An Eye for Gold

by Sarah Andrews

  “Are you talking about some ‘sixth sense?’ “ I asked, fear rising from the pit of my stomach.

  She looked at me from several angles. “If you do not use your sight as you were meant to do, you will stay unhappy. The Spirit did not build you in parts, it made you as a whole creature. You are needed.”

  I almost growled with frustration. “So this is one more recruitment.”

  “Recruitment?”

  I told her irritably about Tom, and about Shirley’s presumptions.

  Hermione’s face softened. “I need you, yes. Shirley needs you, and this Tom, and all people need you. That mountain needs you. That lizard—”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Don’t listen to me. Listen inside.” She touched her heart. “And look.” She touched her forehead.

  My heart quivered. My brain ached. I could not understand, but I was too tired to argue anymore.

  I asked, “Why are you doing this for me?”

  She answered, “It is time to knit our world together. It is always time. Someone did this for me. I do it for you. I did not get Pat Gilmore here in time, and Shirley is as blind as the people she despises. Now sit for a while with these stones, and see what comes.” With that, she stepped outside the ring of stones and walked away.

  I sat, and watched the lizards skitter across the soil. One stopped and did little pushups as it considered me. The sounds of the other campsite on the far side of the springs tinkled up to join the sounds of ours. A young fellow on a mountain bike hurtled past me, startled to find me there, staring at me as if I were nuts.

  As the sun set, the little creatures of the desert emerged from their burrows. A rain cloud rose up from the west, threatened the earth with thunder, and moved around me to the north.’ I watched a kangaroo rat come out to forage, bounding along on its impossibly long hind legs, and thought about the perfect balance it enjoyed with the sagebrush under which it lived. I knew that during the day, as the creature slept within its burrow, with a plug of loose sand pushed up to close its entrance, the moisture from its exhalations gave the plant enough water to survive until the next rain. And during the night, the animal emerged and ate the seeds the shrub had made from the magic alchemy of his water combined with the minerals of the earth and the energy of the sun. I smiled at this little brother, who moved as secretively as the mouse who had found himself the center of so much trouble in the mine to the east.

  Music arose from the other campsite. It was loud and sounded raucous to my ear; at first, I cursed the other campers for breaking my silence with their boom box. But then, as the music meandered and ran on and my ear adjusted to hearing it, I realized that it was not electronically-reproduced sound. One of the college students had brought his fiddle, and was playing his heart out to the rising stars. For a moment, the tethers of the time into which I had been born let go, and I experienced the wilderness with the sense of newness that had met the Sarah Royces who had passed this way a century and a half past. I sighed, and felt the exhaustion of my journey. And, for the first time* I knew that I would make it to my goal.

  A mouse ran from its hiding place under the sagebrush and disappeared into its burrow.

  I contemplated the stones. I sat in the West, the Looks-Within place, awaiting the East, Illumination. As I waited, I listened to the Wise Thunder of the North. It warned the Mouse—South, Trust—to run to its burrow where it would be safe. With my eyes wide open, I glimpsed the medicine wheel that waited within my heart. And, deeply humbled as I was everything I had lived in the past few days, I saw that, like most people born into this world, a spoke or two of my own wheel was a little bit short.

  Sounds of laughter arose from our campsite, and I heard Ray’s voice rise with the others. Smiling, I hitched myself up on my crutches and limped back to join them. I found them sitting around a campfire, warming their hands around cups of hot chocolate, telling made-up stories about the stars. Ray smiled to see me. He seemed at peace, and happy, and not in the least out of place.

  That night, we slept out underneath the brilliance of the stars, Ray and I curled up in separate bed rolls, but only inches apart. He smiled and touched my cheek before he closed his eyes, and, many times during the night, as I lay unable to sleep, I found his dark eyes upon me, checking on me, watching over me.

  As the stars swept across the sky, I saw a golden path stretching before me, and I perceived a future in which all humans embraced the earth as a treasured gift. In this world, each and every child grew into a caretaker, integrating the careful use of raw materials into a gentler industriousness, bending to touch the flowers with renewed wonder, and received the earth’s bounty according to the needs of the body, not the gnawing hungers of unconsciousness, I felt a deep and abiding gratitude for all that had been given to me, every talent, every meal, every scrap of metal, and for the first time, I felt fulfilled and complete.

  In the future that stretched before me, opposites came together and intertwined until they merged. In that future, I perceived a place for the disparate regions of my own aching soul.

  In the morning, I left my crutches by the tent and, leaning on Ray’s strong, firm body, limped down to the four stones that Hermione had placed for me. I drew him inside its magic.

  We watched a flight of horned larks stitch the thin grasses with their erratic search for food. Ray held me close and kissed my hair and asked me nothing.

  It was time for me to answer his question.

  “Ray,” I said, barely above a whisper, “you and I are good together. My courage grows when we’re together, and I love you with every ounce of strength that gives me.”

  Ray swayed slightly, soaking up my words as if they had form and motion.

  I said, “And we are different in important ways. That’s why I had to come out here, to this open place where I can see more clearly. But coming out West alone didn’t go very well. I found that I didn’t have the courage to look at what I truly wanted. I didn’t trust my heart. But when I wound up in total darkness, I had no choice but to look. And you know what I saw? I realized, as I waited in that mine, that I did not need to change you. I am hoping you can do the same for me.” I looked up to see how he was taking this.

  Ray met my gaze. His brow knit slightly, his indication that he needed me to say more.

  I said, “I will never be a Mormon. Even if I did everything necessary to look, act, smell, and taste like a Mormon, I still would not be a Mormon, at least not like you are. I can’t fake what I am, Ray. And the truth is that I don’t even feel the urge to try. So I can’t say yes to what you’ve asked me to do.”

  Ray’s arms tightened around me in supplication, and his deep indigo eyes closed tightly.

  I squeezed back, and in my most soothing tone, said, “I’m not done yet, Ray. Please look at me. Because here’s my challenge: Neither do I say no. I would like to marry you. Look, here you are with me in the wilderness. And you were with me in that mine, and in just the same sense, you’ve been with me wherever I’ve been since the day we met. I don’t have to ask you to meet me somewhere in between, because you already have. So even when neither of us knew it, your heart has made room for everything I am. I’m just hoping it has room for everything I am meant to become,”

  Ray opened his eyes again. “You already astonish me,” he whispered.

  I buried my face against his throat. “Please, Ray, give us some time, see what we become. I’m going to make it easier for us. I’m going to quit running away from you. I’m going to move to Salt Lake City. I’ll find a place of my own to live and I’ll get a job; I need the money to put a new engine in my truck.”

  Ray looked pained. “Em, that truck’s—”

  “Ray, it’s plenty used, but it’s still not used up! Any way you slice it, I’ll deed a job. I don’t know what kind of job that can be to start with, but I know where I’m going to wind up, at least for a while. I’m going into business as an independent consultant to forensic cases.”

  Ray’s
arms spasmed with sudden fear.

  “No, Ray, this is what I do. But I will do it as a consultant, not as an idiot runaway nitwit who gets squashed a mile underground! You don’t see Tom risking his neck, do you? Well, he wants to be my teacher, so I’m going to let him, but on my terms. No FBI. Because here’s my promise: From now on, I will do what I do consciously, and humbly. With my eyes wide open. And with you. What do you say?”

  Ray loosened his embrace just enough so that he could raise my chin and look into my eyes. He was smiling as wide as the sky.

  Author’s Note

  MINING SUPPORTS THE EXCELLENT STANDARD OF living that most people who can read this book now enjoy. Even the page on which you are reading these words was manufactured and contains mined materials (as well as wood pulp, which is grown), and, the long process of composing, editing, printing, communications, and shipping which sup-ported its production are absolutely dependent on mining. Without mined natural resources, we would not live as long or as comfortably as we do, nor could we become as well educated as we are, travel as far and as fast as we do, or enjoy the ease and depth of communications which now links the humblest village in the dustiest Third World country directly to the wealthiest and most advanced cultures in the history of our planet.

  Mining is obviously a reductive process, and is to varying extents also destructive and dangerous. In recent decades, we “have come a long way in learning to limit the destructive aspects of mining, and we have further to go. Part of my agenda in writing mystery books about geology and geologists is to provide a layperson’s view into the earth science professions, so that readers can hope to make more informed decisions that influence every aspect of their lives and lifestyles.

  In researching this book, I took extensive tours of two underground gold mines. As alluded to on the acknowledgments page, the first one, which I visited twenty-two years ago, was pretty dangerous. I was taken into an area containing very unstable rock, and the extent of my training was to be told, “Don’t bump your head.” The stope was dripping with water. We were right under a lake, which politely waited until a time when no one was underground to catastrophically drain down through the mine. The second mine, visited last fall, was by comparison extraordinarily safe and well managed. I was nervous in that mine, but only because the surroundings were strange to me. Also in preparing to write this book, I visited two smallish open-pit gold mines in Nevada. These were similarly very safely managed, and, when the ore has been removed, some may look forward to futures as landfills, which I consider to be an excellent use of old holes in the ground. The alternatives are to dig new holes for our garbage, throw it in the valleys, or build it into mounds. And by the way, solid waste insiders tell me that the trash we throw in landfills today will become a major mineable resource of tomorrow (there are already efforts under way to sort trash and bury materials in cataloged locations for easier future retrieval).

  And, as I write these words, two hundred fifty representatives of governing bodies and mining interests from around the world are meeting in Reno to discuss how better to approach the problems of mining pit waters.

  Having just praised some parts of the mining industry, I shall now criticize others. Some mining projects have been incredibly destructive. To take an example from the mining of gold, the hydraulic mining of the placer deposits on the western flanks of the Sierra Nevada during the California gold* rush dumped incalculable cubic miles of silt into San Francisco Bay and its tributaries. This was an ecological disaster, which no one in any industry will deny. But at the time it was done, it was considered an amazing technological feat. Which mining project of today will be reviewed in the future as a similarly blind blunder? will it be the huge open-pit gold mines of the Carlin trend? Some of them appear to have based their initial EIR reclamation modeling predictions for pit lakes on problematically incomplete data. Or will it be the newer coal mines of West Virginia, which employ the strip-mining practice of removing the mountaintops that cover the coal and shoveling this overburden into the valleys? Some of these mines are many miles wide and cover tens of thousands of acres. Do we need that gold and that coal badly enough to justify these levels of impact?

  My biggest criticism regarding the fate of natural resources does not go to the mining industry. It goes to the consumer, a largely anonymous and only sketchily regulated entity of which I am of course a part. It strikes me that our lives are becoming so far removed from the genesis of the highly sophisticated materials we consume that we no longer even stop to consider that we are using mined materials, or wonder where they came from. And the corporate entities (of which I have also been a part) that mine these materials have become such vast machines, with such overwhelming political sway, that they influence the laws that are meant to govern them.

  I struggled with these issues in writing this book. I had not set out to write about natural resource consumption, but by the time I neared the end of the book, it had become a blaring klaxon that kept me awake at night. I have preferred in the Em Hansen books to present information and opinions rather than judgments, and have tried my best to continue this practice in this book; it is my experience that, when educated, people make judgments of their own that are hopefully better than mine.

  An old friend read the first draft of this book and accused me of having taken sides in the mining versus environmentalism argument. He has worked as an economic geologist throughout his career, and was sufficiently upset by what I had written that he insisted that I not even name him in the acknowledgments. Shaken, I cried on the assembled shoulders of my writers’ group, bemoaning the fact that life seemed to have gotten so complicated and scary in this increasingly technological, corporate-culture-influenced world.

  Mary Hallock, a savvy businesswoman, said wryly, “Oh sure, things used to be so much simpler. We just took and took and took because it was there. We never thought about it.”

  I replied, “So how are we as individuals supposed to cope with these issues?”

  Ken Dalton, a telephone company executive and vintner, said, “Sarah, we don’t cope with these issues as individuals. We cope with them as a society.”

  It is important that we continue to increase our collective awareness of what we do, so that we can make the wisest possible decisions regarding what natural resources to use, how to acquire them, and how to handle the daughter products of their acquisition and use. I think the best way to ensure that we continue to increase our wisdom in these regards is to support education, scientific research, and policy-making that are in no way influenced by financial or other special interests. We must also demand with our votes, our communications, and our consumer dollars that natural resources be used—or left in the ground—wisely and respectfully. Our world is changing. Let’s make certain that it changes for the better.

  And one last thing. Preparing this book has forced me to become more aware of what natural resources I personally consume. Like a great number of persons in this culture, I used to continuously hunger for more of whatever I was consuming, be it chocolate bars, new cars, trips to far-off places or any other community. I suffered from a classic cup-half-empty attitude. But in the process of contemplating what I am consuming, I have discovered how much I already have, and now find that all along, my cup has been full and overflowing. I respectfully thank the Earth for its bounty.

  And I thank you for reading these words.

  Sarah Andrews

  April 6, 2000

  HERE’S AN EXCERPT FROM SARAH ANDREW’S

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  A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid;—one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced.

  —Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, from his journal entry made after experiencing the deva
stating February 20, 1835, earthquake that reduced Conception, Chile, to rabble

  THE EARTHQUAKE THAT SHOOK ME—AND THE REST of Salt Lake City—awake at 4:14 A.M. that wintry Monday measured 5.2 on the Richter scale. That’s a modest quake by California standards, and if you live in Japan, or Mexico City, or Turkey, or in any other place in which violent shaking of terra firma is more common, you’d be done chatting about it by lunchtime. It would only re-emerge in your thoughts if someone mentioned it again, or if you lost a favorite knick-knack in the fracas, or if you saw the follow-up in the next day’s paper.

  But in Salt Lake City, Utah, some of us thought life was ending. The girls who lived across the hall from me greeted the experience with screams of terror and a great deal of howling about Armageddon and other biblical references of doom. For them, the Earth had just become a place that had to be reconsidered: a place that might drop them, or cause something to drop on them.

  Being a geologist, my experience of the event was somewhat different. I found it exciting, once I got over the disappointment of waking up from the dream I was having. That dream and I didn’t want to let each other go, so it translated the motion Salt Lake City was experiencing into the blissful experience of rolling around on that self-same bed with my boyfriend, Ray. This was definitely wishful. Ray’s a devout Mormon, and, as we ain’t hitched, his policy had been to say good night after the lingering tease of a smooch. But my body, having entirely different ideas . . . well, hated to wake up. I can be forgiven for hoping, damn it, because stranger things have been known to happen than for a handsome, healthy thirty-two-year-old male to finally decide to just plain go for it.

  But the earthquake did wake me up. Something deep in my brain stem finally got through to die pleasure section of my gray matter and said, Hey, honey, this isn’t just someone bouncing the springs next to you, and aren‘t those your neighbors screaming?