The Welsh Taxi Driver.
In Coober Pedy I met a Welsman who told me a little story.
Many years ago he had been prospecting in Northwest Canada in a one horse town called Broken Stick for anything the earth would yield; ore, gold, oil anything that could be sold further south.
There was one road in town a kilometer in length and dotted with higgledy-piggledy hotels, busy bars and bordellos.
Men slept ten to a room where it was dangerous to light a cigarette because of the farting and the drunken snoring ripped like a saw through the flatulent night.
It was cold in Broken Stick and the ground was as hard as nails, and unyielding to the most adamite pick.
When men died, for die they surely did, they were laid outside where in ten minutes they had become as stiff as a log of teak.
They knew that they would be covered in snow within minutes and the bodies would remain unspoilt, almost fresh, until the spring thaw when the earth was more forgiving and yielding.
The funeral company would bury dozens of men with one perfunctory ceremony.
Dai was never very good at prospecting and was a profound and profoundly lazy mand.
And proud of it.
He noticed that althought the only road stretched a mere kilometre, the biting cold was so severe at night that men tended to stagger from bar to bar, so painful was the prospect of staggering directly back to their dormitories.
He also noticed that drunks were unusually generous with their money when compared with a man of sobriety.
He had saved enough up over several years and hit on an idea.
He travelled south and arranged for a Buick to be freighted North to Broken Stick, and upon its arrival set up a taxi service to ferry the drunken prospectors the few hundred yards up and down the only road in town.
He had his fuel flown in, where he collected it from the weekly supply plane, that also flew in whisky, food and contraceptives for the bars and bordellos.
His idea took off beyond his wildest dreams.
He raked in more money in a month than he had in year at prospecting, and with a fraction of the effort.
And he was always warm.
After a year, he realised that he had enough money to buy and freight another Buick in to double his productivity.
Further, because Dai was not just a profound, but also a proudly lazy man, he realised that he could afford two men to work for him, and sit back while the moolah rolled in.
One week later, Broken Stick had its first traffic accident between its only two vehicles.
Both of his Buicks were written off.
Dai gave up, and with the little money he had left, swapped his frozen existence in the Arctic Circle for the sweltering hell of Coober Pedy, in the Northwest Territories of Australia, where people live underground and mine for opals.
On a good day, the weather behaves itself and keeps below 45 degrees.
He wasn't good at prospecting for opals either however, so he sold what little money he'd made at mining and bought himself a car and went back into running a taxi service.
So far, he hasn't yet had an accident.
yechydda,