Thrilling Thirteen

by Ponzo, Gary

  “Environmental remediation is the big-bucks term. There’s your new gold rush. Turns out my firm was already working with a deep-pockets company looking to get into the business. So I hooked Dad up with the company, which I’m going to call Deep Pockets. I helped bring the plan to product. I helped Dad come up with a catchy name for his subsidiary—AquaHeal. And yes, I came out here with Dad and a Deep Pockets guy a couple of times. Site survey, checking out hotspots, up and down the river. We packed in, stayed awhile.” He held up a hand. “By the way, I did mention my site scouting, earlier.”

  Walter said, evenly, “You didn’t elaborate.”

  “It wasn’t relevant. Don’t know how else I can put that.”

  “It involved your father,” I said. “He died and you found the ore sample and that kicked off what’s going on now.”

  “He wasn’t out here hunting gold when he died. He was here, on his own, taking water samples—as I said. I was in Sacramento trying to get the permit for a second round of tests. Had a few problems with the first round.”

  “What kind of problems?” Walter asked.

  Shelburne sighed. “Dredging is a violent process. It sucks up the riverbed—sediment and gravel along with the mercury. Breaks up large drops into smaller ones.”

  Relevant or not, I flinched. “It floured? Into reactive mercury?”

  “Yes.”

  Jesus. “You’re talking methylation.”

  “Yes. Bacteria convert the inorganic mercury into the nasty form, and that gets into the food chain.”

  I glanced at the river.

  “I wouldn’t eat the fish.” He gave a tight smile. “In fact, you can take that advisory all the way downriver to the San Francisco Bay.”

  I said, “Methylated mercury is a neurotoxin.”

  “Yes. Hence the word problems. Hence the need to tweak the technology. Hence the need for a second round of tests.”

  I shook my head.

  “By the way, storm waters rile up mercury-laden sediments all the time. Mercury gets methylated all the time. It’s already in the state’s water transport system. We just added to the problem.”

  “And Henry?” Walter asked. “Was he involved with the startup?”

  “No, of course not. He had no money to invest, no skills to offer. He’s hardly a company man, anyway.”

  “But he was aware of it?”

  Shelburne shifted. “Actually, no. Henry and I hadn’t been in touch. And then, at Dad’s place, I didn’t bring it up—no point until I knew if the technology would work. As far as Dad goes, he and Henry had nothing to do with one another for years. In any case, once the estate is settled, Henry will inherit half the company.”

  I said, “Did Henry know his dad died here? How he died?”

  “He read the report. Didn’t seem to rattle him. Remember, he spends his life in the wild. Hey, we Shelburnes are hunters. Dad was a hunter. Dad died as he lived, hunting the new gold rush. And he was hunted, in death.” Shelburne put his hand to his neck, as if there were a tie to adjust. “Admittedly, that’s all too wild-kingdom for me.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Walter had moved to sample upstream of the gravel bar when he shouted, “Oh dear.”

  I sprinted across the bar to the rocky bank.

  Shelburne was already sprinting along the bank.

  We joined Walter and looked where he was looking. Into the river.

  The water was clearer here than at the gravel bar. It ran over bedrock and it ran fast and everything on the river bed was glaringly visible. A metal bottle lay on the bottom. It was cylindrical with a screw-cap top lying alongside. It was open. It was rusted. It was about the size of an extra-large water bottle but you wouldn’t want to drink from it. A word came to mind. Flask. In my reading during the drive across the Sierra, I’d come across that word. Heavy iron flasks were needed to hold heavy liquid mercury. Seventy-six pounds of quicksilver per flask.

  A few of those pounds were scattered downstream from the flask, like breadcrumbs. Carried by the fast-moving flow.

  It didn’t take much of a leap to assume that some of the silvery stuff had been carried still farther, until it hit the catch-basin. Until some of it found its way to the hidden ledge, where droplets liked to coalesce.

  I wondered how much of the silver heart was thanks to Mother Nature and how much was thanks to Henry Shelburne. I guessed it didn’t matter.

  Robert Shelburne muttered, “Christ, Henry.”

  Walter spoke. “I suppose one could find flasks abandoned in old mines.”

  I went cold. “You’re saying Henry found a stash?”

  Walter turned to Shelburne. “Is that likely? And if so, how would he transport it? The weight.”

  “Likely, sure. Transport… Rent a horse? Or could’ve lashed it to his backpack. Heavy load but I guess it’s doable.”

  I said, “Why here? It can’t be coincidental that he leaves it here, where your father died.”

  “That’s my brother. Some kind of bizarre memorial.”

  “Is that what you think it is?”

  Shelburne gave a tight smile. “I think it’s preferable to what I thought you’d found, when you shouted.”

  “What did you think I’d found?”

  “My father’s heart.”

  10

  We packed up.

  There was no discussion about continuing, or not continuing. For all its ugliness, the information about Shelburne’s father was not, I had to admit, relevant. The fact that Shelburne’s father died water-sampling on the river where he used to hunt gold was correlative, not causative. The fact that Henry left a memorial or a message was perhaps pertinent, but it was aimed at Robert. Once we found Henry, it was going to become Robert’s predicament. He’d take it from there.

  We set off, following the narrow trail upriver to a place where the water ran free of catch-pools, and because we were low on potable water we decided to stop. We got out our bottles and filtering kits. Shelburne’s pricey model and our bargain squeeze-bag filter both did the job, straining out gut-sickening bugs like Giardia. Either model should in theory filter out microscopic mercury. I would have paid for a filter that put that in writing.

  Resupplied, we moved on.

  The trail again left the river and began to climb. As I plodded uphill I scanned the cliff tops, thinking that if I were Henry Shelburne and I’d been leaving messages for my brother I’d sure want to see his reaction. There were a hundred places to view that site from the cliff tops. But that would take time, to leave the message, to scout the viewpoints. To rent a horse, if he had rented a horse to transport the flask. And it was the question of time that bugged me. Robert Shelburne said his brother left three days ago. If we assumed that Henry was now shadowing us, an assumption that seemed creepily reasonable, then had he abandoned the hunt for the source of the rock? Or had he already found it? Amateur geologist—barely three days in the field if you leave aside travel time from the boarding house to the wild—bam bam bam and he goes straight to the source? I supposed that was possible. This was, after all, his territory.

  Or perhaps he was long gone from the South Yuba, leaving us to our own devices.

  The trail roughened and I abandoned timetables and paid attention to the ground beneath my feet.

  And then our route traversed a gashed canyon gully and we detoured down a spur trail to the river’s gravel bank in order to do some sampling. Small cobbles of quartz and chert chinked underfoot. Of more interest was the fractured bedrock near the river’s edge, which was emplaced with jade-green serpentine.

  Now we were getting somewhere.

  Walter pointed out the rock face. “That’s serpentine. Its soils are associated with gold.”

  Shelburne looked. “That green rock? Never knew I should care.”

  “Good heavens man, it’s the state rock of California.”

  “There’s a state rock?”

  I said, “You’d think the state rock would be gold.”

  Shelburne smil
ed, as if I’d spoken entirely in jest.

  We moved on, up and over another spiny ridge. Then back down to the river bank, monitoring the cliff tops, watching the sky—how far will we get before we have to make camp, before the rain or the night comes?

  The clouds answered, coalescing to form a seamless roof.

  Hurry up.

  And then, down another spur trail, at a little pool and riffle system, Walter picked up a large pebble and pursed his lips. He took out his magnifier. He studied the pebble under the twenty-power lens for a good minute, and then he passed the lens and the pebble to me. I had a look. It was black, fine-grained, with the luster of mica and a hackly fracture. It was hard, flinty. I went low-tech, took a steel nail from my pocket and dragged it across the surface. It did not scratch. Its shape was subangular, the edges fairly rounded by transport down the river.

  I nodded and passed it back to Walter because he carried the high-tech tool.

  He already had it out of his pack. The handheld XRF spectrometer looks like a hair dryer but shoots like a gun, firing X-rays at the target, exciting the atoms to display their elemental ID. He laid the pebble on the ground. He put the snout of the XRF to the rock and read the results on the display screen. “Chemically speaking,” he said, “woo-hoo.”

  I said, to Shelburne, “He means that’s a probable match to our hornfels.”

  Shelburne picked up the pebble. Turned it over and over. “There’s no cross.”

  “Could be a question of random chiastolite distribution in the parent rock.”

  Walter said, “She means, we keep going.”

  Thunder sounded, echoing down the canyon.

  We pushed on. We did not have to go far. Ten minutes later, following the bouldery river bank, we hit the mother lode.

  The first angular black pebble I picked up was studded with tiny white crystals that were themselves intruded by black carbonaceous inclusions disposed in the form of a cross. My mouth went dry. Here it was. We’d seen its like in the lab, looking at the angular black chiastolite hornfels embedded in the ore sample. We’d done the geology. We’d set out to find its brother in the field. We’d hypothesized where to find it. And find it we did. Here it was, a little stone in the river. Better than gold.

  I passed it to Walter. He eyeballed it and his face creased into a smile and then he brought out the XRF to confirm. He said, “Woo-hoo, in spades.”

  I said, to Shelburne, “We’ve found the neighborhood.”

  “So where to now?” Shelburne asked.

  Walter turned from the river and looked up the offshoot side canyon.

  I followed suit. It was a narrow canyon showing abrupt walls polished to a glacial sheen, so steep as not to be haired over with vegetation. I moved to examine the near wall, a slab of intertonguing slates and cherts and metasandstones. Here was the rock formation we’d been aiming for, the Shoo Fly Formation. I did not know the provenance of that name. Rock units are usually named after a patch of the local geography and I guessed some hapless geographer had been swatting flies when he named this unit. I took a moment to celebrate the coolness of geological names, to ease the tensions of the hunt.

  A thin creek fed out of Shoo Fly Canyon—as I decided to name it—meeting the South Yuba River.

  A confluence of two waterways.

  We were in the neighborhood and now the question became, which way to go?

  The float could have come down the Yuba from a source farther up the main canyon, or it could have come down the thin creek from a source up Shoo Fly Canyon. Or perhaps—however unlikely and undesirable—it could have come from both waterways.

  Walter and I sampled a dozen yards farther up the South Yuba and then a dozen yards up Shoo Fly Creek. We struck out on the Yuba. We struck cross-studded float on the side canyon creek.

  Life just got simpler.

  We headed up Shoo Fly Canyon.

  We began to find a new and interesting addition to the float, salt-and-pepper colored diorite.

  Shelburne shouted “Henry!”

  I thought, he’s expecting a reply. I nearly did, myself. We were getting closer. We all sensed it. We were closing in on the contact zone between the slate and a diorite dike, birthplace of chiastolite hornfels. We were in range of the address and the question would then become, is Henry living there right now?

  We moved slowly because there was no trail, no path, just a rock-hopping contour up the creek. We stopped twice to sample because there were two skinnier side canyons that fed creeklets down into Shoo Fly creek and we did not want to miss a turnoff.

  More problematic, the slate-gray sky was darkening by the yard.

  And then it began to rain.

  We dug out ponchos and covered our heads and our packs with urethane-coated nylon. The clouds heaved and the rain hardened. We pussyfooted, now, slipping on wet rock and clay soil turned to slickenside. And then we were no longer searching for float, we were hunting a flat spot to anchor and wait out the rain. If need be, to set up tents. And then Shelburne said there’s old mining tunnels all the hell over the place, and within another five minutes we indeed came upon the black mouth of a tunnel.

  I looked at Shelburne.

  He nodded. As he’d said.

  This tunnel cut into a sturdy stretch of the rockwall and, peeking inside, we saw that it was a straight-shot gullet, empty and dry.

  Walter retrieved the mini-G gas detector from my pack and went into the tunnel. He came out with an upraised thumb.

  We moved in.

  As we shucked our packs and dripping ponchos, I reflected on the fact that we’d taken shelter in a tunnel cut into the general neighborhood of the Shelburne family offshoot of the deep blue lead. If this were the Dogtown television show, we’d prospect the gullet and encounter the legendary blue.

  Instead, we huddled near the mouth and watched the flux of rain and then, shit, sheet lightning smeared the rock of the gorge.

  The Shoo Fly Formation lit up like Christmas.

  11

  Thunder followed the lightning, as it does.

  Thunder echoed up and down the gorge like rocks kicked over a ridge.

  Thunder got right into the tunnel with us, a long-period rumble that I felt in my bones.

  I wondered where Henry sheltered—since he didn’t like enclosed spaces.

  We sat shivering until the thunder stopped and then in hurried consultation we chose to wait until the storm passed, or night came.

  An hour later, night came.

  Thunder and lightning were sporadic now but the rain did not falter.

  We unrolled our pads and sleeping bags on the hard rock floor. We removed our boots and rubbed our feet and put on clean socks and campsite sandals. Walter switched on our LED lantern and Shelburne unpacked his stove. Shelburne offered to heat water for all three of us, to reconstitute the freeze-dried glop that would pass as dinner. I didn’t envy his fancy stove. I appreciated his offer to do the work.

  I was deeply and thoroughly fatigued.

  So fatigued that it took me a good minute to process the steel clip hooked on the torn mesh pocket of Shelburne’s backpack. As he took the wide-mouth water bottle out of the torn pocket, the clip caught the low-angle light from Walter’s lantern. Steel gleamed. I stared at it. Wondering why Shelburne carried a bottle clip when he didn’t clip his bottle to his belt. Wondering if the steel edge had caught the mesh at some point, tearing it. Thinking, no, the clip was not in position to do that. To tear the mesh, the clip would need to be cinched around the neck of the bottle, edged toward the mesh. But why carry a bottle with the clip attached in a backpack pocket? The whole point of the clip is to clip the bottle to your belt. Or to a D-ring on your shoulder strap.

  I watched Shelburne pour water into the cook pot on top of the stove.

  I listened to the hiss of the little gas flame.

  Nothing to do but wait for the water to boil. And obsess over the water-bottle clip.

  Five minutes later we were eating our glop. Shr
imp Creole for Shelburne. Chili Mac With Beef for Walter and me. I suspected it all tasted the same. If this were the Dogtown TV show we’d be eating canned beans and glad for the grub.

  The rain hardened and lightning and thunder returned, as if they’d taken a break and were now refreshed.

  Deeply and thoroughly fatigued, we all three moved to our sleeping bags.

  Walter switched off the lantern.

  Like some kind of weird slumber party. Normally I sleep alone in my tent. Normally I sleep in as little as possible but the cold and the company got my attention. I slipped out of my Crocs and stripped down to a T-shirt and pulled on silk long underwear, suitably modest. I grabbed my poncho and ventured just outside the tunnel to pee. No need for a flashlight. Lightning lit my way.

  Walter and Shelburne took their turns.

  Chilled, I wormed into my sleeping bag and shivered until body heat flared and my thoughts fuzzed.

  Next thing I knew I was back at the bedrock hump across the Yuba watching lightning bolts duel. Rain like needles. Me, sodden. Benumbed on the gravel bar. Electricity in the air. The taste of ozone. Me, thinking I’m sticking up like a sore thumb on this flat river. And then a lightning bolt the size of Nevada struck the water, speared down to the bed of the river and it brought up on the point of its spear a silver heart. It quivered in front of me. I put out my finger to touch it. Who can resist? And then my hand went straight through the heart and the quicksilver wrapped my wrist. Flashing in the glow of the lightning storm, it thinned, now looking like a steel bottle clip.

  Sometime later I thought I heard bees. I woke.

  Snug in my sleeping bag, water sampling on my mind.

  Hydrology 101 back in college—you attach the specimen bottle to the sampling pole with a steel clip and then dip it in the water to grab the sample. For that class, I’d been sampling sediment load. The equipment I’d used had been designed for the task. Shelburne’s steel clip and wide-mouth bottle would be an improvisation, but doable.

  I sat up straight.

  ~ ~ ~

  It was morning. Early light, silvered. Foggy.

  Not enough light to allow me to re-examine Shelburne’s steel clip. Enough light, though, to make out his hunched form at the mouth of the tunnel, up there watching the day break. Humming to himself.