Chapter 18 - A Sad Thing A sad thing just happened in the country. A young woman was killed. She fell into a cotton module builder and got crushed. They flew her to the big city hospital but it was no use. She died anyway. She was eighteen years old.

When cotton is picked it gets packed into large blocks ready for transport to the cotton gins where it is processed. These blocks are called modules, and so the machinery plant used to make them is called a module builder. It’s a simple affair, consisting of a large, bottomless steel bin, not unlike a giant builder’s waste bin only without a floor, and an overhead press. When the cotton is tipped into the bin an operator works the controls of the press to tamp down the cotton until it is well-compacted. Raw cotton is a springy material and the tamping requires persistence, with the operator manoeuvring the press backwards and forwards over the layers of cotton many times before the module is sufficiently compacted. When the module is built the bin is lifted off leaving the module ready for loading onto a flat-bed trailer, and the process is repeated.

The girl was standing on the side of the bin as the hopper was delivering its load - as the workers often do to watch the cotton is distributed evenly - and she fell in, unnoticed. The hopper driver didn’t see her because he was busy making sure his load went where the press operator was directing him, and the press operator didn’t see her because he was too busy giving the hopper driver instructions before he started tamping down the new load.

It’s hard to imagine what she thought when she fell. Perhaps she giggled as she landed softly in the cotton, unaware she hadn’t been seen. Or maybe she was aware of the danger from the outset, and screamed. Either way it’s academic. At some point she would have known she was in trouble, her muffled screams for help no match for the din of heavy machinery, her struggling pointless against a medium whose very softness was drowning her. Then she would have felt the press.

How they discovered her doesn’t even bear imagining.

Life hasn’t been kind to farmers lately. The worst drought in living memory, country services dwindling, and growing public agitation over the utilization of our diminishing resources.

And cotton farmers have been right in the firing line, with many arguing that it’s a crop which shouldn’t be grown in this country because of its heavy reliance on irrigated water and high use of chemicals. These are valid arguments. But so too is the argument that cotton is an opportunistic crop, planted and grown by irrigators only when market forces and water availability deem it the best choice of crop. Which makes it more flexible and in an oblique way less of a burden in times of drought than permanent plantings, which need water to survive year in, year out, whether it’s there or not.

Whatever your belief it seems we are all becoming experts in crop selection, and conversations speckled with terms such as climate change, sustainable agriculture, and biodiversity are now common around city cafes and dinner tables. And cotton is often painted black. It’s easy to pass judgement on something we can’t see, aren’t intimate with.

Out here these issues are as real as sweat. As the cliché goes they have faces. And right now some of these faces you’d scarcely be able to look at, let alone confront with your ideas on how they should be managing our land.

The parents of the girl who died would have had their share of struggles in the past. Life has a habit of dealing them out just to keep you honest, especially life in the bush. But whatever came along they still had each other, and their kids, to keep them strong. Now where are they expected to draw their strength from? What keeps you going when you have to bury one of your children? The cruellest card in the deck.

Did she have siblings? I don’t know. I hope so for the parents’ sake. I could have followed the story up and gathered those details but I didn’t have the stomach for it, couldn’t face them. I felt for them, wanted to offer something, anything, to show I cared in my own unrelated way, but I couldn’t have looked into those eyes.

Surely there would have been grandparents, and aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, all with a vested interest in the life of this girl, and all now carrying the weight as best they can, each in their own particular way. For that sort of grief is at once the most private and collective of agonies, as if being part of an exclusive club which expects of its members great personal sacrifice to join, yet guarantees all inductees a lifetime membership.

And there’s another face best avoided: that of the young man who was operating the press. Can you imagine how many times he will go over what happened trying to find a loophole, a single moment he might return to and change the outcome? If only. What if? He may not have raised her from a baby like her parents, kissed her better when she hurt, taught her right from wrong, but along with the guilt he will now carry like an errant gene for the rest of his life, he too will feel gutted by the lost potential. For just like her parents he shared her hopes and dreams for the future. He did so because they were entwined with his. He was her boyfriend.

Yes, a sad thing has happened out here. A very sad thing.

© Monte Dwyer 2008