Aurora's Gold

by K. J. Gillenwater

  I noticed my hot water and air lines had twisted around my legs. I’d been following the streak in whichever direction it took me, even if that was in circles. I kicked free. As I did so, I could see in the murky distance another diver and dredge. They appeared to be the correct distance away, but it still didn’t make me happy. This could be Kyle’s new employer. They might’ve found the continuation of my hot streak. In another day or two the gold could be played out. Even more divers could show up. They could muscle in on my find.

  The urge to work my ass off and get as much of the gold as I could took over. The tide pushed at me. The force of it difficult to work against. It became harder and harder to stay in place and continue following the gold. I knew those clouds, and likely a squall, were drifting in quickly.

  “Ben, how’s it looking topside? Starting to get rough down here.”

  Suddenly, breathing grew difficult. My air supply had been cut to a trickle in a matter of seconds. Without thought I gasped and bucked backward, dropping the suction hose to the sea floor.

  “Shit.” Ben in my ear. His one word to me said everything.

  I was in trouble.

  Instinct kicked in. My lungs burned as the air ran out. It had cut off so quickly I hadn’t had a chance to get one last breath. I couldn’t help but think of my father’s accident. With a quick movement, I released my weight belt and headed toward the surface fifteen feet away. Twice the depth of a swimming pool. The water felt like mud around me. Thick, impossible mud. The surface glinted high above, just out of reach.

  I was a strong swimmer. I’d played games before with my friends. Swimming across the Snake River in the height of summer. Rapid breathing ahead of time to super saturate the oxygen in the blood. Hyperventilating. Then, I’d swallow a big gob of air into my lungs. I’d dive down, down, down as close to the rocky bottom as I could and kick like an otter, arms along my sides. I’d glide through the cool water to the other side.

  This was not like those childhood games. This was real.

  I wanted so badly to breathe. A few more feet, and I could surface. The sun bright above me. The white hull of the dredge was visible through the water. The lines tangled around my legs. I imagined for a flash they would drag me back down. As if they were living, breathing creatures who would swirl around me until I’d been bound up and immobilized. Trapped by the lines of air and heat that had been keeping me alive below.

  My hands stretched for the surface. My fingertips cleared first.

  The pain in my lungs was unbearable. I wanted so badly to take in air where none existed. I wanted to pull off my mask, but knew if I did I’d open my mouth, and the sea would rush in. The cold, cold salt water. Gagging me. Filling me.

  I panicked. I flailed. I couldn’t kick anymore.

  The sun. There it was. Right there. Through the veil of water. I reached for it.

  Strong arms wrapped around me. Tugged me to the surface. My mask ripped from my face.

  I coughed.

  Air filled my lungs.

  The rush of oxygen overwhelmed my other senses. I couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, couldn’t hear. I took in lungful after lungful. Over and over and over. Coughing and sputtering between gasps.

  A hand held mine. Very tight grip. Squeezing occasionally.

  “Rory, can you hear me? Are you all right?” Ben’s voice cut through the fog in my head.

  I grew limp. My energy sapped. I could barely think much less coherently answer. So I nodded.

  I realized I was on the deck. I don’t know how I got there. The last I remember Ben had grabbed me out of the water and hauled me to the surface.

  How had he gotten me up on the deck?

  “Just take it easy.” He wiped strands of wet hair off my forehead.

  I’d replaced all the hoses after my father’s accident in a bit of an emotional haze. For a moment it did cross my mind that maybe I’d messed up, putting my own life at risk.

  “The air compressor stalled out,” Ben said. “I think a fuse blew. I’m so sorry.”

  I managed to sit up. A never ending series of coughs took over before I could speak. “That’s ok.” The air compressor had crapped out once before when Nate still worked for us. Maybe it had been a fuse problem, but I couldn’t erase from my mind the possibility I’d missed something. “It’s not your fault.”

  Ben sat back on his haunches. Soaked to the skin and shivering. He’d dived in after me in his t-shirt and jeans. He looked emotionally exhausted. A deep wrinkle set between his brow.

  “I’ll be all right.” I didn’t want him to worry. I didn’t want to talk about the similarities to my father’s accident or think about how close I’d come to giving up. I took deep breaths. “Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.” I coughed some more. My voice sounded weak and strained. “Ask around town. Air compressors going bad, running out of gas, getting tangled in hoses. There’s so many things that can go wrong down there.”

  I wanted to wrap up in a blanket and take a nap. But we were a mile or more from shore, and it would take us some time to get in. Plus, we were on good gold. Crazy thought after I’d almost drowned, but that was the heart of a miner.

  I looked up at the sky. The fog had cleared some. Although the current underneath had grown to a steady ebb and flow and had been difficult to work with, the surface didn’t appear too turbulent.

  “If you’re up for it, there’s still time to get some diving in.” I unzipped my dive suit to my waist. The cool air on my body was invigorating. It made me feel alive. Exhilarated. Some sort of adrenaline high, I guess, after my harrowing experience.

  Ben’s teeth chattered. “Hell yes.”

  “Maybe we should warm you up first.”

  Ben shrugged out of his shirt and grabbed a beach towel off the bench on deck. “I’m fine.”

  Yesterday I didn’t know what to think about my new diver. He was monster-huge, looked like he belong to a motorcycle gang and barely spoke more than two words to me at a time. But today, Ben saved my life, and I would never doubt him again. After something like that, trust was an automatic.

  “I’ve gotta fix the compressor.”

  “Let’s have some lunch first.”

  He helped me to my feet, and we both headed into the wheelhouse. Peanut butter and jelly never tasted so good.

  *

  Ben had done an admirable job his second time out. Although the ocean got a little rough near the end of the day, and we’d have to cut back to shore before I’d planned, I felt good about what we’d accomplished. Oddly, the catastrophe I’d experienced was barely a blip in my brain. All I needed to do was look at the gold in the box, and any fears or remaining bad feelings I had about running out of air 15 feet underwater instantly disappeared.

  Ben bobbed to the surface, pushed up his mask and hauled himself onto the dredge before I could even offer a hand. He was so strong. Amazing, really. I still didn’t know how he’d managed to get me onto the deck so quickly. Like the speed of light.

  “Looks like that other dredge may have wiped it out while I was working on the compressor.” Water droplets clung to his beard. He ran a hand over his chin.

  “Crap.” I’d worried about that. Right before my air cut out, I’d seen that other dredge. A good distance away, but it had been where we were headed. South-southeast.

  Once a miner found a streak, she followed it. The worst was not having any streak to follow, because then a miner had to go back to prospecting. Out on the free claims that could be incredibly difficult. These areas had been worked over by amateurs and pros for years. Although a lot of untouched areas remained, they could be hard to find. Usually a miner hoped to find some tailings that were poorly mined by someone without experience.

  “You got some other hot spots?” Ben unzipped his wet suit and peeled it back to his waist. He grabbed a towel and roughly dried his mane of hair.

  “Not sure. My dad might have some notes somewhere.”

  “I thought you did this fo
r years?”

  My hackles automatically went up. “I have.” I didn’t want to be irritable, but Ben had hit a soft spot. Most of the dredging community assumed my Dad had been covering for me. The notion had been helped along by Nate who had bad mouthed me after being fired last year. “But my dad had been the one who chose the spots, tracked them, made notes on different places and which ones might be good for exploring.”

  I don’t think Ben even realized he’d set me off with his comment. “Oh, okay.”

  To smooth it over and keep my diver hungry I added, “He did tell me about the rumors, though.”

  “Rumors?” Ben sat on the bench.

  “About big gold. Lost out there.” I gestured at the dark blue-green water. “Nuggets the size of quarters.”

  “What do you mean, ‘lost?’” He looped the damp towel around his neck and held both ends. His attention fully mine.

  “My dad used to say an old miner had found a huge pay streak, but he died before anyone could find out where.”

  He raised his brows. “Like an Alaskan El Dorado.”

  I smiled. “Something like that.” My dad loved to tell me all kinds of crazy stories. I never knew which were real and which were for fun. “You ready to head in?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Ben crossed to the port side and pulled in the suction hose and other hoses. Even though he had two days of experience dredging he seemed to know exactly what to do and when to do it. Not sure if he had good instincts or what, but I was happy not to be ordering him around like I’d had to order Kyle. Ben did things without being told.

  Kyle, although he’d been a good diver, didn’t have a lot of initiative. Drove me nuts sometimes. I’d acted like his mother, carping about this chore or that chore left undone on the dredge before we got back to the docks.

  Maybe Ben’s attitude came from his military training. They say the military taught people how to work as a team.

  I shut off the sluice, the air compressor and the heat exchanger. Ben coiled the hoses into neat piles on the deck. I slid the buckets over to the sluice and removed the riffles that not only trapped the larger gold but held the miner’s moss in place beneath. I rolled up the mats and carefully set them into the buckets.

  When I finished, Ben grabbed them and carried them into the wheelhouse.

  The waves grew stronger and broke across the bow of the dredge. “We’d better get moving before we end up in a repeat of yesterday.” I took the wheel and set course for shore.

  Ben grabbed a beer out of the cooler, set one next to me on the dash and stood behind me.

  I scanned the horizon as we turned toward town. Half the dredges that had been out on the water earlier today had returned to the dock. Smaller dredges couldn’t take this kind of chop.

  Buck had made the biggest dredge he could afford when I’d been about sixteen. His original dredge had some rot problems and some of the equipment needed total replacement if he’d wanted to mine the next summer. Ice dredging didn’t require a dredge, so he’d worked his ass off that winter. He and Nate had taken some risks to ensure he’d have enough to put together a better dredge by June.

  I remembered how rickety that original dredge had been. Even a five-mile-an-hour wind had been too much for the original Alaska Darling to keep from capsizing.

  Some of our competition continued to dredge. It burned me to see that. I knew they were on good gold—our gold. My father might’ve stayed out another hour or two, but I didn’t want to risk it. Ben needed to learn more about safe versus unsafe conditions. He depended on me to make educated decisions based on my experience. I didn’t need him rescuing me twice in one day.

  “I’d like to teach you about the clean out process.” I relished the sharp tang of beer on my tongue. After a long day on the water, it soothed my nerves and relaxed me a bit. “It’ll take a few hours’ time, but I’ll feed you.”

  I mentally scanned my refrigerator to remember what I might have to whip together as a decent meal. Maybe a block of cheese. Some bread. Possibly a can of peaches. More beer.

  “Sounds good. You said this morning it was part of the job, and I want to be able to do my job.” His voice rumbled in my ear.

  I didn’t realize he stood so closely behind me. I could feel the heat of his body on my back. He still wore his rolled down wet suit, the expanse of his muscular chest exposed and radiating warmth.

  I straightened my spine. “Not very hard to learn, just time consuming. But then I can pay you your share tonight.”

  I sensed a loss of heat. Ben had moved toward the open doorway. He braced between the frame and leaned into the wind. “I love that smell. Don’t you?” He took in a lungful of sea air.

  “You mean the rotting seaweed and bilge water?” Although sometimes the air could be fresher on the water, it usually depended on the breeze. If it blew from shore to ocean, it typically had a foul, dank smell. Like rotten fish or wet tennis shoes.

  He laughed. The first time I’d heard him laugh. A rolling deep sound from deep down inside. It rumbled through me. Down to my bones. “Kilgore used to say the same thing.”

  “Kilgore?” I asked.

  “My dive buddy in Dive School. He was from Iowa. Never had seen the ocean in his entire life.” Ben faced me. “Seems funny, doesn’t it? Some farm boy wanting to be a diver? He knew how to swim. But he’d never been in anything deeper than a swimming pool.”

  I could see it in my head. A typical American farm boy, probably freckled and tan with a wiry frame developed from years of hefting bags of seed and fertilizer.

  “He’d been disappointed when we moved from the pool to the open water. In the pool you can see everything, clear, clean water. Bright lights. Out on the ocean, miles from shore?” He whistled between his teeth, burly arms crossed casually. “You’re dealing with oil patches drifting on the surface, decaying seaweed, and then the dark under water.” His voice drifted off, as if he was lost in a memory. Ben pointed at the bay in front of us. “This stuff we dive in? Ten, maybe fifteen feet? This is like a training ground for me.”

  I nodded. Most scuba divers felt that way in Nome. They’d had experience diving down to depths of twenty, thirty, forty feet or more. What we did here was baby stuff to them. The dredging apparatus and the long hours in the cold were the challenge. Especially during ice diving season. Not only did a diver have to deal with the typical dangers inherent in underwater ocean dredging, she had to worry about frozen air lines or getting trapped under a foot or more of ice.

  Scuba divers typically had trouble with the tethering, the hoses and lines a dredge diver had to worry about. Both scuba experienced divers and dredge divers had to be cautious about how deep they could operate. A diver could end up with the bends if she weren’t careful with her depths. The bends, or decompression sickness, derived from too much nitrogen entering the bloodstream. When a diver got below 15 or 20 feet nitrogen would build up in a diver’s tissues. If the diver surfaced without a slow, stepped ascent, the pressure would decrease and the nitrogen, which had dissolved into body tissues, would leave the body. The bends caused blocked blood flow and disrupted blood vessels and nerves. The symptoms of the bends were so mild, it could be hard to tell, at first, what the issue was—tiredness, pain in the joints and muscles, dizziness or confusion. More severe symptoms like paralysis, loss of consciousness, or pulmonary problems could send someone into shock and possibly be fatal. Scuba divers were trained to pay attention when surfacing to avoid the bends, but most dredge divers stayed within the 10 to 12 foot depths that meant a diver didn’t have to worry about the nitrogen build up and, therefore, did not train for a regulated ascent.

  As we neared the docks, I kept an eye out for the dredge I thought had been operating near ours. The one I was pretty certain Kyle now worked on—the Goldfinger. They had also begun to return to shore. I could see the name of the watercraft scripted across its side in bright yellow paint outlined with black. Most dredges headed in now, as the wind had become stead
ier and the whitecaps taller.

  “Ready to tie us up?” I jockeyed for a spot between two older vessels that had left a big enough gap between them for my smaller dredge to slide right in.

  “Yup.” Ben grabbed one of the lines attached to the dredge on the starboard side and got up on the lip of the dredge, ready to make a leap when we got close enough.

  I slowed the motor down to a crawl to avoid a collision.

  Ben leapt like an elk from the dredge to the dock. Amazing a man with such a solid, tall frame could jump so gracefully. He whipped the rope around the closest cleats. The dredge bumped gently into the dock, the float tied to the side, which protected both my dredge and the dock. I shut off the motor and headed to the second line attached at the fore and tossed it to him.

  As Ben pulled on the line to tie us more securely, other dredgers hauled smaller, lighter boats ashore and set them atop trailers. Inexperienced, young guys who had no money and no sense had put these dredges together. They’d show up every summer with cash in their pockets, likely from selling their car or everything of value they owned, just for a stake in gold fever. Either they’d buy up the leftovers of someone else’s broken down dredge or put one together out of plywood and dreams, not realizing their little dredges couldn’t make it too far out on the water and were reduced to working only a hundred yards offshore. With undersized motors and weighed down decks full of rusted and broken equipment, they’d never risk going out too far.

  The competition out in the public areas had been cramped enough, but closer in to shore, the little dredges fought for any scrap of gravel they could find. Usually tailings from the previous years’ dreamers.

  I said a quiet prayer thanking God that my father had left me with a good dredge with relatively reliable equipment.

  “Hand me the buckets.” Ben stood on the dock.

  I picked up one heavy bucket at a time and carefully passed them over. I grabbed the trash out of the wheelhouse, locked it with all of our gear inside, and let the Alaska Darling have her night’s rest before more dredging tomorrow.