Thrilling Thirteen

by Ponzo, Gary

  Our trail wound back up the contour and we achieved a higher ridge top without incident.

  Still wooded up here, hardly a view worth achieving, but then again my mountains of choice were the abrupt eastern Sierras where a summit was not easily achieved but once achieved would slay you with the view.

  We paused. We’d reached a fork in our trail. The Shelburne family offshoot tangled with other offshoots of the main blue lead and there were two paths to take us where we needed to go.

  Walter said, “Which way?”

  “The fastest way,” Shelburne said, taking the high path.

  I fell in.

  Walter, behind me, muttered something.

  Wanted to avoid this, I thought he’d said.

  I turned.

  He waved me onward.

  I figured I knew what lay ahead.

  The trail began to descend and in another fifteen minutes we found ourselves funneled onto a narrow path that traversed a steep slope. We were yet again closed in by the woods. It was easy going, gentle hiking, but my antennae were now tuned to Walter and I was hiking brittle. We penetrated a scented grove of cedar and Doug fir and a thicket of manzanita, in which anyone might have hidden, and then we came upon a wide gully that exposed a pitch of cross-bedded gravelly sandstone, upon which my boots slipped, shotgunning gravel.

  “Careful,” Shelburne called, ahead of me.

  “Careful,” I called to Walter, behind me.

  Henry hadn’t called careful when he’d accidentally kicked rocks off the ledge. If it had been Henry, and not a squirrel.

  The trail twisted out of the woods.

  The trail bent sharply and took us to a precipice that gave a view of what lay below.

  I halted. Slayed.

  I’d seen it mapped, on paper an elliptic of dotted pale pink against a field of green, but the map was utterly two-dimensional. Walter knew it by experience. He’d been here once before. Why hadn’t he warned me? Why hadn’t he said, you’re going to have to brace yourself?

  Because a warning was not enough.

  There were no words for what I saw down below. I simply had no words.

  7

  Finally, words did come to mind.

  Catastrophic event.

  Those are the words geologists use for earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, floods.

  There had freaking well been a catastrophic event here only you couldn’t lay it at the feet of Mother Nature.

  Walter asked Shelburne, “Is this the way your father took you?”

  “Yes. It’s in my grandfather’s letters. It’s a bloody monument. It’s mining on the grand scale. It’s what the great bullshitter called the void.”

  Walter grunted. “It’s what’s left after taking out a mountain.”

  I stared into the monumental hole. “How much did they take out?”

  “Four millions bucks in gold,” Shelburne said.

  “I meant, how much of the mountain?”

  “Forty million cubic yards.”

  Walter said, “You know your numbers.”

  Shelburne shrugged. “I’m a numbers guy.”

  I stared down into the great pit, trying to corral it with numbers. “How big is it?”

  “Mile long, half-mile wide,” he said. “I learned this shit in my teens. Hydraulic mining. How they did it. The dudes had to get down through six hundred feet of compacted gravel to reach the holy grail. Built forty miles of canals to bring enough water to feed the cannons. Eight cannons, twenty-four hours per day, firing sixteen thousand gallons of water per minute to ream out the mountain. Ridiculous name, though. I’d never green-light a project with that name. They called it the diggins. No third g. Just the folksy diggins.”

  Of course they did, I thought. They would not have called it a catastrophic event.

  Walter had picked up a chunk of andesite breccia and was examining it like it was the Rosetta Stone.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement on the cliff tops on the opposite rim. I turned to fully look. Nothing. Maybe a hiker, now absorbed by the trees.

  “In the end,” Walter said, “it was mined to extinction.” He tossed the chunk of andesite into the void.

  I watched the rock fall. Into the abyss where a mountain had been. The great pit was shadowed now, clouds moving overhead, shapes moving down below. The wind picked up. For a moment I thought I glimpsed something other than a shadow moving down there but maybe it was just the wind moving the vegetation. I caught that odd odor again, carried on the wind.

  Walter said, “What did Henry make of it?”

  “A big playground. Fantasyland.”

  Fantasyland. I could not stop looking. And what was empty, nothing—a void—became strangely beautiful. Where the mountain had been washed away, the ancient gravel beds were exposed in the cut cliff walls, layered like a summer cake in yellow and red and white and orange, eroded here and there into spires and fluted hoodoos. It had a fantastical monstrous beauty.

  Walter said, “So it’s likely Henry came this way, this time?”

  “Beyond likely.”

  “And from here…”

  Shelburne jerked a thumb. “Down there.”

  Shadows flickered, down there.

  I said, “Hey guys, I think there’s somebody down there right now.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “Henry!” Robert Shelburne’s shout echoed.

  All of a sudden thunder sounded, in the distance, but there was no other reply.

  “I just caught a glimpse,” I said. “Could have been a pack.”

  “Backpack?” Shelburne asked. “Day pack?”

  “I’d say day pack.”

  “Then he has made camp. Then he is tracking.”

  “If it was a pack,” I said. “It was moving in that willow jungle down there.”

  Walter asked, “Could it have been an animal?”

  “It was brown.” Brown deer, brown bear. Too big for a squirrel. “Could have been.”

  “Henry!” Shelburne shouted again.

  No answer. No discernible movement.

  Come out come out wherever you are.

  ~ ~ ~

  We started our descent into the pit on another of Robert Shelburne’s unmapped trails. Hardly a trail at all but it was the most direct way down.

  The soil was too sandy to hold footprints. If there were any recent scuff-marks, Shelburne, in front, was scuffing them into oblivion.

  We descended single-file, Shelburne then me then Walter.

  Now and then, when I could safely take my eyes off the treacherous trail, I scanned the landscape below. Nothing. The lower we got, the more limited the long view became.

  I shifted my focus to the near view, right under my nose. The trail was so narrow I kept brushing against cliff walls and acquired a coating of dirt. The walls told the story, without the romance. Volcanic andesite breccia capped layers of Eocene river gravels, which were interbedded with sand and clay.

  Shelburne said, over his shoulder, “My dad called these bastard gravels.”

  Walter, behind me, said, “All the way down. And then the good stuff’s buried.”

  Yeah, I got it. No holy grail awaiting us down there, because the basal blue lead, laid down upon bedrock, was now buried beneath the tailings and landslides in the bottom of the pit. Any blue gravel that happened to crop out would have been oxidized into reddish rusty rock.

  Would have been mined to extinction.

  The Shelburne family offshoot, according to the map, zigzagged through this neighborhood.

  What I did see, once again, was a flash of something brown, off in the far side of the pit. And then, deer-like, it bolted. And then Shelburne shouted Henry and a clap of thunder came in reply and the wind picked up and a few fat raindrops fell.

  And then ceased.

  We continued down the trail.

  Alice hiking down into the rabbit hole.

  8

  Five hundred feet down, we bottomed out.

  If I had not k
nown a mountain once stood here I would not have known this was a manufactured landscape.

  The hosed-out world of the pit was now jungly, bristling with pines and alders and willows and brush that criss-crossed in a maze that could screen an army of hikers.

  The soil was fine-grained colluvium eroded from above, with lenses of pebbly gravel and clay. I looked for, and did not see, footprints.

  We crossed a little stream—runoff, I presumed, from the upcanyon watershed. The stream wandered into a thicket of brush.

  I wondered if there was a trail down here. I had no idea which way to go.

  Shelburne did. As ever, he took the lead and we followed and damned if he didn’t discover a path.

  We passed through a tunnel of pines and emerged into a small clearing where old mining equipment was on display. My attention caught on the huge lengths of rusted pipe, jumbled like pick-up sticks. I stopped, stared. A man could hide inside that pipe.

  Shelburne saw me looking. “He hates enclosed spaces.”

  My Henry would have been in there.

  “Not hiding in the water cannon, either.”

  Beyond the pipes was a giant rusted cannon that looked like something out of a Civil War textbook. I still had to wrap my head around the idea that it had shot water, not iron.

  “Let’s go,” Shelburne said.

  Walter held up a hand. “A moment.” He took off his pack and rummaged for his parka.

  I looked at a long wooden open-top box set upon a frame.

  Shelburne saw me looking. “That, he liked. It’s a sluice box. Miners ran a slurry of water and gravel through it. The riffles trapped the heavy grains of gold. The lighter stuff, they trapped with mercury. The metals mix into an amalgam. Bonded like brothers—as my dad liked to say.” Shelburne snagged his water bottle. He toasted the sluice. “Dad let us play here. He brought vials of mercury and a baggie of gold dust. And a bottle of water. The gold was the prize. The mercury the waste.” Shelburne drank.

  I wondered if Dad put it that way to his sons. Robert, you’re the prize. Henry, you’re waste.

  I drifted over to the sluice box. I glimpsed something inside, caught between riffles. Something silvery. I thought, if that’s a drop of mercury in there right now, then Henry Shelburne AKA Quicksilver was playing some goddamn stupid game.

  I moved for a closer look. It had disappeared. I blinked. Glint of sunlight on a nailhead or something. Now you see it, now you don’t. Sunlight’s playing hide and seek.

  “Here’s more numbers for you,” Shelburne said. “The miners used ten pounds of mercury for every foot of sluice. Eighty thousand pounds a year. Thirty percent of it washed away. Poof! I’d never green-light a project with that level of waste.”

  I thought, he’s got a lot of numbers at the ready. Who remembers precise numbers like that? Especially when you learned this stuff as a kid. If it were me, I’d just say the miners put a shitload more mercury into the ground than they took out in gold.

  Shelburne turned to Walter. “Not Dogtown, hey?”

  “No,” Walter said. He shouldered his backpack. Zipped his parka. “Rather, the other extreme.”

  I felt I ought to say something to my partner. Yeah, you fell in love with a Hollywood facade and the reality is your grown-up hobby has a real dark history but I understand that you can love something in the whole and yet not love every part of it. I understand why you wanted to avoid this place. And I’m certainly no paragon of consistency. I’m an environmentalist who uses paper towels wantonly. Who lives the pure life?

  I said, “Who lives the pure life?”

  Both Shelburne and Walter looked at me in some surprise.

  I turned away. My field of view altered a smidge. Enough to get a fresh look into the sluice box, to see that the something silvery that had caught my eye wasn’t a nailhead. It was a dime.

  I said, “Somebody dropped a dime.”

  Shelburne was suddenly beside me, hands braced on the rough rim of the sluice box. Strong hands. Manicured. City-boy hands on rough wood. Fingers flexed. Knuckles white.

  Walter joined us. “Somebody dropped a number of dimes.”

  I looked further. Dimes scattered throughout the sluice box. All of them shiny. Innocent of dust. How long could a dime lay in a sluice box before acquiring at least a freckling of dust? Hours? If that.

  Shelburne picked up a dime.

  Walter said, “Is this significant?”

  Shelburne spun. Scanning the trees around the clearing. “Give me a minute,” he said. Voice hoarse. Choked. He jammed his water bottle into the pocket and shoved off. Just short of a run.

  Walter and I stood flatfooted. A minute to do what?

  “We don’t want to lose him,” Walter said.

  Hell no, we sure didn’t want to lose him, not down here in this jungle. We plunged back into the maze where Shelburne had disappeared.

  But we had already fallen behind. Although I could hear him rustling through the vegetation up ahead, I could not see him. No means of judging distance, no map to consult because quite clearly the way through the maze altered season by season as the underbrush crept this way and that. I shouted “wait” and Shelburne somewhere up ahead muttered something in reply but it did not matter because his voice was the clue and so I followed the bushwhacked path to the left instead of to the right. I heard Walter behind me, the rock hammer and trenching tool tied to his pack rattling like coins in a pocket. Like dropped dimes. Only they weren’t dropped, right? They were placed, scattered throughout the sluice box so as not to be missed. Henry placed them. Who else? And spooked his brother in the bargain.

  And now as I crashed through the woods my sense of smell kicked in. My nose stung. There was that odd odor, much stronger now than when I’d first sniffed it hiking up the ego-blazed trail into the Shelburne family neighborhood. It was a medicinal smell. It was like bitter greens I’d once boiled to oblivion. It had an undercurrent of rotting sweet fruit. I turned to Walter and said “what’s that stink?” but he was too far back to hear me or too short on breath to reply.

  And then I broke free of the willow jungle and waded hip-deep into cattails and I saw Shelburne ahead, on the far side of a stinking pond red with iron-rich silt.

  He was wading through a field of brush, peering into a thicket of pines beyond.

  I shouted.

  He stiffened. Turned. Lifted a hand to us.

  We skirted the pond and joined him.

  I expelled the words. “What. The. Hell?”

  “I thought….” He passed a hand across his eyes. “Thought I’d find Henry.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “But the dimes said he came this way?”

  “Yes.”

  Walter said, “Call for him.”

  “Haven’t I been? For the past three hours?” Shelburne lifted his palms. “Fine, I’ll shout my fool head off. Henry Henry Henry Henry!”

  There was no reply.

  Shelburne glanced up. Around.

  I followed suit, looking up to the rim of the pit. There were a dozen viewpoints. More. I looked around us. Jungle. Woods.

  Walter said, “And if he’s watching?”

  “Christ.” Shelburne flashed a grim smile. Shook his head. “Christ, Henry.” Shelburne suddenly shouted to the sky, “You want the dog and pony show?”

  There was no reply.

  Walter said, thinly, “Why don’t you give us the dog and pony show?”

  After a long moment Shelburne said, “Why not?”

  Walter folded his arms.

  “It starts with the dime,” Shelburne said. “Did you ever hear the expression you’re on my dime? Dad loved that expression. He wasn’t talking allowance, he was talking I own you.” Shelburne unbuckled his hip belt. “So of course Henry and I would challenge each other to do outrageous shit, betting a dime on it. In particular, there was the time I flicked the dime into the sluice box, making a particular outrageous bet.”

  “In what se
nse outrageous?”

  Shelburne slipped his pack off one shoulder and slid it around to access the stash pocket. He retrieved something. Shouldered the pack.

  I said, “What’s in your hand?”

  He displayed a box of matches.

  “Good God man,” Walter said, “you’re standing in mountain misery.”

  I looked at the brush, some kind of groundcover, low-lying ferns. My nose stung. It had not stopped stinging since I’d crashed through the maze. Now I realized I’d found the source of the odd odor. It came from the ferns.

  “That’s the point,” Shelburne said. “The thing about mountain misery is this time of year its leaves are coated with resin. Flammable as hell.”

  I said, “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Far from it. There’s a pond behind you. But it won’t be necessary. If I may?”

  Walter gave a brusque nod.

  “Here’s how it works. You’ve got two boys pretty much brought up in the wild. Daring each other to do the outrageous. You’ve got a father who leaves them alone with dangerous toys. Some dads give their boys boxing gloves to pound out the rivalry. Ours gave us all this. So we made bets. Always a dime.” He paused and made a slow survey of the jungle, of the rim. Then his focus snapped back to us. “Let’s pretend Henry is standing here with me in the misery. We’re facing each other. Use your imagination.”

  I didn’t need to. Henry was parked in my mind.

  “Here’s how it played,” Shelburne said. “We flipped the dime to see who went first. I chose heads. The dime landed heads-up. I went first.” Shelburne lit a match. He watched it burn down. When the flame neared his fingers he blew it out. He snapped the matchstick in half and put it in his pocket. He took another match from the box. “Henry’s turn.” Shelburne lit the second match. “I’m playing Henry here, of course.” Shelburne watched the match burn down. Blew it out. Snapped it, pocketed it.