The Rock Blaster

The News Item

“Why the hell isn’t it going off?”

Norström angrily kicked his left foot. He had got it tangled in a ball of steel wire which someone had carelessly left lying among the rock debris. As he thrashed about, the wire tightened ever higher up his leg. He could easily have bent down and yanked the snarl free with a single tug.

But Norström did not bend down. He kept on furiously kicking. He was sweating. His grey flannel shirt, unbuttoned far down over his bulging stomach, soaked up the sweat and gave off an acrid smell of dirty skin.

Norström was the foreman of a team of detonators. It was a Saturday afternoon in the middle of June and steam was rising from the heat beating down on the unshaded work site. Norström was in charge of blasting tunnels for a railway line. The line was to be made double-track and that required three new tunnels. Right now, they were working on the middle one, also the longest and most awkward. They had just started on the opening in the rock wall. The rough and spiky surface of the grey granite had been laid bare of its thin covering of soil. Sunlight reflected off the cliff face, which rose almost vertically for about thirty metres. There was a hillock, roughly a hundred metres in circumference, and the tunnels and railway line were to go straight through it.

Norström did not like blasting tunnels. “You either get rid of the whole thing or just leave it. Making holes straight through is asking for trouble. Sooner or later it’ll collapse.” That was his view. In all his fifty years he had been lucky enough not to have to blast tunnels more than once every five years, but now he had three to do in one go.

“Will someone come and get rid of this bloody mess!”

Norström glared angrily at some workers who were resting on their pinch bars. They were gratefully enjoying the unexpected break. First the charge had failed, and then Norström had got his foot tangled up in some steel wire. They leaned on their spikes and waited with their backs turned to the sun.

“You run over and help him.”

Oskar Johansson gave the youngest in their team a light kick with the tip of his boot. A lad of fourteen, small and skinny. He leaped up at once and ran across the sandy ground to Norström, quickly bent down and began to tug at the wire.

“Don’t pull so bloody hard. Just loosen it.”

Norström was becoming more and more annoyed. He squinted at the sun, then turned towards the rock face, glanced down at the boy carefully digging around in the tangle of steel wire, and then glared at the blasters, immobile and leaning on their spikes.

“Why isn’t it going off?” he bellowed.

Oskar Johansson straightened up.

“I’ll take a look.”

At the same time, Norström’s foot came free of the wire. The break was over. Now the failed charge had to be checked. And that was Johansson’s job, since he had primed it. Every explosion was a personal thing. The dynamite was the same, unpredictable and treacherous, but every charge had its owner, the one responsible for it.

The accelerating pace of industrial expansion made improved communications necessary. The railways had to be extended. There were to be more tracks. There were more and longer trains and the roar of explosions echoed throughout the country.

They were well into summer. The constant heat since the end of May had begun to scorch the ground. When the blasters sought the shade of the birch trees for their short breaks, there was a crackling under their boots.

Johansson wiped his forehead. He looked at the back of his hand. It was shiny with sweat and he wiped it on his shirt. He was twenty-three years old, the youngest in the team of blasters — because the helper did not count. Oskar had already worked on blasting teams for seven years, and enjoyed it. He was tall, well built, with a round face and an open expression which was never serious. His eyes were bright blue, and his fair hair curled over his forehead. The early summer heat had turned his skin brown. He was wearing a grey-white shirt and dark blue cotton trousers, and was barefoot.

He peered towards the rock face.

“Will you go and check?”

Norström stood with his hands on his hips and shot Johansson a challenging look. Norström disliked failed detonations. Partly because you never knew what might happen, partly because they held up the work. He was responsible for sticking to the schedule, and he knew this tunnel was going to cause them problems. Besides, he had a hangover. The day before he had turned fifty-five, and there had been a party in the evening. He had drunk akvavit all through the night until he crashed into bed at about two in the morning. And he had vomited at length and copiously when he got up two hours later to go to work. He almost regretted having turned down the offer of a day’s holiday to mark his birthday. A gesture from management, in recognition of his having worked for the railway’s construction division on and off since 1881. And because he had a reputation for keeping to deadlines and getting work done. This had earned him the nickname “Glory of Labour” from his fellow workers. It was never used in Norström’s presence, but that is how he was referred to when the blasters talked about him at home in the evening, or during rest breaks when he was busy with something else. When he first found out that he had a nickname he was angry, but then he began to see it as a sign that the blasters were afraid of him, and he liked that. Now he often used the name to refer to himself, when describing his job to his friends. Only yesterday he had gone on and on about how scared the blasters were of him. He had been with his brother-in-law, who had come to the birthday celebration, and had talked at length about his job.

It was nearly three o’clock, and in three hours their working week would be over. Then they would have a day off and Norström would be able to lie on his bed, swatting at the flies and telling the children to be quiet, and slowly plan next week’s work. According to the schedule he had thought out the previous Sunday, they had failed to meet their target. And nothing disturbed him more than when they fell short of expectations. It meant that his Sunday, the rest day, would be ruined. He would spend it fretting.

“Have you pulled off the detonating cable?”

Some of the blasters mumbled an almost inaudible “no”.

“Are you out of your minds? Why not?”

Norström was astonished that they had failed to do something so obvious. He had no sympathy for the fact that the blasters had been taking a short break in the heat.

“Get your arse over there nowand rip the cable off!”

He gave the helper a kick. The boy quickly scampered over to the small wooden box that stood a short distance from them and tore off a cable which was attached to a steel clip at the back.

Johansson pulled himself up to his full height, propped his metal spike against a huge lump of blast debris, and began to walk toward the rock face. He went slowly, as if he did not want to rouse the dynamite. He grimaced in the heat, and wiped the salty sweat from his eyes. A feeling of unease always settled over the entire team whenever an explosive charge did not go off. Dynamite was dangerous. You never knew what tricks it might get up to. But somebody always had to go and check, and caution was the only possible protection.

Johansson stopped just metres short of the rock face. He bit his lower lip and looked carefully at the hole in the cliff into which the detonating cable snaked. He turned around, and in a low voice called over to the others still standing there leaning on their spikes:

“Is the cable off?”

Norström strode over to the wooden box himself, something he did not usually do, had a look and then shouted:

“It’s disconnected. You can go on over.”

Johansson nodded, more for his own benefit than Norström’s. He did it to convince himself that everything was ready.

Then he turns, fixes his eyes on the drill-hole and slowly approaches the rock wall with short, stealthy steps. He does not take his eyes off the hole. He bites his lip, sweat pouring down his face; he blinks to clear his vision and when he is half a metre from the cliff he stops and carefully leans forward. Without relaxing his concentration, he slowly stretches out his right arm until his hand is resting just above the hole. He focuses, braces himself, and begins to tease out the detonating cable. He hears the faint sound of a metal spike clinking as it is laid against a stone. His fingertips tighten around the cable.

The next moment the rock wall explodes, and for many years afterwards foreman Norström will tell people how it was one of his men who, while working on the middle one of three railway tunnels, astonishingly survived an explosion at close range. His name was Oskar Johansson, and their helper, a lad of just fourteen years, fainted when they found Johansson’s right hand, rotting in a bush seventy metres away. They found it thanks to the flies that had gathered around. It was lying among the dandelions, its fingers stretched out.

And Norström would add that Johansson not only survived but kept on working as a blaster once he had recovered.

That Saturday afternoon in June 1911, Oskar Johansson lost all his fair hair. His left eye was ripped out of its socket by the force of the blast. The right hand was severed at the wrist by a shard of rock. It was sliced off with an almost surgical precision. Another shard tore through Oskar’s lower abdomen like a red-hot arrow, severed half of his penis on the way through and emerged via his groin, kidney and bladder.

But Oskar Johansson survived, carried on working as a rock blaster until his retirement, and did not die until April 9, 1969.

On the following Monday, the local newspapers reported that a young rock blaster had died in a terrible and harrowing accident. Nobody had been able to prevent the tragedy. The incident was attributable to the dangers of dynamite. By a small mercy nobody else was hurt, and the deceased did not have any family, which would now be left destitute.

The story was never corrected.