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On this page, I tell you all about Johnny and my two-month geological fieldwork in Sweden.
Oh, Johnny!
The initial plan had been to take my racing bike and hook up a little cart to it. It's been done before, though maybe not
to carry out two months of geological fieldwork in Sweden. I had taken my bike to and on a fieldwork before, but that
was only two weeks, in a small area and with many others on the same fieldwork. My advisor said it really would be
better to take a car to Sweden, so I set off in search of my first car.
For geological fieldwork, you want a practical car. Sturdy, maybe not too big, and certainly not too low on its haunches
so to speak (or a wheel base that is exceptionally wide), as you wouldn't be the first one to get stuck on a rock
protruding from the center of a dirt road somewhere.
Very popular at the time were those little Renault semi-vans. (Were they Renaults? Renault 4?
French in any case. Paco Peligroso had one too.) And hatchbacks are more convenient than sedans.
Think wilderness! Think practical! (Think Dakar?)
I felt I didn't know enough about cars so on my first trip to look at a used car, I took a guy along who
knows a lot about cars
(the very pleasant boyfriend of my friend Soraya). He was reluctant to give his opinion, however, so I still had to rely
on my own observations, namely that the exhaust had a black deposit in it, the fact that the car wouldn't
start right away, the odd moldy smell of the interior, and that the engine didn't sound smooth-running to me.
The next car I checked out on my own. It was a Toyota Starlet and I believe it was green. It was in good condition,
drove well and sounded good. I should have bought it, but I told myself I didn't know enough to know what I was doing.
But I had liked the car and time was running out, so I ended up buying another Toyota Starlet, badly rusted and
a lot more expensive than the other one (more than twice as much). I named it Johnny. Jantje, in Dutch.
No particular reason.
I had gotten my driving license five years before, had not driven a car since, except hired a van once to be able to
move my stuff out temporarily when my apartment was being renovated.
I don't recall why exactly I drove to Limburg first, but I did accidentally
leave the car's papers at a post office there, where I'd
gone to pay my road tax or insurance or whatever. The post office sent the papers to the national car
registration agency, which then
scrapped the car in its files. They had presumed Johnny had departed to the great hunting fields in the sky.
I called that agency and explained that I was about to take this car to Sweden. They suggested that I take a little detour
on the way to Sweden (via the Afsluitdijk) and swing by their office to pick up a new set of papers. I did, and I took a
bunch of flowers along, to express my appreciation.
Johnny had a problem, one I was not aware of yet, though something had
already seemed off when I was still in Limburg.
It had a two-stage carburettor, so plenty of spirit, or "kemau" in good Limburgian dialect,
but its engine kept cutting out.
As I was traveling through Denmark,
along this hilly road with traffic lights perched on top of the hills, I had to keep flooring the gas to prevent
the engine from cutting out, on the steep slope with all these cars behind me. Somewhere on the way to my fieldwork
area, around Loftahammar which is north of Västervik - okay, about 100 kilometers south of Stockholm -
I had a new car battery put in, hoping that that might solve the problem. It didn'n't.
One of the first things I did after I finally arrived and pitched my tent on a camp site, temporarily, was park
Johnny into a ditch, nose down, when I went on my first exploratory drive.
Many of the roads in this part of Sweden are thick ribbons of sand and gravel that
have been deposited there by big trucks and bulldozers.
That means that there are deep ditches on either side, but they were so overgrown that they
looked like neat grassy stretches of roadside to me.
It was a Sunday morning, so I had to wait until another car finally drove by and I
could stop it, ask the driver to pull me
out of the ditch. He did.
Believe it or not, I later repeated this maneuver when I helpfully made way for a passing car, the driver of which
then had to pull me out. (Don't laugh.) (Whenever I say that - don't laugh - in England, the Britons take me
seriously. No sense of humor, those Britons.)
I left the camping behind and moved into a little stuga (for which the rent was higher
than for my Amsterdam apartment). No running water, no electricity and only bottled gas. From time to time, I
drove to a camp site to do some laundry, and I'd also usually take a shower there. I collected containers with
drinking water from the owners of the stuga and something similar happened with the bottled gas, I think.
As I was aware my behavior - woman alone doing a lot of weird stuff in the middle of nowhere - could raise
some concern and in any case a few eyebrows of curiosity, I had made a sign which I put in the
back of the car, behind the rear
windshield, saying
"Department of Earth Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam".
(The department later merged with the department of life sciences.)
The fieldwork area was mainly gneisses, and some granites (mainly in narrow dikes) and gabbros. Some relatively mildly
metamorphic sediments as well. It is part of a
major shear zone that traverses Sweden,
about 300 kilometers long. In Norway, the shear zone is covered by younger rocks.
This area (Proterozoic)
has been investigated by a Dutch geologist at the end of the 1960s and nothing much had happened since.
(Someone else had looked at uranium mineralizations.)
I had been led to expect a folded area, but my field observations didn't match.
With folds, you expect to find both sinistral
and dextral movement directions in the field, and I consistently found only one. That told me that this was not
an area of folds, but a shear zone. It is called the Loftahammar-Linköping Deformation Zone,
but goes by other names as well.
Sweden was very quiet. Very! I saw a few deer, a badger one Sunday morning when I walked to the water (a drowned fjord)
to bathe there. Yes, I was on the coast, of the Baltic Sea. There was a lot of water there and most of the locals had boats.
It was often easier to travel by boat than to travel by car.
Some locations could even only be reached, so when
Frank (my advisor) dropped by the second time, we rented a motor boat (something I couldn't just do, but for which Frank
had a budget) and went to the island Ekö to look at some shear bands there. That was fun! (I have slides of
that little adventure, but they're on another continent, along with many many other slides and pictures. Frank
kindly sent me scans of three slides, though.)
The situation with Johnny got worse and worse. We became quite a spectacle. Our top speed became maybe five kilometers
per hour and the car would rear up and buck like a horse in a western. Wahoo!
There was no escape. I had to take Johnny to a garage and have this sorted out. I'd been over this problem with someone's
boyfriend, over the phone, and I'd said that there seemed to be some overpressure on the brakes.
He said that wasn't possible,
but this was a guy who designed engines and in his spare time often was an expert on a Formula-1 racing team,
present at the races. (Yep, for real. No, not the same guy as above. It always helps to have friends with
car-savvy boyfriends!)
My advisor, who'd dropped by a second time, suggested it might be dirt in the carburettor, clogging things there.
I remember a discussion about tools, and I bought a quality set of spanners, I think. I also remember ice cream at
that corner in the village. (According to Frank, you can judge a country's state of civilization by the
quality of its ice cream.)
So I hop-skipped the car to a local garage, where they'd already heard I might be on my way. The carburettor was
opened but looked suspiciously clean. That complicated matters and it seemed best that I go into the village and
return at the end of the afternoon. Keep in mind that this was the era before mobile phones (1989).
For some reason, maybe because I'd left something behind or had another question, I walked back into the garage and
then the mechanic said he'd just been about to call the people whose stuga I was renting. See, the mechanic had dropped
a nut and when he picked it up, he happened to look up... and that's when he saw the reason for Johnny's mysterious
problems. He could never have guessed it in a million years.
The engine was open!!! Some of the bolts that were supposed to keep the engine halves together were missing
and the engine was guzzling air! No wonder spirited little Johnny had had so much trouble!
That also explained the problem with the brakes as those made use of the relative underpressure in the engine. (Yes, I'd
bought a manual for the car before I drove off to Sweden.)
Can you imagine how wonderful it was to hear that little car's engine purr so very sweetly again
when I later picked it up?
Oh, Johnny! Johnny!!
When I had a day off, I went to visit the domain of Pippi Longstocking of whom I have always been a big fan. I bought
lemonade straight from the lemonade tree and a few other gifts for some of my friends in Holland and also for a friend who
was living in northern Germany with her family at the time. I stayed with them for one night. When I traveled
to Sweden, I first
had to go to Germany, then take a ferry. Drive through Denmark, take another ferry which landed me
on the west coast of Sweden, with still about a day's driving left to my fieldwork area. I traveled back the same way,
except that this time, I didn't have to go to Veendam and cross the Afsluitdijk after that.
I also traveled far west on one of the last days, in search of some new geology, some new clues.
I didn't find any, but I did find tons of raspberries.
I picked them all,
happily oblivious to the fact that they were likely still a bit radioactive as a result of the Chernobyl
disaster, and also completely forgetting that I didn't have a fridge. So I had raspberries for breakfast, lunch, dinner
and breakfast and another lunch and dinner or two. Raspberries with yogurt, raspberries on knäckebrød,
raspberries au naturel, what have you.
I remember picking up a dead rabbit from the middle of the road, still warm (not hit by me!),
and moving it to the side of the road. I remember listening to a
lot of Swedish music (a song about "ingen whiskey" comes to mind) and there are also a few
English-language songs that I associate with that fieldwork.
I also remember passing a sign for an old tingstad many times but I don't think I ever visited that
archeological site.
Hilarious was that time when I was a little bit less in the middle of nowhere than usual, close to Loftahammar and
investigating some outcrops, when I heard a couple very passsssionately making love. I became focused on
not stumbling across the two unexpectedly, disturbing their bliss and possibly (unlikely
if they were Swedish, but not if they were tourists) embarrassing the hell out of them... Well,
it turned out to be nothing less than a very passionate... seagull. I laughed my head off when I realized!
Speaking of sounds, toward the end of my fieldwork, I heard an odd humming or buzzing noise that I couldn't place. I
feared it was artificial (produced by my brain)
and had to do with the overwhelming silence. Fortunately, this mystery was solved one or two days before I left
to return to Holland. I saw some wasps... I bet you know where I am going now. So were they, indeed.
There was a wasps' nest in the ceiling of
the stuga. None of the wasps ever bothered me, though.
To tell you the truth, I was bloody relieved that they were there!
I had seriously thought the sound was all in my head as I couldn't find a rational explanation for it and apparently had
failed to see those wasps (maybe because they entered the nest at the back of the
stuga, where they ducked into or under the roof). That idea, that it was all in my mind, was a bit disturbing.
Yep, I did need a big 2-kilogram hammer on this fieldwork! I didn't take a drill with me as I was on my own
and you need two people to operate a drill well. While on fieldwork, you take a lot of samples, and you make a
geological map. Back in the lab, you can't just
go into the field again when you realize you'd like to take a look at something of which you didn't take samples,
after all.
Johnny gave me no further problems and faithfully took about 500 kilograms of rocks (rock samples)
to a regional company that shipped them to the lab in Amsterdam. I later processed many of those samples, for
various types of chemical analysis (such as XRF and INAA) and for thin sections (microscopy slides, for petrography,
mineralogy and structural analysis). I wrote it all up in one or two reports.
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I felt I didn't know enough about cars so on my first trip to look at a used car, I took a guy along who
knows a lot about cars
(the very pleasant boyfriend of my friend Soraya). He was reluctant to give his opinion, however, so I still had to rely
on my own observations, namely that the exhaust had a black deposit in it, the fact that the car wouldn't
start right away, the odd moldy smell of the interior, and that the engine didn't sound smooth-running to me.
