Back from hell (part 2)

The job wasn’t finish yet, The steal coffin needs to be cut halfway in the height. The height of the building was something machines couldn’t reach. It was up to the human body ,torch and our little cage of the scissor lift .

There was only one team left over at the war zone. The Russians were send home for trespassing certain unwritten bush rules. The suites and breathing mask were the past.  It was a time of fires and burns.

11 hours a day we were swinging in the basket of the scissor lift, oxy cutting steel frames. Against the wind and with the wind. Dropping down tons of steel .Cursing in Belgian slang and cursing in German slang. At the end of the day , when we had the ground back under our feet we weren’t able to walk straight. Coppers would fine us immediately without a drunk test. 

Living at heights for the last weeks is a strange feeling. You get used to be in the air. The arms of the scissor lift are stretched every day a little bit further till you reach the full lenght. Every day we try to maneuver the flexible arm trough and under the steel skelet while the basket dances on the flex of the steel. Whole days we are looking down at the fires we started with the oxycutting. Looking down at the steel we dropped from a height of 38 metres. And once and a while a tool drops down in the chaos underneath us, disappearing for ever. 

We started to look more and more as B- actors out Mad Max 5 . My face grew harder and harder, And with every hot spark of melted iron that was flying down on me, my mood and patience were going down too. Even the rain transformed the war zone in a chemical wasteland. Everybody has a safe zone where he function in a social acceptable behaviour. Once fatigue, stress , the absence of beauty, lonelynes and a spark that lands on private parts ,you step out that safe zone. You become as destructive as the environment you live in. Anger becomes a part of you, not even knowing why. And if a destructive world were i was living in comes in contact with another part of the world it can go wrong.

After 5 weeks working 7 days for 12 hours, the bitch was going down. The end of an era of gold and copper mining was finally closed. The only thing standing was a skelet of melted and twisted frames of steel in the chemical wasteland. The once majestic asbestos building was no more. We had finished the job. 3761 sheets of asbestos were laying somewhere in a abandoned water pool, 63 ton of steel was laying twisted on the ground waited to be cut in small pieces and to be transported to be melted.We did it ! Me and my German friend. We survived,

It’s time to escape from hell. It’s time the war ends. It s time to step in the car , to drive away to look for beauty, to look for a bird , a living tree, to enjoy a rainbow.