Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  “Well, of course, we’d be happy-”

  “Good. I’ll have the plants delivered to your warehouse tomorrow. And I’ll call you in a day or so about the customer agreements. How is your brother, by the way?”

  “He’s good.”

  “His girlfriend cleans my house, I think. Rosie. It must be profoundly affecting for someone in his condition to have a relationship.”

  “It’s very important to him, yes.”

  There was a brief silence on the line while Jeremy Tripp digested this. Then he hung up.

  It seemed that in the space of five minutes Plantasaurus had gone from certain ruin to potentially being more successful than we could have dreamed. That was, of course, if Jeremy Tripp was genuine. But looking at it logically I saw no reason for him not to be. He’d attacked us because he believed we’d made the video that drove his sister to suicide. Now that he knew someone else had made it he had no reason to continue persecuting us.

  I went outside. Stan was dancing with Rosie on a flat patch of ground in front of the cabin. He had a radio balanced on the porch railing. It was tuned to a station that played jazz and swing.

  Despite the illusion their dancing created, that Stan was happy and without care, I knew there was another, much larger part of him that was troubled and frightened-the moths and his increasing reliance on Rosie’s company were clear evidence of that. So it was good to be able to tell him that Jeremy Tripp and Plantagion were no longer a threat to us, that the success of Plantasaurus was virtually guaranteed.

  Stan hugged Rosie and let out a whoop.

  “I told you, Johnny! I told you! I knew power was going to come across.”

  He lifted his moth pouch from the throat of his shirt, opened it, and held it to his nose. He inhaled deeply and his eyelids fluttered.

  “I can feel it coming into me. I’m breathing it in, Johnny. Wow, what a great day!”

  It was in the spirit of this newfound optimism that I decided to see if I could make the day even better. It had been two days since Stan and I had climbed to the top of the spur, two days since I’d discovered what I thought was the secret of Empty Mile, and the need to know if I was right had now reached a point where I could no longer put off doing something about it. So, around midday, after we’d finished what little Plantasaurus work we had, I used my phone and made an appointment and took Stan on a drive.

  The Bureau of Land Management office in Burton was a storefront conversion that ran back through the ground floor of a ’50s building made from shiny, burnt-purple bricks. There were two women behind computers in the room that opened off the street and one of them pointed us down a short corridor when I asked to see Howard Webb, the man whose name was on the business card Rolf Kortekas had given me. We passed a couple of doors as we made our way to the rear of the building. They had frosted glass panels in their upper halves and the light that came through them made me think there was no one in the rooms behind them.

  The door at the end of the corridor was the same as the others except that the blurred nimbus of an electric light showed through the frosting. We knocked and went in.

  Howard Webb was a small man with dark hair. He sat behind a wooden desk that looked like it had been thrown away by the local school years ago. There were windows behind him and it was bright in the room, but still he had a lamp burning on his desk. It was angled over a spread of black-and-white photographs. At his direction Stan and I dragged two hard chairs away from a wall and as we set them in front of his desk I saw that the photographs he was looking at had been taken from a plane. We made our introductions and he reached over the desk and shook our hands. Stan coughed nervously when it was his turn. Howard Webb leaned back in his chair.

  “You’re lucky to catch me. This office is mainly an administrative station-permits for land use, that sort of thing. I’m only really here when there’s a survey in the area. You said on the phone that you have a picture you want me to look at?”

  I handed him my father’s aerial photograph. “I was wondering what you could tell us about it.”

  He looked at the picture for a moment, then set it down and typed the serial number in its bottom right-hand corner into a laptop that stood on a small table beside the desk. He read the screen for a moment then turned back to us.

  “It’s a place outside Oakridge. We did an aerial survey of the area a year ago. How’d you come across it?”

  Stan shifted in his seat. “Uh-oh, Johnny.”

  Howard Webb glanced at him uncertainly. “There’s nothing wrong with you having it. I just meant that they don’t really find their way out into the world with any sort of prevalence…” His voice tailed off on the last word, as though he was uncertain Stan would understand its meaning.

  Stan looked embarrassed and said quietly, “My dad had it.”

  “Oh. Was he developing land in the area?”

  “He was a real estate agent.”

  Howard Webb frowned and looked at the photo again. Then he turned it over and read out what was written there. “The trees are different…” He repeated it to himself and smiled. “I remember this picture. Your father sold real estate in Oakridge. Yes, I remember him. We met at his office back in the middle of April when I was researching the area. He asked me if I had any photos he could have for his office. And I remember particularly because, a few days after I’d given him some, he asked me exactly that-why the trees were different.” Howard Webb looked at me and squinted. “How is he?”

  “Well, we’re not really sure right now. He may be off on a midlife crisis.”

  The surveyor was momentarily confused, but evidently decided it would be indelicate to probe further. “Oh, well, he seemed like a nice man. Do you know what he meant, about the trees?”

  “I can see something in the photo, but I’m not sure what it is.”

  “Okay, look here.”

  Stan and I stood up and leaned over the desk as Webb pointed at the photo with the tip of a pencil.

  “So, most of what you can see is typical topography for the area-forest, river, a collapsed spur. But there’s something else a little more interesting here too. The trees we’re talking about are here.”

  Webb traced the faintly differentiated channel of trees on the picture with his pencil.

  “You can see how this area of forest appears very slightly lighter on the photograph. That’s because the vegetation here-the trees-is less dense and of lesser stature than the forest on either side of it. And it’s like that because it’s growing in ground that is poorer in nutrients. You see the course of the river? How it curves around this spur? That’s not its original course. I think what we’re looking at here is the result of a landslip. At some point the face of the spur fell away into the path of the river and forced it into this curve, here. The line of sparser vegetation on the other side of the bluff follows the original path of the river. The trees are, in effect, growing on top of the original riverbed. In some cases a riverbed will be sediment rich and we would see the opposite effect on vegetation-that it would grow more strongly-but in others the riverbed is composed of gravel and sand and plants have a harder time because they only have a shallow layer of topsoil from which to source nutrients. That’s probably the case here.”

  “But we own that land and where those trees are doesn’t look like a riverbed. I mean, it doesn’t dip down or anything.”

  “The Swallow River is very shallow in that part of the country even now. There’s no reason to suppose it was any deeper along this old, original stretch. The slip might have happened several hundred years ago. Over that time whatever depression there was could easily have been filled with windborne debris, matter washed in by rain, accumulated dead vegetation…”

  Stan made two quick popping noises with his lips. “Yikes, Johnny, a secret river and we didn’t even know it was there!”

  Howard Webb looked slightly nonplussed, but recovered quickly and smiled at Stan. “A lot of these things are only visible from the air.”


  I had what I needed. Stan and I thanked Howard Webb for his time and headed out of the office. At the door, though, something occurred to me and I turned back to him.

  “When my father was here asking about the picture, was there anyone else with him?”

  “Yes, a kind of redheaded guy, about your age.”

  On the way home Stan was agog with the idea of a hidden river.

  “I bet we’re the only people in the whole world who know about it, Johnny. It’s right there, in the trees, and anyone else would just walk over it, but we know. I told you it was weird how the trees were like that. And I was right.”

  “That you were, dude.”

  “I wonder what it would look like if we dug it up.” For a moment he was silent, then he startled me with a sharp intake of breath. “Johnny! That must be why Dad dug those holes there. Where he got that sample from. The hidden river must be full of gold!”

  “Calm down, dude.”

  “But why would he dig samples if he didn’t think it was? Hey, you know what? We should go exploring there.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be exploring it all right.”

  “We should make an equipment list. Like a flashlight and an axe. And some rope.”

  “What are you going to use rope for?”

  “You coil it up and put it over your shoulder. So it goes across your chest.”

  “And you look totally cool.”

  “Yeah. We gotta do it when Rosie’s around so she can see.” After that he gazed out the window for a couple of minutes, then he turned back to me and said quietly, “You think we should get married, Johnny?”

  “Can’t, we’re brothers.”

  “Me and Rosie, stupid.”

  That Stan and Rosie might get married was an idea so bizarre I’d never contemplated it and caught unawares as I was now I couldn’t help but react negatively.

  “I don’t know, Stan, Marla and I aren’t married.”

  “Yeah, but Johnny,” Stan looked uncomfortable, “you’re you.”

  “Okay, even so, do you think it’s a good idea? I mean, Rosie’s a lovely girl but I think she had a pretty rough life in the past. Being married is kind of different than just going out, you have to deal with more of each other’s problems.”

  “But Rosie and I don’t have problems. We’re happy.”

  “Yeah, but what I’m saying is you might have problems if you got married.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Johnny.”

  “Look, Stan, I know you love her, but you live right next door, you see her whenever you want. What’s the difference?”

  Stan was silent for a mile or so and I knew I’d made him unhappy.

  “But if we did get married you wouldn’t be angry, would you, Johnny?”

  “No, I wouldn’t be angry.”

  Stan smiled to himself and wriggled comfortably deeper into his seat. And I drove on, wondering just how complicated life could get.

  Marla was later than usual and it was dark when she got home from work. She dropped her things over the back of a chair and collapsed on the couch. Her cheeks were flushed from the cool air outside but under the color she looked the same sort of tired she always did nowadays. Stan was in his room watching TV and came out when he heard her arrive. He was bursting to tell her about our buried river but before he could start Marla sighed and launched into an explanation of why she was late.

  “They called an unscheduled meeting at the town hall about the road to Tunney Lake. I had to go up and take minutes.” She smiled grimly. “Things don’t look good for Gareth. They took an informal vote; there wasn’t enough of a majority to veto the project, but it could easily end up that way given time. You won’t believe who was there-Jeremy Tripp. He was with that woman who’s been campaigning around town.”

  “Vivian Gelhardt.”

  “You know her?”

  “Gareth used to go out with her. He introduced us awhile ago, before she left him for Tripp.”

  “What a shame. Well, they’ve got this petition with a ton of signatures. Tripp said he was going to keep collecting them until he had enough to force the council to abandon the road.”

  “Could they really do that?”

  “They see that van around town and enough people sign a piece of paper, they can’t just ignore it. Plus a couple of the councilors don’t want to spend the money anyhow.”

  Stan, who had been jigging from foot to foot while she spoke, couldn’t contain himself any longer and blurted, “We’ve got a hidden river and it’s full of gold!”

  Marla looked confused and I could tell she was trying to figure out if his comment was another behavioral anomaly like his moths. I held my hand up to stop him saying any more and he sat down on a chair facing the couch, grinning at me, waiting for me to explain our discovery to Marla.

  “Stan and I found out something today that makes me pretty sure I know why my father bought this land.”

  Stan leaned forward excitedly and said, “Because there’s a river full of gold!”

  Marla rolled her eyes. “Oh God, Johnny, he was always digging around in one place or another. He never found anything worth more than a couple hundred dollars, you know that.”

  “Well, listen to this-Millicent told me he was out here in February trying to get her to put her house on the market. While he was there she showed him a journal her great-great-grandfather or someone had written early in the Gold Rush. I’ve read it too, and this guy came up the Swallow and panned the whole length of Empty Mile. Didn’t find a thing, got pissed off, and moved on up the river. Okay, no big deal. Empty Mile’s called Empty Mile because no one found gold here. Everyone’s always assumed it was because some early party of miners got to the bend before the Rush really got going and mined it clean. Thing is, Millicent’s great-great-grandfather said in his journal that the bend had never been mined before he got to it. There were no piles of dirt, the riverbed wasn’t disturbed, etcetera, etcetera. So the reason there was no gold at Empty Mile couldn’t have been because it was mined out. Now, my father, being interested in gold forever, would have found this an interesting fact, and he would have remembered it, particularly because the rest of the Swallow River was so rich. Then, Chris Reynolds told us, he attended a lecture in March at the Elephant Society-the same subject you and I sat through-about how changes in the landscape, things like landslides and so on, can change the course of a river. I think it was at that point he started speculating about Empty Mile. But the breakthrough came with this.”

  I had the aerial photo ready at the side of the couch. I passed it to Marla. She looked at it blankly. “I don’t see anything.”

  Stan laughed. “That’s because it’s a secret river.”

  Marla looked levelly at me. “A secret river?”

  “It’s true. He was all excited about this photo a couple of weeks after I got back to Oakridge. He had it blown up and he hung it on the wall in the living room. It’s part of a Bureau of Land Management survey. He wouldn’t say what the big deal was, but it was obviously important to him. This is the original print. He wrote something on the back.”

  Marla turned the photo so she could read my father’s cryptic: The trees are different.

  “Today Stan and I took it to the guy my father got it from. He’s a BLM surveyor.”

  Marla squinted closely at the front of the photo again. “I still don’t see anything.”

  “Look here.”

  I traced the pale line through the trees for her and continued it to the river on the other side of the spur.

  “You can see the trees don’t grow quite as strongly. The BLM guy said this is the original course of the river. It used to run pretty much straight, see? Then the front of this spur here, which is the cliff that runs down the side of the meadow, collapsed and forced the river into the curve it makes now. The part that got cut off gradually filled in over the years and things started to grow on it. If you go up high enough, though, you can still see it.”

  S
tan nodded enthusiastically. “See, Marla, a secret river. It’s been like that for hundreds of years and nobody knew ’cause they never went high enough to see it.”

  “And Ray thought it was full of gold?” Marla’s voice was droll.

  “Well, it makes sense. The gold they found in the Gold Rush had built up over thousands and thousands of years. If just a few hundred years ago a river changed course, the new part of it probably wouldn’t have time to build up much gold at all. Once my father read Millicent’s journal he knew Empty Mile wasn’t empty from having been mined out. And that meant there was a possibility the gold was somewhere else. You heard Chris Reynolds say how rich the Swallow River was. Some people made fortunes, and they were competing with thousands of other men wherever they went on the river. So imagine if you own a whole stretch of it and you’re the only person who gets to mine it. I mean, gold’s like over nine hundred dollars an ounce now. And my father did actually do a bit of testing before he bought the land. I told you about the assayer in Burton, about how he took some samples there. They came from this buried riverbed. Plus it explains why he was so adamant about me not selling the land after he put it in my name. It didn’t have anything to do with something his accountant told him, because Rolf Kortekas told me he never had an accountant.”

  “And what about you? Do you think there’s gold there?”

  Marla’s question made me pause. I’d been so focused on figuring out what was going on with the land that I hadn’t really thought about whether or not I actually believed there was gold on it. I had my father’s faith in what he thought he’d found-but he didn’t have a great track record when it came to making money-and I had the small sample of gold from the assayer in Burton. It wasn’t much.

  “I guess the only way to know is to dig some more holes.”

  “And if you find something, then what? You can’t dig up a whole river with a spade.”

  Stan chimed in, “I’ll help you, Johnny. I could dig a whole bunch of holes.”

  To Marla I said, “Doing it on any sort of scale is obviously going to cost money-clearing the land, digging out the riverbed, processing the pay dirt, if there is any. And right now I don’t see how we could finance it. Maybe if Plantasaurus picks up with these new customers we’re supposed to be getting from Jeremy Tripp we could try and raise a small loan for some exploratory work. Until then it’s just us and a spade.”