OK,”, I said, looking closely at the exposed scrappy remains, “Fucking-A Bubba. Nailed it.” I said, giving him the thumbs up.
“Ceratopsian. Look at those greens-grinder molars. There’s some small osteoderms on the skull; knobby old bastard. Early critter.” I continued.
Others looked around and confirmed my observations.
“Reminds me of
Protoceratops from when I was back in Mongolia,” I said.
Dax chimed in with, “Looks something like
Psittacosaurus from back in the Cretaceous Belly River of Canada.”
Drs. Ivan and Morse agree. “Most assuredly. It is definitely proto-ceratopsian. Young adult, as Dr. Rock notes by the cranial sutures. Do they have a record of proto-ceratopsians here?”
Myung-dae replies, “I have read reports of Korean proto-ceratopsian found in South Korea. Not long ago, 2019, it is called…ah…
Auroraceratops. It is a genus of bipedal basal neo-ceratopsian dinosaur.”
“Bipedal?” I query. “Well, there’s a fine how do you do. All the proto-ceratopsians I’ve known were obligate quadrupeds.”
“Well”, Ivan, Dax, Cliff, and Morse agree, “That should give the shiny suit squad something to report. That’ll keep them the hell out of our hair for a while.”
We photograph each step as we excavate the critter. It’s more or less
in situ, buried where it fell. Probably killed by a sand slip off a dune, or a river sandbar slip and burial. It’s not complete, but we do have the skull and a good portion of the post-cranial elements to about just before the pelvis. A good pectoral girdle, skull, jaw, frill, forelimbs, forefeet…easily half-a cute little herbivorous dinosaur. About the size of a smallish Highland Coo or large Great Dane.
We flag it with the team particulars, it’s GPS position, and carefully rebury the animal. We don’t have any of the equipment nor time to excavate it properly, but we can conserve it. Of course, we’ll be informing the proper authorities of our discovery.
I have an absolutely ancient Polaroid instant camera. Before re-internment, I take several pictures of our “
Koreasaurus”, as we’ve dubbed the animal, with items for scale; like a hammer, cigar, and oddly enough, a photographic scale. Then I get a photo of the whole crew standing around, drinking warm beers from their individual day packs, smiling about the find ‘they‘ made.
We hear the melodious tootle of the bus’s horns. We make sure to pack out all our trash and wander back to our terrestrial transport.
“You were gone too long!” the chief shiny suited character goes all ballistic on me.
“Watch yourself, Herr Mac.”, I calmly said, “You’re going to burn your nose on my cigar.”
“You left without your handlers…err…guides!” he fumed.
“Hey, Scooter. Cool out. We’re geologists. We never get lost.” I said.
It sometimes just takes us longer to get back than it took us to leave…
“Your impertinence will be reported.” He smoldered.
“Report this, Mother Chuckler”, I observed and held out the pictures of our newly discovered
Koreasaurus.
“Show those photos to
your handlers,” I said in a mocking tone. “We found a brand new species of God-damned dinosaur for you geezers. It took us less than two hours. You can spin it that it’s a new, never-before-seen species of very specialized dinosaur found right here in beautiful Korea del Norte. Be quite the scientific coup, don’t you think? Trust us. We won’t say anything.”
He immediately shut up and went into conference with the rest of the shiny suit squad.
“Doctor”, one of the clan covert asked, “This is a new dinosaur?”
I had a thunderbolt of an idea.
“Oh! Yes, it is. I’d stake my reputation on it. You’ve had no concerted search here for the beasts and well, with the normalizing of relations between your country and the world, it allowed your specialists to perform real science. In fact, on the bus is the young North Korean geoscientist who made the discovery.” I said. “Give me a minute. I’ll go and get him. I think he was off taking a shi…ah, using the lavatory. Just give me a minute.”
I did have an idea. A wonderful idea. A wonderfully evil idea.
Back on the bus, I ordered the doors closed.
“Gentlemen! Ears and eyes! Please.” I said loudly.
Continuing…
“The shiny suits have their knickers all a-twist because we don’t want to listen to them; the assholes. Fuck that. I’ve got an idea. Let’s make our young acolyte here, Mr. Myung-dae Soo, a national hero. He would probably get his ass in a crack for sneaking on board the Western bus today the way he did. Well, double fuck that. Let’s all say
he found the dinosaur. Let him take the glory for the homeland. No one else will ever need to know.” I said smiling.
“Fuck Yeah! You bet! Замечательное! Ihmeellisiä! Maravilhoso! Geweldig!”
Good to know we’re all on the same page. Geologists. You can always count on them…
“Mr. Myung-dae Soo? Front and center. Time to go and become ‘Hero of Best Korea’.” I smiled.
He was absolutely terrified.
“Doctor…I …don't…wait…no…” he stammered.
Cliff, Dax, Ivan, and I trotted him out to confront the shiny suit squad.
“Don’t worry, Myung. We’ve got your back. Trust us.” I said in a low conspiratorial tone.
The shiny suit squad turned as one and gave Mr. Myung the Stink Eye treatment.
“Here you go. The man of the hour. Mr. Myung-Dae Soo, young geologist and up and coming paleontologist.” I say loudly and with the utmost honor.
They look at him and the Korean erupts in rapid-fire staccato bursts.
Cliff just wanders in and interjects, “Yes. Righto. Top form. Found the float. Tracked down that dino like he was on safari. Highest marks. Good man!”
Dax adds more fuel to the fire. “Like he knew where to go, knew where to look. He’s a natural.”
Dr. Academician Ivan blustered forth: “Excellent scholar. Excellent field man. Banner geologist.”
I couldn’t have added more. The shiny suit squad was gobsmacked.
I asked Myung-dae what they were saying.
“They were talking about reprisals. Reporting to authorities. Then, they stopped. You have them completely confounded.” He said.
“How so?” I asked, quietly.
“Between an international incident where we don’t listen to our handlers and this potential important scientific discovery.” Mr. Myung-dae reported, trying hard to parse the evolving situation.
“Yes”, I added to Ivan’s bluster.
To the shiny suits: “I’ve worked as visiting Dinosaurian Vertebrate Paleontology Curator at all the major American museums. This is a find quite unlike anything known. It is a watershed discovery. It will help unravel the evolution and distribution of the clan
Dinosauria for the whole Korean Peninsula. Perhaps, even with international impact on the recent finds in China.”
I laid it on with a trowel.
I hit all the buzzwords.
“Yes. Yes, perhaps.”, the head shiny-suiter said. “I will report this bit of very good news to the proper authorities. Myung-dae, with us. We require more information.”
“Ah, we’d prefer him to ride in back with us if you don’t mind. Scientific courtesy, old man. He needs to be classically de-interviewed after such a find.” I insisted, making certain I stand as tall, wide, and menacing as possible while smiling like a damned Cheshire cat, one smoking a very large cigar.
“Very well. We are not far from our evening stop. We can talk later.” He agreed.
We all moseyed, laughing silently, back to the bus; literally supporting our young hero Mr. Myung-dae as he seemed to have gone all wobbly of late.
Myung-dae was ashen-white. He looked like he had just given birth to a basketball. He was visibly shaking.
We get on the bus and I whip up a stout Yorshch for the young hero of the hour.
“Here! This is for you. If you’re going to be a world-class geologist, you’d damn sure better start acting like one.” I smile broadly.
There were hoots, cheers, and cat-calls.
Beers were popped, bottles uncorked; cigars, cigarettes, and pipes lit.
“Damn Skippy!” some anonymous reveler added.
Myung-dae slurped a good half the drink. I offered him a cigar. He stopped shaking enough to accept the novel offer.
Remember “crawlin’ home puker”? He’s taken his first step into a larger world.
OK, just to recap. Here are the
dramatis personae left on the bus…
Bus driver (Kim) and his relief (Won).
My team and I. That’s 11 Western geoscientists: Morse, Cliff, Volna, Ack, Viv, Graco, Erlen, Dr. Academician Ivan, Joon, Dax, and myself.
Then there are our guides: Yuk, No, Man, and Kong.
Our stowaway hero geologist-in-training: Myung-dae Soo, aka, “Mung”.
And the four members of the shiny suit clan: Pak, Mak, Tak, and Jak. At least, that’s the names we used when we addressed them.
The bus was rumbling down the deserted highway. We were headed more or less due east, passing the occasional Potemkin Village. They knew we cracked their code long ago, so they didn’t bother with darkening the windows any longer.
We are passing a series of highway road cut outcrops. We’re only going approximately 35 or 40 miles per hour. Suddenly, Morse jumps out of his seat and runs up to the driver.
“STOP! STOP! Back up! We almost missed it!” he barks in heavily Russian inflected English.
The driver, shaken to the core, just slams on the brakes. The bus grinds to a stop. Good thing there’s no traffic out here.
Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Jak of the suit clan jumps up and asks “What is the problem?”
“How could you miss that?” Morse shouts. “Huge fault. Mineralization. I saw that from a glimpse. We must return to investigate.”
“Is not possible. We have appointment at the hotel.” Jak replies.
“Fuck that!”, Morse shouts. I guess he’s just really into faults…
I wander up and try to defuse the situation.
“OK, guys, cool out. Let’s be reasonable. Do it our way. Go back to that road cut. We spend a half-hour there then we go on to the hotel. The hotel will still be there when we arrive, won’t it? Even if we’re a bit late?” I ask.
Jak looks to Pak, who converses with Mak and Tak. They know they’re outgunned.
The driver shifts the bus into reverse and we
back down the luckily deserted highway over a mile to the outcrop in question.
We had to admit, it was a mother beautiful normal fault. In perfect, textbook cross-section.
Morse and Joon were on it like white on rice; given the mineralization along the fault plane. All sorts of implications for the thermal and geological history of the area. But with just one exposure like this, more or less just a real interesting geo-oddity.
We spent precisely 30 minutes at the exposure, and when our handlers requested we re-board and head to the motel, we complied like nice, normal sort of folks.
I believe the appropriate maxim here is: “Lull them into a false sense of security…”
Once more down the road we travel. Beers popped, bottles uncorked; you know, the usual.
Forty-five minutes later, we pull into, I kid you not, a replica US of A 1950s
Motor-Inn.
“Mr. Myung”, I ask, “What the hell is this?”
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