Myrna's Gold Finders

            I met Myrna in a Geology class. She was seventy-four, and I was twenty-five. We hadn't known each other long when she said, "Call me Granny. Almost everybody else does." But I never did.

            She told me, "I have a dream. I want to find so much gold, I can buy a ranch and build places for everyone I know to live. With communal farming and gardening, but private dwellings for individuals and families. My family would start it, but I'd make places available for other people in need who fit in."

            I said, "That sounds like a good dream."

            "I've had claims that could pay a wage if you worked them steady. I've had fairly rich claims, but no equipment to work them, so I sold them to people who could work them, and the people who bought them made most of the money. I was married, divorced once, and widowed once, by the same man, and I raised five children. My richest finds supported his inventions that he always quit working on just a little before they were ready to turn into cash. Anyway, that's a different story, and now I live on my own, and I'm responsible to no one but myself. I prospect quite a bit, and I want to understand more about geology.

            "My son and I are digging a hole down in Little Butte Canyon. He picked up a strong signal on his metal detector down there, so we decided to dig to see what's there. We've dug it six feet, and we have to pull the dirt out in a bucket now. We tied a rope to it. One person fills the bucket in the hole, and the other stays on top and pulls the bucket up and dumps it.

            "We need someone to pull the rope. Or dig. My son does real well. He's forty-two, but I'm too old to work that hard for very long. I wear out after about an hour. I can work another hour later in the day, and that's it. Sometimes not that much.

            "You see what I'm getting at."

            I know the area, so I drove down the rough gravel road and met them at the bridge Saturday morning early, while it was still cool. There were two other cars parked by the bridge, probably people gone fishing. When the day warmed up, swimmers would park their cars by the bridge and disperse up and down the creek.

            Myrna said, "I didn't know if you'd actually show up. Most people think I'm a crazy old woman and agree with everything I say and then forget any promises they make. This is my son, Richard."

            We hiked the trail up the creek, through pine and fir forest. Black oak trees grew among the evergreens, and poison oak bushes, with their red and green leaves, protruded into the trail in some places. Madrone trees and dogwood thickened the forest. Below us, the creek ran clear and noisy, pooling in many places for fish and swimmers.

            About a mile upstream, we left the trail and climbed the steep ridge. We stopped by a deep hole in the ground, and Richard put his metal detector together. He said, "I didn't find this with the metal detector. Mom, there, she found it with her rods. She didn't tell you about the rods? Mom, you should have told him in the beginning. Anyway, she got all excited and told me about this hot spot, so I brought the metal detector down. I thought it wouldn't show anything, but it agrees with her. Something causes a reaction. It even fits the boundaries she laid out for me."

            Myrna said, "He brought that thing down here to prove to me that I'm wrong, and the rods don't work. When the metal detector showed the same thing, he had to sit down and take a rest for a while."

            Richard showed me how the detector worked. He said, "Whatever it is, it's in this whole swale. See, down in the bottom, it goes to the top of the dial. Then all the way up here." We went around trees and brush and defined the area.

            I said, "I think it's a big space ship. It's shaped just right."

            "Could be."

            "Everybody's hoping gold, though, right?"

            Myrna said, "The rods say gold."

            Richard said, "A space ship might be even more valuable. It could be different things. Even a change in geologic layers. Or a void in the earth. If you know enough, you can interpret some possibilities out. But I don't know enough, so I decided to dig a hole and see. Mom and I decided. Maybe she mostly decided. You'll see."

            We dug four hours that day. It took a while to make any depth. We had to have room to work at the bottom, and the hole had to taper wider going up. Richard said, "I'm not saying it would cave in, but if it tapers, it'll be less likely to cave in. I just hate knocking all that dirt down into the hole we've already dug. What do you think, Mom?"

            "Dig it deeper."

            At twelve feet, Richard said, "We're going to have to knock the sides down again. What do you think, Mom?"

            "Dig it deeper."

            "You have a one-track mind. That's enough for me for today. Let's come back in the morning."

            There's a good swimming hole just down the hill from where we were digging, so I spent the afternoon in the creek. It was so far above the bridge, with enough good swimming holes in between, I didn't see anyone but a man and a woman fishing their way back downstream to their car.

            In three weekends of digging, we went to twenty-two feet, the maximum depth the detector read, and we never saw anything but California red clay, all twenty-two feet down, with no changes.

            I still have a picture of me at the top of that hole. Richard got down in the bottom, and I leaned over the hole, and he snapped it. Back-lighted by the sun. Bare-chested and dirty. I took a picture of him at the bottom of the hole, but you can't see anything but his dirty face.

            I prospected sometimes with Myrna after that. She checked out places with the rods. They were two copper rods, bent, so she held the handles, and the rods went straight out in front of her, parallel to each other. It was about the same thing as divining, or witching, or dowsing, but instead of using a forked stick, she had the rods, and she said they would find anything she wanted to find, gold, silver, whatever. She said, "Old Mac used to prospect all over these hills, and he showed me how to work the rods. I've seen them work."

            "Have you found gold with them?"

            "No. I've found places where I think there's gold. Richard thinks that deep hole down in the canyon proves they don't work, but if that's true, the metal detector doesn't work either. He's accepted a job in Arizona, and he's moving his family there soon.

            "The rest of my kids are scattered all over the nation, and they're too skeptical to give any credit to an old woman going around trying to find gold with a pair of copper rods. Some people can even tell how deep what they're looking for is."

            "Can you?"

            "I don't know. I'm still learning how to use them. I'm not sure how well they work for me, yet."

            "Well, you pick out a good spot, where they say there's gold, and I'll dig it for you."

            "Not for me. Fifty-fifty."

            "Okay. Fifty-fifty."

            "Do you want to build a place on the ranch?"

            "I don't know."

            "Do you know carpentry? Could you build a house?"

            "Most of it. I'd have to learn some as I worked at it."

            "Have you ever done any gardening"

            "Yes. I've had gardens, different places. I like gardening."

            "Well, I know you'd fit right in on the ranch. So you can live there if you want to."

            "Okay. We'll see how it goes."

            "It might work best if you got married first."

            "That might take a while."

            "Well, we haven't found the gold to buy the place yet, either."

            The semester ended, and I got tied up with earning a living for a while. Between jobs, I went up to see Chip. He was cutting wood and selling it and prospecting for gold, finding a little here and there, enough to keep him looking. I told him about the hole we dug.

            "Did you pan any of the dirt you dug out?"

            "Never did. Never thought about panning the dirt."

            "Let's go down there."

            We hiked up the creek on a cold spring day, with light rain, then hard rain in the wind. Pine trees stood in the wind, and madrone trees and oak trees. We took dirt down the steep slope to the creek and panned it. Chip said, "Pretty good color. Small stuff, but a fair amount of it."

            "Would it be practical to work it?"

            "You'd have to wash down the whole hillside. I don't think they'd let you do it. It would mean all the dirt going down the creek."

            "The mineral rights are tied up on it anyway."

            I went to see Myrna. She said, "You know, it never occurred to me to pan the dirt. I was looking for gravel with placer gold in it or rock, with a vein of gold. I never thought about the dirt."

            "Neither did I."

            I went to Myrna's place early Wednesday morning, and we went down into Butte Creek canyon. She walked along the face of the hill above the creek, holding the copper rods straight out in front of her. She said, "I get the strongest reading right here. They say at six feet, but the book says they're accurate on depth for some people and not for others."

            We dug most of that day and part of the next, until we had dug eight feet deep. At eight feet, she said, "Let's quit. They're no good."

            "Pan some dirt."

            She found color in the dirt. "But they said a rich deposit. This is fair, but it isn't rich."

            "Maybe gold is gold as far as they care."

            "I don't know. I asked them to show me a rich deposit. What I want is ancient stream bed with rich placer in it. Something we can work and make enough to buy the tools we need to work more of it. We need at least a million dollars to get started."

            "A million dollars?"

            "Land isn't cheap. Do you know of any way to build that's cheap? Especially if you're building for a dozen or two dozen families. It isn't going to be cheap to build, buy the land, get everything started. It'll take time to make the place self-sufficient, and it'll take money to keep everything going until it is."

            "Well, you'd better get busy with those things then."

            Myrna was better company than a lot of people I know. That was all the reason I needed to go prospecting with her whenever she found another hot spot. Her hope for striking it rich kept her driving and hiking all over the country, digging and panning, when most people her age had surrendered to old age. "I want that ranch before I'll quit. Not just for myself. It would be good for other people, too."

            "I know it would. I agree with that."

            "Are you going to live there?"

            "I don't see how I could do anything else. If we hit it and buy a ranch, you couldn't drive me away."

            "Richard and his family will be there. You haven't met Brian, but he'll be there. He's married and has three children. His wife is sort of a nose-in-the-air and knows-it-all woman, but the places will have enough distance between them, everyone will have privacy. We need people who know how to do things and how to teach, because there will be people who don't know how to do much until they have a chance to learn."

            The next few places we dug, we found traces of gold. Then we found a spot that looked like it might be rich, but we ran out of digging power. There was too much dirt and rock to move with the tools we had. Myrna checked records, and found it had a claim on it.

            Chip laughed at me for prospecting with an old woman who picked out spots with a pair of copper rods.

            "Why not? How do you decide where to dig?"

            "Way the ground lays. Way the stream runs. How I feel about it."

            "Myrna looks at how the ground lays and how the stream runs. Then she picks a spot within what looks good by using the rods. Should I avoid digging at a spot that looks good just because her rods tell her that's a good spot?"

            "You got a good point there."

            "Then come on down where we're digging and bring drills and dynamite. She says she gets a strong reading, and we're clear to bedrock, and she says deeper. She thinks there's a vein in the rock, and she wants to blow a hole and see."

            Boom. The ground shook. Rock blew up into the air, blew up a rock-dust, clay-dust cloud that settled down the hill. We cleaned out the hole. Rock. Some quartz.

            Myrna said, "Quartz bears gold."

            "Sometimes. Can bear gold, but mostly doesn't."

            "Let's send it in for an assay."

            The assay showed traces of gold. Not enough to encourage mining, but enough so nobody could say there wasn't any gold there. Chip blew the hole three feet deeper, but nothing showed up any richer.

            "I'm going to throw these things away and take up knitting and get a little lap dog to take to town on a leash."

            "Don't quit prospecting though, in between knitting sweaters for the little dog."

            Winter set down, and we didn't go out. I got a job pulling green-chain in a lumber mill. Hated it, too. But I stuck with it all winter and part of the spring. Chip came busting into my place one evening mid-spring when I'd just finished showering after work and told me a story that startled me. I said, "Let's go tell that one to Myrna."

            Chip launched right into it when we got there. "I run into this guy yesterday. He was looking at that dry shaker I got for sale. He says, 'I've hit the mother lode.' He pulled a pill bottle about this big out of his shirt pocket and shook it out in his hand. It was full up with nuggets, some as big as the eraser on a pencil, real rough stuff, didn't move much after it got knocked out of the rock. He said he's got the stuff all across the surface, in the grass, thick in there, and he's found where it's coming from, washing down from an outcropping. I mentioned knowing you, Granny, and the rods, and he said, 'Yeah. That's how I found this. With rods. Eleven years I've been looking, and now I've hit it.'"

            Myrna said, "But why eleven years? If you have something that points right at it, why eleven years?"

            "You have to cover a lot of territory. Quite a few places have a little bit of gold. Not very many places have a lot of gold. He said you have to learn to use the rods. He said they aren't always dependable. They can play tricks on you or you can play tricks on yourself."

            "The book says they can't be used for purely selfish reasons. They won't work."

            "All you can do is keep trying."

            Myrna said, "You have to have confidence in them to make them work, and the people around you have to have confidence. And some people I know haven't had much confidence."

            I said, "Uh, Myrna...?"

            "Yes, you."

            "If you say I have to believe in the rods, it sounds like imputing power to pieces of copper, and I don't believe in them in that way. They might be a useful tool for someone who can tune in to their surroundings. Every place you've said there would be gold, we've found gold. But I can't crank up my faith to a high intensity, because they aren't a totem for me, positive or negative. I could stay away when you use the rods and come in later."

            "Will you dig?"

            "Yes."

            "If I say deeper, will you dig deeper?"

            "If possible."

            "If it isn't possible, will you go get Chip and some dynamite?"

            "If possible."

            "Will you go by my judgements?"

            "Most of the time, I'm sure."

            "You sound too independent to be of much use to me."

            "My independence is more than equalled by my ability to dig large, deep holes with basic hand tools. And my willingness to dig them almost anyplace you say."

            "Anyplace."

            "You can, at times, be headstrong, stubborn, and imperious. My dignity and my respect for common sense demand a say."

            "If you must, I suppose you must. When can you dig?"

             "Saturday."

            "I'll pick you up."

            I never could convince Myrna that I had not lost my faith and then regained it when I heard of the man's strike.

            "How come you'd believe him, but you never did believe me?"

            "Myrna, I never did not believe you. It was winter. I was pulling green-chain and some overtime, and I was too beat to do much."

            "You're still pulling green-chain, and there you are, digging a hole."

            "No overtime. I come out here more because working with you helps keep my mind sharpened up than because I hope to find a lot of gold."

            "You don't believe that I ever will hit it big."

            "I didn't say that. I said more one than the other."

            "Mac told me about a place up Deer Creek. They went to bedrock up there and found an ancient stream bed. Mac was working the claim down on the creek, right below them, and he saw some of what they took out. He said they took out biscuit-size nuggets."

            "How is Mac?"

            "He died last winter."

            "Oh."

            "He was eighty-six years old, and he lived a good life, that he enjoyed a lot, and he was ready to let go of it. I've been up there several times with the rods, and I have some hot spots. Let's go up there Saturday and look around. I'll fix a lunch and pick you up early."

            They'd brought a lot of water down and washed a big piece of the hill down into the creek, where they sorted their materials and let the creek wash away their dirt and gravel. They worked a hole down, forty feet deep in the center and drained it out a deep, narrow gully. They exposed bedrock and found ancient river channel in the rock and placer gold in the river channel.

            Sixty-foot tall pines grow in the bottom now and up the steep slope where they left off their work.

            I said, "How in all these hillsides so much alike did they pick this place?"

            "I don't know. Mac said he thought they used rods, but I don't really know."

            "Why did they quit?"

            "I don't know."

            "Maybe they took it all out."

            "Maybe."

            "When did they work it?"

            "The late thirties, I think."

            "Maybe the war shut them down. You should have asked Mac more questions."

            "I didn't know he was going to die."

            "Is there any more gold?"

            Myrna said, "The rods say so. Both ways, the river bed runs under, and the rods say there's rich gold in it."

            "Maybe there is. That's sixty feet of dirt to move. The only way to do that is just like they did it. Set it all up for spring runoff. Get nozzles and wash the whole thing down. Flume the whole hill down the gully and into the creek."

            "Hydraulicking is illegal now."

            "Oh, I know it is. I just say it's the only effective way to move that much dirt. You could work it all as you moved it that way. Get the fine gold in the dirt and the biscuit-size nuggets from the stream bed."

            "You aren't serious enough about mining."

            "Probably not. But even if I was very serious, I wouldn't see any way to move all that dirt, not to mention all the trees."

            "We could use all the materials from the trees. For building and for firewood."

            "You could do it in a couple of summers with a bulldozer and a loader, trommel, pumps, about a half-million dollars worth of equipment, lots of water, and a crew of five. The trouble with owning equipment is that a lot of what you find goes to support the equipment. You have to find gold to keep the whole operation running. Not to mention buying the equipment in the first place. Could take all of the profit and most of the fun out of it."

            We prospected around the area. We found some gold, paid our expenses, and had some extra cash now and then. Old claims lapsed, and Myrna filed on them. She said, "I'm going to be too old by the time we find a million dollars. I'm going to be so old I won't care about trying to build the ranch. What's the use of dreaming if I get too old for the dream?"

            "That only gives us about twenty more years, then."

            "Ha. That would make me almost a hundred."

            She tried to give me the claims, and I told her to keep them in her name. We'd keep digging around; maybe we'd hit something.

            Sometimes we went out to that area along Deer Creek Saturday mornings and just kicked around. Sometimes we dug. I dug two weekends in a row when we hit a good pocket in the dirt on the bedrock, where the overburden was shallow in a drainage.

            We repaired some of the ditches the original miners used to bring spring runoff to the claim. I quit the mill, and we went up as soon as we could get in in the spring and knocked all the dirt and rock we could down into our ditch, accelerating the erosion of the north face, trying to find and open up the old stream bed. We put everything through a sluice at the foot of the slope and dammed the gully so the dirt would settle out before the water reached Deer Creek. We found some good color, and Myrna sparkled and danced. "By this time next year, we'll be on the ranch. A million dollars worth of gold. We got it whipped now."

            Then the color fell off. "Not ten dollars worth today. It's bringing our average down."

            Good days. Small nuggets sometimes. Some days with nothing. The water ran out. We sold gold, evaluated the rest of it, and totaled our figures. "Forty-six dollars and fifty-two cents a day apiece."

            "You could make more than that pulling green-chain."

            "No comparison. I hate pulling green-chain. Noisy, dirty, hard, indoor work. I like this work."

            "You do most of the work. You take it all."

            "Baloney on that. You do your share. The manager usually makes more than the laborers."

            "Not in this outfit. I'll take twenty a day. That's more than I've earned."

            "Forty-six fifty-two per day apiece is what it figures out. If you don't like the way I figure it and split it, you could always get another shovel-man."

            "Forty-six fifty-two a day for two months doesn't buy a ranch."

            "Myrna, we don't need a ranch. The whole world is our ranch."

            "I want to have something to give to people who are in need."

            "Everybody else has to buy his own ranch for right now."

             "I'm not giving up the dream."

            "You shouldn't give it up. But you shouldn't be too disappointed if it turns out that's something you can't do. You're valuable for what you already are and what you already do."

            We worked the claim the next spring and averaged a little better. We prospected all over the country that summer. We kept hitting enough gold that I thought either there's some gold almost everywhere, or the rods really did work for Myrna.

            Winter set down, and I went back to pulling green-chain. I knew it was temporary, so it didn't really bother me. I stopped by to see Myrna on a Monday. She was doing pretty well, slow moving around, but holding her own.

            She said, "I haven't let go of the dream. If I never achieve it, just having it has made my life more worthwhile."

            She made coffee, and we had coffee and sweet rolls. She asked me, "If I don't make it through until we dig out a million dollars, are you going to buy a ranch?"

            "If I hit it that rich, yes, I will."

            Two days later, Myrna went to that gold field beyond, where every pan brings clinker-sized colors, and lots of fines, and one-pound nuggets turn up every now and then and everybody who wants to lives on a big ranch in peaceful community.

            I was glad she went the way she did. She wasn't sick, just here and doing okay one minute and gone the next.

            She left all her claims to me. I thought of giving some to her children. Her lawyer said, "I advise going by the terms of the will. Myrna was not unmindful of her own children. She gave something to each of them. If she had wanted them to have claims, she would have given them herself. I don't know what her thoughts were, but I know she arranged everything in what she considered to be an orderly fashion."

            So I've made most of my living from Myrna's claims since then.

            My water's about gone for this year. I'll clean up what I have and pack everything up. I've made enough, I can spend the rest of the summer prospecting new areas. It'll go like other years.

            Sometimes I'll forget, and I'll turn from digging for signs of gold and say something to Myrna before I remember she isn't standing up there in the sunshine, letting the rods dangle from her hand, waiting to see what I find, anymore.

            I come down that steep north slope through the brush and trees. I slide down the slope. Gravel rolls under me, and I raise a cloud of dust. Might be a lot more gold under here. A million dollars worth, maybe more. The only way I could find out is by selling the claims to someone who has the equipment to strip it down to bedrock. I don't want to do that. I don't want to see it all gouged out quick with big machines.

            I've had a couple of offers. If I sold, I'd have the money I sold it for, and they'd have the million dollars. They wouldn't buy a ranch to share with other people, and I wouldn't have nearly enough money to do that.

            Myrna's dream is still a good dream. Sometimes I think about it while I'm working or at night when I stay out here and roll up in my sleeping bag with bright stars above me.

            Sometimes I think there isn't room in the modern world for such a dream. People out for themselves and big machines have buried the dream Myrna held onto, using the riches the earth holds to help people in need.

            I don't know. If I think about it too much, I get depressed, and it sours the work I'm doing and makes me stand off bitter from the people I see when I go into town.

            So I'll keep working it the way I'm working it. Maybe some day I'll dig up biscuit-sized nuggets. If I do, I'll be on my way to uncovering Myrna's million dollar dream.

            If that never happens, I'll grow into being a white-haired old man in these hills and mountains, knowing the reality of the earth providing me work I enjoy and a good living for fifty years.

            If I meet Myrna in the eternal gold mine beyond, I'll tell her it's still a good dream, but the world isn't ready for it yet.