Day 2

Up at the crack of dawn and on our way to a local rubber plantation—Kathy, me, Rosey, the director, Tony, the cameraman, and Simon, in charge of sound. Rubber trees are native to the Amazon, so we wouldn’t find them growing naturally in a Zanzibar forest.

I’d tapped rubber trees before when I was working in Brazil, so Kathy and I practiced a bit before we split up and went to work. It is absolutely amazing to see. With a v-tipped knife, we pierced the outer bark of the tree. We cut diagonally down and across the trunk, about a third of the way around the circumference. The latex runs in vessels just below the outer bark, so when we strike the right layer, it’s obvious. It’s like cutting a vein with a sharp blade; the white, milky latex starts pouring out. (It doesn’t pulse like cutting an artery—there isn’t a heartbeat in trees.)

So Kathy and I went from tree to tree in the early morning light. We wedged a little v-shaped spout at the end of the diagonal cut in the tree and place a plastic cup to catch the flowing latex. At 9 am, we were done tapping and were pouring the latex from the cups into buckets. It was a bit nerve racking carrying the sloshing bucket of latex—a morning’s work and all necessary for our success later. It was so, so easy to trip over a stump or a log on the ground—hence, one of my boots is extra-waterproofed now. Kathy and I took turns leading, checking the way for the one carrying the bucket of “white gold”.

The best latex in the world is still tapped this way, by hand, in the mornings. It doesn’t damage the tree if you do it well. Tap every other morning, cutting just through the outer bark. The wounds heal themselves as the latex coagulates slowly in contact with the air.

This also meant we needed to get cracking so the latex wouldn’t coagulate before we coated the material for the life-jacket.

"we heard shouts, screams, and a ruckus"

And then…we heard shouts, screams, and a ruckus. Among the creatures living in the rubber plantation are biting red ants. The director had stepped right into a plant they were protecting. Immediately the lower half of her body, inside her clothes and out, was covered in ants. As she moved, they bit. As they bit, she jumped. We turned around to see Rosey jumping frantically, slapping her body wildly. Just as we were rubbing down her legs to kill the ants on the inside and out, Tony, the cameraman started the same routine. We were all bit some, though Rosey and Tony got the worst of it. Each bite stands your hair on end. It’s hard to tell when you’re bitten; it’s more like a tiny electric shock. Thankfully we were almost done, because the production team was out of there - walking carefully to avoid walking through plants that the ants frequent. Kathy and I didn’t have enough time to figure out if the ants were living on or in the species of plants they were on or if they were foraging for food on them. In any case, once you set your search image for that plant, we avoided it. This was impossible for Tony the cameraman as he walks while looking through the lens. Simon, the soundman, guided him the best he could without making noise - the soundman’s not eager to mess up the sound!

This was only the start of the day. The rest of the day, Kathy and I spent figuring out how to vulcanize the rubber. The material we’d sewn so carefully into life-jackets for stuffing yesterday just shrunk up to nothing when we dipped them in latex and then placed them over the fire. An absolute disaster. This meant we started experimenting with dipping more fabric, smoking it - it was a fine line between vulcanized and a burned mess. The key was to add sulphur so cross-linking between the rubber molecules occurred. Mid-process from milky to stable rubber was a mess - very, very sticky. It got all over our clothes, on our skin, in our hair. I felt like a big ball of rubber cement. Cooking oil worked to get it off, but then we were greasy, too. A funny nightmare as we smelled of smoke as well. It was a long, long, hard, hot day by the fire. In the end? Well, I couldn’t have been more pleased. Kathy and I had vulcanized latex! We had rubberized material. But we were nowhere close to having completed life-jackets.

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Content last updated: 26/01/2005