Diamonds for Julia

            Julia, seven, golden-haired, thin and tall, lives away from most of civilization's noise and busy activity, in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon, in a high valley where small streams, spread across the meadow by ditches, irrigate grass for grazing cattle and to cut and bale and stack for winter feed.

            Ridges around the valley rise toward mountain peaks. Forests of pine, fir, and western larch grow toward the mountain blue sky. Irrigated wild mountain meadows surrounding the house green and grow in spring. The gravel road through the valley gives Julia and her family a way to town, forty-three miles down the mountain from them.

            Workers built their house a long time ago. The house became ramshackle and creaky, but it serves the family well.

            Julia and her sister, Alicea, nine, her mother, Martha, and her father, Jack, live far from any neighbor. The old, wooden house, silver-grey from years of weather, except for the front door, which Julia and Alicea painted bright blue after reading The Gammage Cup, has no electricity. They have no television. They don't listen to their battery powered radio and tape deck much.

            The family fills every day with sounds, conversation, laughter, singing, dishes and pots and pans clattering. The wind soughs gently, blows harder, whistles across the meadow and around the house, sometimes rises to furious assaults against the house, as if the wind will tear the roof off and blow the house into thousands of scattered pieces, then slows again to soft breezes.

            Owls call, hoo, hoo-oo, hoo, hoo. Jack can tell if it's a male or a female owl from its call. He teaches Alicea and Julia the difference. He teaches them the names and calls of other birds in the valley. Hawks scream in the high mountain air.

            Alicea asks, "Why do they do that? Wouldn't that warn all the animals they hunt, so they can hide?"

            Jack stopped splitting firewood in front of the house. He leaned the axe against the splitting block and looked at his daughters, then up into the tall sky, where the red-tailed hawk coasted on mountain air and screamed again. Another red-tailed hawk screamed and flew against the sun. Fire of the sun shone around the hawk, lighted it brilliant, as if the bird was born of the sun, and cooled to feathered bird only as it fell from fire of the sun and coasted high above the meadow toward the other hawk.

            Julia said, "They're talking to each other, not hunting."

            Jack said, "If I were a vole, I might panic if I heard that sound, and run and wiggle the grasses, and a bird looking down from the sky could see the grass moving and know where to hunt."

            Ravens croak a harsh croak and fly across the meadow.

            Julia listens to the river in the spring, when it runs full in its banks. Sometimes, the river floods across part of the meadow, singing rushing, tumbling sounds that echo across the valley. Julia hears coyotes singing.

            Lightning and thunder march, roll, tumble from the mountains around them down into their mountain valley. On a summer night, lightning on all sides of them lights up the interior of the house. Thunder roars and shakes the house.

            Julia wakes. Lightning flashes, and thunder roars almost immediately. Alicea speaks from the darkness of their room. "Will lightning hit the house?"

            Their father answers from the next room. "No. It won't hit the house."

            Lightning and thunder flash and rumble across the meadow, farther and farther from them in the night. Rain pounds on the metal roof and blows against the outside wall close to their bed. The wet, rapid sound fills the house, and Julia slides back into sleep.

            Sometimes, Julia wakes in a dark night, frightened by her dreams and then frightened by the night, by the darkness, dense and heavy around her, by strange sounds of the night intruding into her dreams. She knows the difference between her mother's snoring and her father's snoring from their room next to hers, with an open doorway between, the same way she knows the smell of her father from her mother, knows the difference between their voices, the sound of their walking.

            She hears one of them or both of them snoring, and it soothes her. Darkness becomes natural and comforting, and she sleeps again.

            Julia's father doesn't own cattle, land, nor the house where they live, though Julia thinks he would, were it a just world. He labors mightily, irrigates the hay and pasture ground, repairs fences, builds new fences, tends and herds cattle, cuts hay, bales hay, loads trucks and hauls hay down the river road to the owner's home ranch. He cuts beetle-killed lodgepole pine from the west boundary of the ranch and sells it for firewood to ranchers and farmers who live down in the valley, drive their trucks up, and haul the wood away to burn and keep them warm in winter.

            Sales of the firewood supplement their income from ranch work and allowed them to buy the orange-brown four-wheel-drive pickup and allowed them to spend some money to fix it up, so they had dependable transportation. It made things a little easier. Julia understood that, because she listened to the adults' conversation.

            Meadows surround them. The river runs a hundred yards below the house. Forest-covered ridges rise all around the valley. Theirs isn't a world for children and another world for adults. Julia and Alicea have few pursuits apart from their parents. They aren't much aware that, in some places almost different worlds exist for adults and children. Parents and their children, in some places, don't share all the processes of the children's education, aren't with each other for every meal, for every errand, for every event of every day.

            Even when Alicea and Julia play on the meadow, free to go where they will, they stay within calling distance.

            Jack often took Alicea and Julia with him when he worked. They played together close to where he worked, or they walked along with him and talked as he walked along ditches, taking dirt dams out and putting dirt dams in other places, so the water overflowed the ditch and irrigated the meadow.

            He walked along fences and repaired them, and they played nearby. He worked along the foot of the hill, up the fence line, and they crossed the hill above him, moving their play to stay within sight of him.

            They ran down the hill and joined Jack where the fence left the openness of meadow grass and sage brush and entered timber of ponderosa pine and lodgepole pine, giving way to dense aspen along the seasonal stream. He stretched barbed wire tight with a metal tool. He stapled the wire to wooden posts.

            Julia and Alicea left their play and walked along with Jack as he walked along the fence running through the timber. They talked about the birds they saw, and elk, deer, coyotes, ground squirrels, a badger once. They talked about the world, about what they studied in their school they had at home, usually with their mother as teacher, and anywhere they were, with their mother or father as teacher, because they lived so far from any school.

            Huge towers supported wires carrying high voltage electricity along the Blue Mountains in a corridor where trees had been cut away. They crossed under those wires that carried electricity to so many people, to power their lights, television sets, electric stoves, and washing machines. They passed by those towers when they drove up to irrigate the high pasture along the edge of the valley or to fix fence above the north pasture.

            Alicea asked, "If electricity is so close, why don't we have any?"

            Jack said, "These are high power lines. It would take a lot of equipment, and it would be expensive to transform the electricity to lower voltage we could use."

            "But they could do it."

            "They could if somebody paid for it. We certainly don't have enough money to pay for it."

            Alicea said, "I like it better without electricity anyway. We don't need it."

            During breakfast, Jack said, "I'm driving up to Gimlet Creek this morning. Does anyone want to go?"

            Julia asked, "How long will you be up there?"

            "Probably until mid-afternoon. We could take a lunch and have a picnic. I'm going to put a plastic dam in Gimlet Creek. The water will get deep enough for a little bit of swimming, though it will be plenty cold."

            Cold water never stopped Julia and Alicea. Jack set the plastic dam first, and the water rose quickly. Martha spread a blanket on the grass above the creek and sat down and read. Jack walked across the meadow with his shovel and set up the flow of water in small ditches. Julia and Alicea played in the pool behind the plastic dam as it deepened. Sometimes Martha said, "Get out of the water for a while, your lips are turning blue."

            The sun shone hot. Before long, they were ready for the cold water again. When they all sat together in the sunshine and ate lunch, Alicea asked, "Where does all the gravel come from?"

            Jack said, "It washes down from the mountain during high water. During runoff, the water roars through here. Farther up, it washes gravel and dirt from the stream bank and from the stream bed. When it gets down here, the ground starts to flatten out, and the water slows down. When it starts running slower like that, it can't carry the gravel anymore, so the gravel settles to the bottom. The dirt is in much smaller particles, so the water carries the dirt on out across the meadow. If you walk down this gully, you'll see where the water slowed even more and spread out a big fan-shaped deposit of dirt."

            Julia said, "I read that people find diamonds in gravel. Is that right? Are there diamonds in gravel?"

            Jack said, "Sometimes. Some gravel."

            Later, when Jack came back after working on more ditches, Julia said, "Daddy, look. Look at all this shiny stuff on the bottom. Is that gold?"

            Jack said, "Wouldn't it be nice if that was gold? We'd be rich. That's mica. It separates out from granite when granite breaks up. You wouldn't see gold on top of the gravel. Gold is heavy and settles to the bottom, under all the gravel."

            "What about diamonds? Do diamonds settle to the bottom?"

            "Diamonds are heavier than gravel, so they settle to the bottom if the gravel is stirred up enough. I've seen pictures of people panning for diamonds, the same way they pan for gold."

            "Are there diamonds around here, Daddy?"

            "I don't think so. I've never heard of anyone finding diamonds around here."

            Julia didn't know when she first understood they had very little money, but she did know that lack had a strong negative effect on her father. She worried about it. It didn't worry Alicea. When Julia talked about it to Alicea, Alicea said, "We have enough money. We have everything we need. Why worry about it?" and she went on to other things to talk about or other things to do.

            But Julia heard conversations between the adults that focused on their lack of money, and she became aware that her father had old injuries that had never completely healed, and they caused him pain when he worked too hard.

            When Jack finished the ranch work each autumn, he took time off the payroll and cut firewood. He made more money cutting firewood than he did doing ranch work, but ranch work was their foundation. It gave them a place to live, to grow a garden, and it gave them access to the firewood. "The dead lodgepole is on the ranch. It needs to be cleaned up so the fence is easier to take care of and the ditch is clear. That's why John lets me cut it and sell it."

            Ownership of land, of houses, employment for wages, the fact that some people made very good wages and could buy expensive things and other people made small or very small wages, how the world works among the people who live in the world, all of that was something Julia was just learning.

            Jack came in toward dusk, limping, bent a little forward, as if his back and leg hurt. Julia asked him, "Daddy, why do you work so long if it makes you hurt?"

            He said, "About Thanksgiving, if it goes like most years go, we'll have a heavy snow that stays on the ground and builds up deeper every time a new storm comes along. So Thanksgiving or soon after, I won't be able to get across the meadow and get any more wood out. I'll mostly stay home, play music, write long poems, take care of the fires, help with your schooling, do a little bit of skiing.

            "I like doing all that, but when I'm not working, I don't get paid. I have to sell as much wood before winter shuts down cutting wood as I can, so we'll have enough money for the winter."

            "I cut about five cords of wood today. More than I've ever cut before. I'm sore, but I'll be okay after I take a hot bath and rest for a while. After dinner, I'll play the guitar and dance around, you watch."

            Julia did watch. He played the guitar after dinner, but he did it sitting down, and he didn't dance around, the way he said he would, the way he did sometimes when he hadn't cut wood all day. That night, after she and Alicea had gone to bed, Julia heard the adults talking about money, worrying about having enough to get through the winter.

            The next day, Julia said, "I want to help with the wood-cutting".

            Jack said, "There isn't much you can do, Julia. Most of the work is with a chain saw, and you're not big enough to run a chain saw."

            "There must be something I could do."

            "I've been bringing wood back to the barn most days, to have wood to sell this winter, when the price goes up. You could help load the trailer. I've been loading wood whenever I have some time and some wood that's easy to get at. The way I've been working, it wouldn't work to say I'd have some wood to load at a certain time, and it wouldn't work to have you over there all day. I don't want anyone around at all when I'm falling trees. There's plenty of stuff you can do around here to help."

            "I want to help with the wood."

            "I know. I appreciate that. I'll set it up so there's wood to load, and you can come over some days and help load wood."

            In the days and weeks that followed, Jack often said soon he could use some help loading, but it never seemed to go that way. Julia said, "You keep putting it off. You say Tuesday, we'll go over and load the trailer, but then Tuesday comes along, and there isn't any wood to load."

            "I don't set it up that way on purpose. I cut wood to load and haul, and then someone wants to buy wood, so I sell what I've been planning to load. I'd rather sell it on the ground, right where I cut it, than haul it over and stack it in the barn, even if I can sell it for more money this winter. I sell it where I cut it for thirty-five dollars a cord. I might be able to sell it for seventy or seventy-five dollars a cord this winter. I can cut more than another cord of wood in the time it takes me to load it, haul it, and unload and stack it, so I might as well sell everything on the ground if I can. We make more money that way."

            The days grew shorter toward winter. Julia and Alicea played on the meadow near the river. It was named a river, but they and their parents had checked the depth of all the holes in the small run of water down through their valley. The water was only deeper than they were tall in one area so small, Jack said, "If you fell in there, you could just hold your breath and walk out."

            So they played by the river.

            In the midst of acting out Moley and Ratty near the river, looking for Toad, Julia realized she and Alicea walked on a big gravel bar. Her attention to the adventure of Moley and Ratty faded. Playing their play no longer contained much meaning for her as the meaning of the family in need of money intruded more and more strongly into their day.

            Alicea said, "Come on, Moley. What are you doing?"

            Julia turned and looked at Alicea, who no longer looked at all like Ratty of many river adventures and said, "Diamonds. Diamonds are in gravel. Or gold. Maybe both. And this is a lot of gravel. Diamonds and gold wash down the river and settle out of the water, and gravel settles above them."

            Alicea swung her wooden sword through the air. "What would a river rat or a mole want with gold or diamonds? Everything we need is here, along the river, on the meadow, in the forest."

            "Not for a mole or a rat. For Daddy, so he doesn't have to work so hard. So he can own this ranch. I'm going to go get a shovel."

            Alicea's appealing words, "Come on, Moley. Come on, Julia. We're playing. You can't leave right in the middle..." bounced off Julia's back as Julia ran up the sloping meadow, climbed through the fence, and disappeared into the shop.

            "I'm not," Julia said. "I'm not playing now. I'm working. I'm going to work."

            In the shop, she decided a shovel was too big to handle. She pulled a wooden box close to the workbench, climbed on the box, then up onto the bench and lifted a trowel from its peg on the wall.

            On the gravel bar again, she looked around. "Where? Where in all this gravel? Anywhere, I guess." She sat down, scraped the gravel with her trowel, looked through what she had scraped toward her, then scooped the sorted-through gravel onto the trowel and threw the gravel up onto the bank above the gravel bar.

            Alicea stood in front of Julia, "Julia, what are you doing?"

            "I'm looking for gold. I'm looking for diamonds."

            "That isn't anything Moley and Ratty would ever do. That isn't part of our play."

            Julia allowed gravel to trickle through her fingers. She watched it closely as it fell. "I'm not playing now. Playing can wait. Daddy works too hard, and he doesn't own much, but he should own this ranch. He shouldn't have to work so hard." She scooped gravel into the trowel and threw the gravel away from her, up onto the grassy bank above her. "Diamonds and gold come in gravel. Don't you remember when Daddy said that, when we were up at Gimlet Creek?"

            "I remember that. I guess I can help you." Alicea sat down, facing Julia, and they both sorted through gravel. Julia threw the sorted gravel away from them. "You have to be careful. Some of the sand hit me that time."

            "Sorry. I'll throw it over this way. I have to throw it far enough so we don't sort through gravel twice. That would waste our time."

            "What do diamonds look like?

            "You've seen pictures of diamonds. They're shiny. Kind of white. Or maybe more clear, like glass. If you find anything like glass, let's look at it."

            "What about quartz?"

            "I don't know. I think if we find some quartz, we should save it. It could be diamonds. If you see anything gold colored, save that, too."

            They sorted, dug, and threw gravel with absorbed intensity for some time. Then Alicea said, "This is boring. I don't think we ever will find gold or diamonds or anything but gravel with sand mixed in. Let's play something else. We didn't finish Moley and Ratty down by the river looking for Toad."

            "I'm not playing. I'm working. I don't have time to play."

            "When will you have time to play?"

            "As soon as I find enough gold or diamonds."

            "How much do you have to find?"

            "I don't know. I'll find some, and I'll find out if that's enough. If it isn't, then I'll find some more, until I have enough."

            "What if you don't find any?"

            "I guess then I'll just have to keep working."

            "What if you never find anything your whole life?"

            "Then I guess I have to keep trying right till I die."

            "That's really stupid. You can't just stay here and keep digging your whole life."

            Julia kept digging, sorting, and throwing gravel. "I probably can."

            Alicea started for the house. Julia kept digging.

            Clouds slipped off the mountain peaks and obscured the sky above the mountain valley. The small girl on the gravel bar beside the river kept digging. Moist gravel and sand chilled her hands, but she kept digging, sorting, and throwing.

            Snowflakes separated from the dark clouds above the valley, drifted down, and settled softly on the gravel, on the small, thin girl sorting through the gravel with cold hands. She didn't care about the snowflakes, about her cold hands, but a degree of doubt crept into her existence. Would she ever find gold and diamonds? She sorted through cold gravel. Snow flakes accumulated on her wool hat, on her shoulders, on her hair hanging golden red down her back.

            Jack slipped through the fence, trotted across the meadow, and knelt in front of Julia. "Hi, beautiful. Headed for China?"

            "I'm going to find gold and diamonds."

            "Good. That sounds like a good thing to do, but maybe not in a snowstorm. I think you should come home now, and we'll talk about gold and diamonds. If you decide you should still try to find them, you can begin again on a warm day."

            Tears ran down her face like snowflakes falling. "I'm not going to leave here until I find gold or diamonds."

            "Come on, Julia, time to go home."

            Julia dug more furiously, and gravel flew. "I am going to keep working until I find gold and diamonds. It's time to work, and I'm going to work."

            Jack reached out and caught her wrist. "Come on Julia. We're going home. I wouldn't interfere without your willing consent, but your hands are blue, they're so cold, and if you don't take care of yourself, I have to do it for you." He caught her other wrist, raised her from her knees, and pulled her toward him.

            She fought and tried to pull away. She said, "No. I'm going to work. No. No." But he was strong, stronger than she realized anyone could be, and all her struggles came to nothing, like snow melting against warmth. He turned her, bent her backward, reached under her knees with one hand, behind her shoulders with the other, picked her up, and carried her toward the house.

            She squirmed and fought, but her struggles came to nothing. She realized the futility of struggling and relaxed. She felt his strength enfolding her, and she realized for the first time she was cold clear through. She felt warmth from being enfolded in his arms.

            He couldn't carry her through the fence. He said, "I need to put you down so we can get through the fence. Will you come along if I put you down?"

            "Yes."

            He put his foot on the bottom wire and pulled the top wire up, to give her more room to get through. She was so stiff with cold, she almost couldn't bend far enough to get through, but she stepped over the bottom wire and stood up on the other side of the fence.

            Jack scooped her up again. "You are our treasure," he said. "Your hair is all the gold we need. You and Alicea are all the treasure we need. You've reminded me I need to worry about money a lot less and express a lot more gratitude that we have everything we need."

            She relaxed into the rhythm of his rapid steps toward the house. She thought of the heater in the house, burning wood and filling the house with warmth. Snow fell faster all across the mountain meadow, filled the air close around them, and fell to the ground like diamonds.