Word: opal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Coober Pedy, the Opal capital of Australia, is about 525 miles north-northwest of Adelaide. You fly there on a little 19-seater plane that stops first at a uranium-mining town called Olympic Dam, a cluster of machinery and huts in absolute flatness--red desert all around. As soon as you get out of the plane (which has to refuel), you are assailed by millions of flies. The fly biomass of central Australia must be 10 times the biomass of humans or kangaroos. You at once start doing the irritable wave of the hand known as the outback salute...
Coober Pedy is Aboriginal for "white fella down a hole." Opals were discovered here, lying on the surface, by a 14-year-old boy back in 1915. He was looking for water but instead kept tripping over the "floaters," as surface opals are called. Few floaters are seen now; the opals are all underground, embedded in deep layers of soft sandstone. This whole area, millions of years ago, was ocean floor. So it is relatively easy to mine, and since opal mining is entirely an individual business, like California gold mining back in 1849, it has never been industrialized...
Another potentially lethal factor: hurricanes can suddenly change in intensity. For Jerry Jarrell, director of the federal Tropical Prediction Center (which includes the National Hurricane Center), the most frightening near miss was not Andrew but Hurricane Opal, which hit the Gulf Coast in October 1995. Opal had been a weak storm, but just before it struck, it underwent what forecasters call "rapid deepening," leaping from Category 2 to nearly Category 5, with winds at 150 m.p.h. It also started moving faster. Such rapid change is the thing emergency managers most fear. Says Tom Millwee, coordinator of the Texas Division...
Then, just before landfall, Opal had another change of heart. She fizzled. By the time the storm crossed the coast, its winds diminished by at least a third. Until then, however, it fit Jarrell's vision of what the Big One will be like: traffic jams and cars blown wholesale into storm-surge waters. "I'm afraid you're going to drown hundreds if not thousands of people," says Jarrell. "And it's going to happen some time...
...novel, menaced by half-understood threats, never sure what ground is solid. The horror here is peeked at slantwise, through a girl's splayed fingers. What appears to be true is that Oyster bound dozens of young believers into a cult whose elements included an underground life of opal mining, ecstatic prayer and patriarchal sex. And that in the end Oyster gratified his inflamed ego with mass suicide. The author's story, of course, is a rough match with remembered headlines--of Waco, of Heaven's Gate and the rest. But the mad Oyster, dead before the narrative begins...