Rock Doctor

John Cater

Description

This is the tale of fifteen humorous, heart-breaking years, of the journey of a lifetime, from Tibetan India to the Anti-Lebanon Mountains of Syria. A tale of oil exploration, with love, humility and the companionship of some of the world's hardiest nomads discovered along the way. It is the story of some pioneering and sometimes misguided journeys through the amazing world of the Middle East and Indo-Pakistan, before the political upheavals of the 21st Century. A world where it was still possible to play a drum solo in a Sufi temple, share a goat with Pathan tribesmen, guide a helicopter down on a Turkish threshing ground, eat sheep's brains at 16,000 feet and crawl though Roman sewers on the abandoned edge of an apocalyptic war. The crying shame is that nearly all of this story is no longer possible. Above all this is a true story, to remind people of what can be, even if we can never rebuild what was.

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• Travel writing
• Geology

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 04 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800466425
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Rock Doctor

Copyright © 2021 John Cater
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1800466 425
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
In memory of Waterman Sergeant Len Cater, Royal Army Service Corps. As brave as any I ever met.
And Connie, his wife, who put aside religion for love.
Contents
Don’t Get Me Started… Oh – Too Late
Chapter 1 Before 1985
Chapter 2 Central Turkey, 1985
Chapter 3 North-West India, 1986
Chapter 4 South-East Turkey, 1987
Chapter 5 Yemen, 1988
Chapter 6 Nepal, 1989–1990
Chapter 7 Syria, 1991–1992
Chapter 8 Pakistan, 1993–1994
Chapter 9 Oman, 1995
Chapter 10 Azerbaijan, 1997
Chapter 11 Russia, 1998
And Finally…
Don’t Get Me Started… Oh – Too Late
It’s 1992, just after the First Gulf War. Me and Big Steve, my very good Irish friend, are sitting in a Syrian Army tent. We’re sort of under arrest, on the orders of one of the fifteen kinds of Syrian secret police. Actually, we’re being held on suspicion of spying, but luckily the Syrian squaddies feeding us dusty almonds don’t think we were actually looking for the Scud missiles that we’ve just seen, parked in a massive bunker on the other side of the ridge.
Of course, they don’t know that we know the British Military Attaché, having met him in the best pub in Damascus, the undiplomatically named Pig & Whistle, in the basement of the British Embassy. One beery evening he asked us to look out for Scuds on our travels, and we promised to keep our patriotic eyes open. Luckily we’re too naive and stupid to be worried about the electric shock therapy awaiting us back in town, so everyone’s chatting, relaxed and friendly, while our cameras are taken to Damascus to have the film developed.
All of which probably sounds too bizarre to be true, in this modern world of satnavs and YouTube. There was a lot more left to the imagination back then, so field geologists could be blissfully ignorant of political reality, even when exploring the borders of Lebanon, Yemen or Pakistan. We got by with a few armed guards to keep any bandits at bay and a willingness to meet the locals on equal terms. Which I did for fourteen eventful years, until those planes hit the Twin Towers and brought our simple, carefree world of tolerance crashing down.
This is the story of some pioneering but sometimes misguided journeys through that amazing world. I’m certainly nobody’s idea of an action hero, but I can truthfully say that I played a drum solo in a Sufi temple, shared a goat with Pathan tribesmen whose ancestors had slaughtered mine, guided a helicopter down on a Turkish threshing ground, ate sheep’s brains at sixteen thousand feet, and crawled through Roman sewers with my wife-to-be on the abandoned edge of the First Gulf War. And I’m pretty sure that most people given those opportunities would have done much the same. The crying shame is that nearly all of this is no longer possible. Perhaps my tale might remind people of what can be, even if we can never rebuild what was.
Alison, my first boss and the daughter of a colonel in Britain’s special forces, might not approve of me using some people’s names here. Still, many of them have long since retired or died, and the companies involved have mostly disappeared, so I’m sure my story won’t hurt anyone. Anyway, who’s going to believe it? Well, luckily the secret police did. They took one look at our boring pictures of barren hillsides, notably devoid of Scud missiles, and sent us on our way.

Chapter 1
Before 1985
Hi there. I’m a Rock Doctor. There’s hundreds – maybe thousands – of us, but not many call themselves that. Maybe they’re too modest, too proud, or too boring to bother with that sort of thing. Maybe.
Whatever. The point is, we Rock Doctors all have doctorates in Earth Science. Mine was awarded by a couple of generous professors (one aptly named Friend) in Birmingham in 1984. Having had a careful look at what I’d been up to over the previous four years, they did whatever you do to allow someone to call themselves a Doctor. Which had nothing to do with my medical ability, as we shall see.
My training, if you can call a PhD that, took place largely in the provinces of Alicante and Valencia in south-east Spain in the early ’80s. Most of my time was spent biking around on a series of knackered motorcycles, living in a tent, struggling through gorges choked with thorn bushes, and learning the Valencian ‘Balensiahn’ dialect whilst shopping for Spam and curry powder in the local markets. My only experience of ‘doctoring’ consisted of self-diagnosing and treating heat exhaustion, tummy upsets and the scrapes I picked up either off the road or drinking in bars with gypsies. I learned that rehydration requires water rather than cold beer, and that, whilst I kind of enjoyed risking my neck on a motorbike, or climbing a crumbling scree slope, I wasn’t very good at bar-room brawls. And I fell in love a couple of times, which made the occasional tedium and loneliness worthwhile.
As for earlier education… Well, I went to primary school in northern Kent, a major entry point for a huge diversity of immigrants to the UK in the ’60s. My fellow pupils taught me to accept new cultures, which proved to be a very valuable lesson. My parents unwisely gave me a squeaky plastic hammer before I could walk, so I quickly learned the basics of field geology (hammering rocks) and developed a love of drumming that has lasted through six decades and eleven pub-rock bands so far. A mate of my dad’s gave me a kid’s book on rocks and minerals when I was about six, which set me off on my career. The How and Why Wonder Books I bought with my pocket money were full of the stuff a small boy wants to know about dinosaurs, sabre-toothed cats ( not tigers!) and giant sloths. By the time we moved to Cornwall I had a collection of rock fragments (most of which, I later realised, were not the minerals and fossils shown in my books after all), and a fascination for all things ancient.
But I wasn’t really into rocks as such, which even I could see are basically pretty dull (apart from the glittery specimens my big sister’s bearded boyfriend generously donated from his collection of Norwegian ore minerals). My thing was discovering ancient worlds, visualising weird landscapes populated by fantastical creatures, and exploring the mysteries of our planet. Films like One Million Years BC and visits to London’s Natural History Museum fired my imagination, although job-wise I dreamed of being a footballer or a computer expert rather than one of the palaeontologists mentioned in my books. I hadn’t a clue about petroleum until I was at high school in Penzance, where I was assigned an essay on crude oil (smirk!) for Chemistry homework. Later on they gave me a choice between doing O-Level Latin or Geology. The original no-brainer.
Anyway, I was lucky enough to go to one of the few State-funded schools in Britain offering classes in Geology at O, A and S Level, with a teacher who recommended Leicester University because their Geology degree included lots of exciting fieldwork. In my case that meant roughing it alone in a tent on a tiny island in Scotland (Kerrera), wondering what the local rocks were called, and going on guided tours of Arran and the Alps to find out about rain (I wore glasses, so could never see much when it rained, which it seemed to most of the time) and beer. This didn’t do much to equip me for my field geology career, which was spent almost entirely in dry countries (in both senses of the word). I eventually realised that there wasn’t much I could do with a Geology degree other than sit on an oil rig in the North Sea, so I decided to be a student for a bit longer whilst continuing to indulge my love of motorbikes and drumming.
So I applied for that PhD. And the rest is ancient history.
Publications
Cater, J. M. L., 1984. An application of scanning electron microscopy of quartz sand surface textures to the environmental diagnosis of Neogene carbonate sediments, Finestrat Basin, south-east Spain. Sedimentology, 31 , pp. 717–31.
Cater, J. M. L., 1987. Sedimentary evidence of the Neogene evolution of SE Spain. Journal of the Geological Society of London , 144 , pp. 915–32.
Photo 1.1. 10 million year-old river deposits, including channel-filling sandstones, in a road cut north of Karachi. Note 1.5m stick for scale near the base of the channel. The rock layers (‘beds’) piled up gradually, with the youngest on top (the principle of Superposition). Some layers accumulated more rapidly than others – the channel may have filled with a plug of sand overnight, whereas the thin layers below the channel probably took thousands of years to build up. The once-horizontal package of beds has been tilted gently more recently, as western Pakistan gradually squeezed up against Afghanistan (see Map 2 ).

Photo 1.2. Ripples formed in sand and mud, deposited on the floor of a shallow sea or lake about 400 million years ago, in SE Turkey. Their shape is typical of ripples that form in standing water today due to wave action, rather than beneath a flowing curren