CHAPTER NINE
YEAR 1976
MINNESOTA
EARLY OCTOBER, and after three swift years of hitchhiking, busing, or
driving in and out of numerous states in the U.S.A., three provinces of Canada,
and half the states of Old Mexico, Shanan, now with another old beater of a
station wagon, started his third maid service, yet, during this period of confinement,
in the lake-adorned City of Minneapolis.
He had again pursued elusive
rainbows, each after the next, finding no complete satisfaction or full success
in a one of them. He had his petty conflicts along the way: in jams
intermittently in this town or that bar (fifteen different jails in nine
different states) for a battery of trivial matters, in court often, or, as they
used to say: in front of a judge more than an overly humorous chiropractor.
Nothing very serious, but Shanan did get into more unintentional trouble than a
loose puppy in a jelly factory during a midnight power outage. Regardless of
the enormous amount of world-reaped wisdom—life at every level—which Shanan had
gleaned along the way, his carelessness could have staggered the imagination of
a tachisme artist. Now, however, Minneapolis hinted at peace and was a
prime-open city, ever welcoming a wide range of innovative businesses. Maid services were virtually nonexistent in the Midwest, and the company, located in
what Shanan referred to as
his apartmoffice (living quarters and office combined) flourished from the start.
At five feet nine, Shanan was
a skinny hundred and twenty-five pounds. Yet, more than half the girls who
worked for him loved him—and frequently. He was a hundred and twenty-five pounds of
pure lust for life, a
beautiful white smile; and the egocentric word adultery held no value whatsoever. He simply floated through
destinies, aimlessly involving himself in the lives of those with which he
connected; and by whatever uncanny principle, people did enjoy his presence:
associate blindness, if you will.
“Hey—”
He, as I have previously
pointed out, had constantly labored his adult life at offbeat ventures, wrote
poems, painted, sculpted, invented strange gimmicks, and etceteras; and, while
he was running this maid service, he busied himself at the same. What is
more, he had vivid dreams as he slept, which often came to pass, and he would eagerly
replay them in vivid detail into the nearest sympathetic ear. Moreover, and now
somewhat profitably, that peaceful man’s voice from deep within—if or
when Shanan listened—would occasionally direct a more rational path.
Every project—puddle, pond,
lake, or ocean—was a dynamic endeavor, had to be swum win-or-drown, and Shanan
would paint them with glorifying words flowing ceaselessly from the brush of
his over-enthusiastic mouth, supporting them enthusiastically in his naive
dialogue of “—great potential here!” or “A vast fortune to be had!” This
attitude of explosive lusts woven into the hope-stitched fabric of all of his revolutionary
enterprises perpetually excited anyone associated with him.
Shanan had made acquaintances
by the hundreds along his meandering way, and only a precious few actually
found reasons to dislike him. The majority could still find areas of admiration
in their heart for the man, maybe because he tried so hard at his multitudinous
schemes or, quite possibly, because he was just such a klutz.
“Hey—”
He was indeed diverse, in
contrast to the norm, though if you told him, he would ebb and become
unresponsive to your voice. As I have already written, but will paraphrase
herein, he simply soared enthusiastically through his carefree life, sampling
its endless flavors among its rose-petal-garnished flight patterns.
EARLY SPRING of nineteen hundred and seventy-seven, on a dismal, rainy
Minneapolis morning, a young woman, hired that very morning and now a young
house cleaner for Shanan’s latest enterprise, brought into the office with her
a furry, white puppy with a furry, looping tail. Employee to Shanan: “Would you
mind taking care of my, my pup—just for today?” Without
hesitation, Shanan separated the wiggling pooch from the young woman’s gentle
caress, and took note of a distinguishing bodily signature. Shanan to employee:
“Not to worry. I’d be more than happy to comply. How old is she?”
“Six weeks. Isn’t she cute?”
“Yeah. She got a name?”
“We haven’t named her, yet.
We got seven more at home, but we got a add in the paper, and people are coming
over today, and we didn’t want anybody to know we got her. She’s the cutest.
We’re saving her to keep.” Shanan placed the tiny puppy onto the office floor. Instant “Snf, snf, snfs,”
little head acting like a high-speed metal detector, and a square-yard of floor
was memorized.
A chauffeur—Chuck (Chuck-Man-Jones!) Kelly 
—alias Z-monster Kelly—for Shanan’s new
firm circled his hand through the lower air, wiggling four fingers high, and
motioned the young woman to exit her conversation, and get into his van. “Your
customer’s waiting,” he called out to her. Neither the chauffeur nor Shanan saw
the young woman after that day. ’Twas as if she had abruptly faded into the
Minneapolis association of the voluntarily invisible. Added to the above
mystery of the moment, the young woman had a young girlfriend retrieve her
young friend’s last, perhaps her only, paycheck.
DURING THE FOLLOWING WEEK, having no real intentions of keeping the pup—totally
absurd, absolutely unreasonable, tush to all thought of so disgusting a
venture, Shanan, the new dog connoisseur, bought puppy food, puppy cookies, a
puppy collar, a puppy leash, puppy shampoo, puppy squeaky-toys, and walked the
little squirt as often as she required, or, as often as he could snatch her off her scrambling feet and
flip her onto the front lawn of the
kennel-apartmoffice. The company chauffeurs and the young and the older women
in the office loved the pup and showered her often with cuddling affections. On
the third day, the puppy received a name.
“Amy! (pronounced aymee) C’mere, snookies,” he
would call to her, “you sneaky lil phubby you. What’s youze lil youze doin’
now?” The fun they would have with each other was spontaneous and reciprocal
with every mutual gesture perceived by their ever-anticipating eyes,
anticipating anything moving. He would purse his lips together and make
high-pitched but short sucking noises; Amy would come scampering lickety-split
with precedential memory. Shanan figured the noises sounded like puppies
pulling on their mother’s teats, and Amy did not want her imaginary brothers or
sisters to drain the reserves. He would play this frolic-filled stratagem on
her whenever he wanted her attention. Furthermore, as the closing bell of each
day began drawing sleepy thoughts to sleeping quarters, he would allow Amy to
crawl onto the floor-level mattress and between the covers with him, whenever
she so desired. She would sneak in—for the fiftieth time—lick his face, with
her little, pink tongue; she would sneak out again. Sneak, sneak, sneak. Always
sneak, sneak, sneak. He would roll Amy onto her back and wrestle with her
beneath the ceiling of his chest; and he loved her puppy antics and her playful
defense. Amy’s feelings for him were as mutual as the color orange is to a ripe
orange; and, as she grew (or, with better context: as they grew collectively),
Shanan would qualify her ears proudly to his friends.
“They stand perfectly,” he
would boast. “I’ll bet she’s got a mix of Shepherd in her. Ain’t she a beauty?”
She was certainly a beauty,
and just as independent as he was; and though she chewed on half the items in
Shanan’s abode, he still
acquired a staggering fondness for her, and she forever loved the chase.
Amy was the first full-time
companion who truly loved him. Every belonging and every human being joined to
Shanan’s days were always temporary: Things came; things went. Evolving
from the consistency of this lifelong pattern, his pet theme on life had become
wholly wrapped into this standard and often-used motto: “I’m temporary!” Now,
however, here was a friend, and the word temporary (though in these
ultramodern but Last Days of the original twentieth century a rarely used
adjective), all but dissolved from Shanan’s vocabulary.”
Amy, a dog, yes, but a dog
with the truest effect of life itself springing forth joyously from her
penetratingly sparkling winks, would go everywhere and anywhere with her
beloved person. By the end of six carnivorous months, she was fully grown
and fattening, with the
biggest and blackest of eyes, which could steal
the stony heart from a leering gargoyle, and, which contained a variety of
tender emotions rather human in quality. On odd occasions, alas, Shanan would
have to leave Amy locked in the car, windows cracked open an inch, more or
less, and this would wrack
his compassionate conscience. Excluding those few isolated affairs,
Amy was eternally by his side. They were pals to the end.
A LATE WEDNESDAY EVENING
THERE
WAS SHANAN,
seated, relaxing
lackadaisically, and quaffing a Bud-Stupor
Beer near the front-window-end of the long bar in the old-world-styled Oval
Table Restaurant: a routinely visited and favorite upper-class suburban
nightclub, which he enjoyed with many good friends of same pleasures, including
Chuck (Chuck-Man-Jones!) Kelly —alias
Z-monster Kelly. The customer to Shanan’s left
happened to bend to the floor, for a dollar he had dropped, but popped up as if
performing a physical impression of a medieval catapult; and, as his face shot
over the level of the bar, exclaimed with a vociferous shout to everyone in the
place: “He’s got a dog in here! Shan’s got a dog!”
Carlos, a giant of a man, the restaurant’s half-owner,
ambled slowly down the meager bar.way and stood before the
new dog administrator. Searching Shanan’s eyes, he placed his fleshy hands flat
upon the surface of the bar. “Shanan,” he uttered in a monotone, and with a
strict contour to his face, “—youuu can dooo no wrong!” grinned, shook his head
jovially, and turned toward the cash register and respectably-stocked liquor
shelves dressing the lower third of the full-mirrored wall. From the stainless
steel cooler, Carlos raised an icy bottle of Bud-Stupor Beer, turned
again, and slid the brew-gratis a foot across the bar to the front of Mr.
Greatly Relieved. Merrily humming his lips into congenial smiles, Carlos
returned to the supplying of his smooth northern comforts to the balance of his
now laughing customers.
By this time, the patrons were gaping
the bar’s length at Amy. She had completely
surprised her observers, having reached her front paws to the mahogany rim of
the bar, and now sniff, sniff, sniffing with her little, coal-button nose at
Shanan’s beer glass. Upon witnessing this waggishly unique spectacle of the nose,
the folk in the pub began to delight, “She’s thirsty, Shan! She’s thirsty! Give
that white girl a drink of your beer, you old miser!”
Shanan nodded graciously
toward his friends, smiled consent, and asked Carlos for a saucer. Saucer
delivered, drink poured, tongue-consumed to the point of totally dry, saucer a millimeter thinner. Amy
wrinkled her curious eyebrows and settled back onto the comfortable, carpeted floor. The man (the ex-catapult)
sitting next to Shanan inquired if she were friendly.
“For sure!” Chuck (Chuck-Man-Jones!)
Kelly smiled. “She loves everybody.”
Assuming Chuck’s reply to be a personal
permission, the man leaned gingerly sideways
to pet the dog but shot upward again, this time impersonating a rocket launched
to the moon; and, as he ascended, banged the booster section of his head
against the bottom edge of the bar.
“Jesus, Shanan!” he yelled with a loud
voice. “Hey, Carlos…!” he bellowed
vindictively, rubbing the back of his throbbing head, “Shan’s barefooted—He
hasn’t even got socks on his feet!”
Now, the clientele, in elated
high gear, delivered a symphony of whistles and hand clapping. Carlos, with wide-open eyes, gazed in low gear toward the end of the bar. Shanan was sitting
on his soft-backed chair, with a dumb two-eggs-sunny-side-up-over-a-nose look
on his face.
Deliberate step after
deliberate step, Carlos again maneuvered his hulking body skillfully along the narrow bar.way
until directly in front of the new hillbilly.
Shaking his head, Carlos leaned way over the bar and stared what appeared to be
swaying daggers into Shanan’s large, brown, swaying eyes.
Shanan sat frozen with impish,
non-blinking eyelids. “I left them in my car,
Carlos. Heh, heh, I hate things on my feet….”
Dispassionately but cautious,
the customer to his left (Mr. Ex-Moon-Pilot) reached down and grabbed a tight
hold of Amy’s silvery, ring-linked collar.
Carlos appraised Shanan for
the length of a protracted breath, reached over the bar, and placed his right
hand gently behind Shanan’s neck.
“Shanan...” he intoned as he
puffed his rosy cheeks into small balloons and blew, “…youuu can dooo no
wrong!” and the sweet-tempered
giant broke into a laughter that seemed to inundate with a liquid form of happiness the entire establishment, until
he was thoroughly purple in the face.
THE NIGHT whoopeeed on in the now de-starched-shirted Oval Table,
and the amusements loosened to the beat of the music. Shoes were hung on the
parapets of the booths, laughter was heard from every corner, and the beers and
the mixies flowed. Amy became guest of honor, and the merrymakers loved her,
showering her with their many compliments and many petting hands. Carlos sang, and the other half-owner,
L’Ru the Frenchman, on three of his mystified
patrons, practiced his philosophical mysteries. Shanan broke an inveterate
custom, and the guests of the brasserie could not be the happier.
Embraced in the intoxicating
arms of the emancipated night, certain shoeless women, old and young,
asked Shanan to dance, and he happily danced the midnight enchantresses into
tomorrow, and frequently. The barefoot dog-lover had found his nirvana. The
population of the restaurant, including Chuck (Chuck-Man-Jones!)
Kelly? Well, I hear they found theirs, too; for, if
you were to stop in for a sip of palatable refreshment today, they could easily
show you the laughter yet echoing from those noble red walls.
YEAR 1979
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER
Hurricane
David Thrashes Caribbean
Islands, New England, Violently
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
SPRING
SHANAN HAD GROUND three wonderful years through the mill of adventure and
diversion. He had long ago sold his third maid service and began engraving
beautiful pictures onto mirrors. His endeavors in this artful capacity took him
to Chicago, New Orleans,
California, and back to Minnesota, where again tradition ruled. He tired of his glamorous occupation, not entirely
allowing its full potential to bloom (excessive glass dust in
the pores of his hands, as
he so explained, possible silicosis), and opened his fourth maid
service, but, on this engagement, in a professional office in a professional
office building. Regarding the flavors of the business, not a spice had
changed, and he still had his baby—Amy.
By now, Amy had acquired an
extraordinary routine. Whenever someone
approached her with the intention of petting or saying “Hi, Amy,” a great big
grin would spread clear across Amy’s friendly mouth, exposing a picketed row of
shiny, sharp teeth, soon known as her famous impression of a Great White Shark.
Her grin would indeed scare a timid person, but only in rare instances. Shanan,
nevertheless, would have to expound, “She smiles,” before jittery nerves
finally settled in the flesh. Amy could indubitably smile.
SIX CAREFREE MONTHS elapsed, and he again sold his maid service, this time to a
south Suburban businessperson named Tilda Danielson. Shanan made a considerable
chunk of money from the
sale and now had a steady girlfriend named Cathy James: a beautiful dusty-blonde, green-eyed, braid-haired Scandinavian
girl of twenty-six extremely blest years: Shanan’s tastes were nothing
less than impeccable. If, on the other hand, Cathy were simply a result of
supernatural luck, I would be more than happy to finance Shanan’s chances for
ten decades in Las Vegas—with my eternal soul!
Together, Shanan (and Cathy,
a young woman who was just a tad religious: Everything was always going to be
everlasting) rented a tiny house at the end of a gravely cul-de-sac
in the countryside area of Minnetonka, the wealthiest suburb—in those days—in
the state of Minnesota. Their rented house, needless to say, was not in the
midst of luxurious mansions. To show a clear relativity here, they
referred to their charming residence as The Little House on the Gravel Pit,
all four rooms of the place, plus bathroom. Moreover, its owner had had the
northern end of the house built cavernously into the side of a small hill,
hobbit-style. Nonetheless,
the pair loved their quaint, cinderblock home, occasionally invited company for
music and chats; and, the vast and endless fields decorating two
horizons of their chateau-unroyal allowed affectionate Amy a
sprawling amount of nomadic freedom. Adding to
her newfound liberties, with a couple of neighboring canines, Amy eventually made—new friends!
The money Shanan
received from the sale of his business would see them
comfortably through the winter.
’TWAS A MEMORABLE AFTERNOON, not long into the freezing and snowcapped months of Minnesota’s winter, twenty-nine days below
zero, when Shanan was hit with a brainstorm, which overrode all the brainstorms
he had ever brainstormed in his life.
“I’m going gold mining!” he
cried to Cathy. “I ain’t ever gone gold mining. I know they haven’t quit mining
gold—I just know they haven’t! I got a feeling down in me bones, see? Yas,
suh...!” With these words yet lingering in the room, he bounded through the kitchen doorway, to his
automobile, warmed her for an entire minute, and raced wildly off like a star contender at an international speed contest, into downtown
Minneapolis—straight for the main library.
SEVEN THAT ICE-CAPPED
EVENING, Shanan came pealing into their driveway and made a fast— “I’ll
be right back!” Excuse me, two fast
fumbling, stumbling, and mad-dashing trips into the kitchen, wherein the new
John Augustus Sutter scattered twenty-four books across the table. Cathy simply stood near the door, with her beautiful Scandinavian-green eyes following Shanan, mutely.
“I had to go into the library
twice, honey.” Shanan panted, huffin’-and-a-puffin’. “You could only leave with
twelve books at a time, and I couldn’t leave without all of them. People are
out west today as sure as I’m standing here, honey, —goould mining! Folks!
Folks, I tell ya! Folks gold mining! I already read boo-coo pages in these here
good ol’ gold mining books.” He threw his head back in praise, peered through
smiling lids at the ceiling, and exulted loudly. “The West is loaded with the stuff!” He threw his head into a hanging surrender, and
shook it. “Whew!”
By now, Cathy’s dimples were
showing, as she squinted, and crinkled her shoulders. With the corners of her
mouth tweaked up, she quizzed in an evocative tone, “I suppose you’re going
gold mining right this second?”
Eyeballs out exercising. “Not
right this second, honey. I’m going to read these first until I suck in a ton of this
knowledge. When I’m done with them, I
might go.” As though he were king before a pie of four and twenty golden birds
of destiny, Shanan sat himself respectively before his task of a thorough
plucking.
Cathy knew, however, no
“might go” existed within his elated bones. His methodical heart was set:
immovable as the granite cornerstone
of the first Chase Manhattan Bank. His departure was naught but a matter of implosion.
THROUGHOUT THE FREEZING
MINNESOTA WINTER, both days and
nights, Shanan hardened himself to the task of reading and learning. He nailed
gigantic sheets of paper and maps onto half the walls in the house, made
innumerable notes, penned parallel lines and countless characters onto charted
graphs denoting every occurrence of gold ever recorded in the history of every
gold-bearing state in the United States of America, and, in the exertion, had
discovered three major gold belts spanning the country from the East Coast to
the West Coast. Connect the dots was back in style.
The excitement brewed, now
bubbling within his jubilant body was interminable, to say the least. As he
pounded his studies, his fervent soul drew no pity from the man wearing it, and
he drove his eyes relentlessly over the endless lines and sentences paving the
ageless, printed avenues of his twenty-four books. The countenance of his round
Little Ben clock was manifesting its seasonal transformation; Mother Spring was
thawing frigid Mr. Winter; and every word ever darting through Shanan’s excited
mind, or fleeing from his rapturous mouth, alluded to “Gooooould mining!”
Amy herself could sense her
master’s bloating fascination instinctively, with each little sniff, sniff,
sniff of her nose. Upon entering their arms-open-wide house from a daily romp
in the crystal-white snow, she would prance her crystal-white body immediately
to his side, smile, and eagerly wag her tail, as if wanting to help him move faster—and
faster and faster he moved.
“Eeyow! There must be tons of gold in
outer space,” he blurted to
Cathy one evening. “The books say you usually find iron wherever there’s
gold.” Cathy did inquire the deduction. Shanan did bug his eyes and did explain: “Because
meteorites are usually made of iron.” Cathy did twist her lips—to the far
side of her face.
Shanan, still and all, had
his old peculiar quirk: When the flesh of his body had finally wearied from the
towering alp of his studies, just before giving serious consideration to his
beckoning mattress, he would relax himself into his huge easy chair and write
slowly until a whimsical or heartfelt poem had fashioned itself onto his thick, ruffled tablet.
If he missed a night of writing a poem, he
would diligently compose two the next, even if he had to scribe until he fell
into slumber. In a way, he was a man of habit, actually, six habits total: Amy, gold mining,
writing poems, cigarettes,
a six-pack of beer every night, and—frequently!
YEAR 198O
MINNETONKA, MINNESOTA
EARLY SPRING
THEIR GARAGE SALE was a fabulous boon. Shanan had finally returned the gold mining books to the
library, sadly but obediently, and the possessions he had acquired
during the past year, including bedroom and
living room suites, were now scurrying off to their various new homes,
excluding, of course, sundry items relative to mining and living in the
wilderness. He now had a pocket full of cash and a station wagon stuffed with a
canvas and vinyl tent and essential camping gear, packed to half the heights of
its foggy windows.
The month prior to the sale,
and energized to the brim of his ball cap because of the radically escalating
gold prices (roughly eight hundred and fifty dollars per ounce), with a glass
pie dish, Shanan had clumsily tried practicing the art of gold panning in the
nearby icy Minnetonka Creek—but to no avail. “My fingers couldn’t get used to the
freezing water, Cath…” Translated: “I don’t know a darn thing about gold
panning.”
Fully cognizant that his present mining
equipment would definitely have to be
subjected to modern advancements, after executing a thick yellow list of
telephone calls, Shanan at length found a shop in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where they retailed genuine steel gold pans, and bought two: a sixteen-inch for Cathy
(if he could coax her to
accompany him), and a king-size eighteen for himself. Furthermore, suspecting the better part of his labors
would be directed toward gold mining, he mailed his poems back to his mother, in
New York.
THE NEW GOLD MINER moseyed into the kitchen and studied Cathy. His imploring
her to go with him had increased as the long, white winter drew to a close, but
Cathy had hesitated. Shanan loved her so and desired her to be with him on this
new eternal adventure. Now, he knew the last match had to be lighted. Aware his
gold odyssey might be lonely without human company, he knew of no alternative:
He needed to propose marriage.
“You wanna poop off logs and
eat bunnies with me for the rest of your life?” He looked at the floor,
shuffled his feet.
Cathy crinkled her shoulders,
placed her hands on her hips, leaned forward, cocked her braided head, deepened her eyebrows, wrinkled her nose, puckered her lips, and whispered, “You saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Need I speak again?” he murmured,
inspecting the floor, still shuffling his feet
around their kitchen.
Cathy had planned to room with a
life-long friend after Shanan had left, but this…this was a fatter
cow of quite a different pasture. Not uttering
a sound, she grabbed her meager belongings quietly into her arms, and was
standing beside their modern-day covered wagon before Shanan could turn his
head.
“Well,” she hummed
euphorically, “how long are you going to stand in the doorway?”
Cathy was not exactly a
stranger to gold mining scenarios. Her grandfather lived half his life in the
western wilderness, applying himself to the same. He was from a long line of
rugged men, including the James Brothers: Jesse Woodson and Frank. Cathy’s
father was named Jesse Edward Frank James, so as he matured into adulthood, he
could choose from that menu of monikers the name he deemed would bestow him the
sincerest of honor. Half way through grammar school, he decided prudently one
day, having duked it with half his school class and half the rest of half the
other classes, the name Eddie would be just what the doctor ordered; and,
coincidentally, the doctor had. Nevertheless, regarding gold miner grandpa, Cathy’s grandmother had left her struggling husband in them thar hills years
ago, to raise their children near the readily accessible conveniences of the
city, where creature comforts were easier to find. Although Grandpa James did finally make a fortune in the West, discovering
a wealthy talc mine, grandma James remained in
the city, staying close to her developing brood. Be that as all this may,
however, Cathy was confident she could tough it; and, cooed by the fiery
speeches of riches and independent happiness pouring off the tongue of her everlasting
beau made the entire enterprise all the more glamorous and appealing, and more
appealing, and more appealing….
“C’mon…Amy,” Shanan cheered
loudly. “Youze lil youze has gotta jump in, too.”
A long, embracing kiss did
our advocate of the gold pan plant upon Cathy’s like-minded smile. They joined
lively Amy in the front seat of their four-wheeled relic and began driving
casually outbound from the cul-de-sac and into their ultimate choice, a
multitude of tiny clouds of gravel dust twirling gracefully from the breezing
air trailing their vehicle. Thoroughly encased within their delighted hearts
was also twirling a jewel-studded memory of nine cuddly baby puppies (adopted
optimistically to nine forewarned households) that “affectionate Amy” had given
birth to during her brief stay in the little house on the gravel pit.
BIG BAR,
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
SILVER AND GOLD VALUES WERE
SOARING throughout the world. Shanan,
acting on an unanticipated tip from an attorney in Minneapolis, finally
appeared in the Trinity River town of Big Bar, California. Canyons of California’s Trinity River
were swarming with
broad-striding feet and their high-spirited owners— impassioned men and their fiery women, from half the
United States and half the
country of Canada. Gold-related pandemonium
kindled itself anywhere a man could drive a questionable stake. Shanan’s fever,
likewise, with respect to the yellow metal, was by no means unique, as this
phenomenon was equally exhibited by adventurous gold explorers in the locales
of every modern gold bearing area—desert, mountain, field, or stream in the
country, if not the world.
The old federal mining laws
were meaningless to the men of the golden gleaning, and claims were being
double- and triple-staked as though tomorrow had fallen victim to a
pre-embedded x-mark on the
war calendar of eternity.
Gold dredging was by far the
fastest, yet not the easiest, method for recovering gold from the rivers and
creeks. A man could drive State Highway Two-ninety-nine a solid twenty miles of
the Trinity River and observe nothing but miners hustling and bustling about
and diving for the riches of their dreams. The holes they bored ran from a
variety of simple and unassuming ditches, to immense and complex funnels
drilled down through the sand, rocks, and boulders (overburden) until the hole
exposed the river’s bedrock. If blest fruitfully, the diver or divers would uncover
bean-sized and possibly larger pieces or nuggets of gold long-hidden below the
sand, rocks, and boulders. More miners than fewer, lamentably, were not thus
blest. All the same, during exceptional occasions in the Trinity River, as in
many rivers, as a miner gold-dredged himself into the mansion of his
imagination, fine flood-gold would run with the overburden from its loose top
gravels down to the hardpan (compacted blue clay); and, after that, the
bedrock. “Eureka…!” These types of glory holes paid handsomely, but to refer
them as scarce would certainly be an understatement.
At this unpromising juncture,
you potential gold enthusiasts out there might be considering canceling your
order for that new gold mining book or shovel or steel pan, but allow this
writer not to dash the eternal inspiration into oblivion. Gold was indeed to be
found and, often predictably, in exciting and serious quantities.
Sixteen-year-old Elmo, son of John Spool, dredged sixty thousand dollars’ worth
of the amber-colored element in less than a week, and hit the road after six apprehensive days,
heeding a well-founded proverb from San Diego Rick, a well-seasoned diver,
gem-hunter, and miner: “Hit the road, Elmo!”
San Diego Rick was a tried and true
friend of Shanan’s. Elmo, though only sixteen years of age, blew
them thar hills, because of potential adverse
repercussions from his dad. Elmo had pestered for two unbroken weeks on a hunch, “Move the five-incher
behind the huge boulder at Big Flat, Dad!
Let’s move the dredge. Gold’s gotta be a natural on the down-side of that rock,
Pop. I just got a feeling!” At the end of those two weeks, Elmo’s father had
given him the five-inch dredge, told him to remove the dredge and
himself from their camp, and, “Don’t ever come back to this camp, you hear?”
John Spool kept the six-inch dredge for himself and just managed to keep
soul and body together.
Five extraordinarily scenic,
yet mountainous winding miles upriver from the picturesque hamlet of Big Bar,
Truman White (a stocky six-foot-two red-bearded man, who loved the world, and
always had a smile for his neighbors) and Truman’s easygoing partner, Steve Rillsby, brought in nearly two ounces of gold per day with their
eight-inch dredge…on days they worked. “What the heck, at eight hundred dollars
per ounce, in the middle of paradise…?”
Gold miner Rob Boar (who
became a very close acquaintance of Shanan’s), and Rob’s older gold miner
brother, Anti-Forest-Ranger Earl, had a countywide reputation for prospecting
and hitting major jackpots on a monthly basis with their eight-inch
dredge. They typically had a canning jar or two filled to the brim with large and small nuggets to
display to curious “close --- friends.” The
two of them, though on different claims, dredged holes so massive a man would
doubt that the following spring runoff could ever fill them again, but it
did—with ease.
Nonetheless, violent and
whitecapped river flooding spawned by a snow-loaded winter, an early thaw, and a
long and hardy spring rain dumping into and churning the Trinity could roll a
small pickup truck a mile or two a day beneath the stampeding, sea-fated waters
without ever flexing a muscle. During this type of runoff, all of the holes the
miners dredged refilled, and a prospector would need God if ever to find those
same holes again. Those old digs were often carved into the river again and
again; and, after a miner (and not necessarily a novice) had poured his guts
and labors into an entire summer, he would feel like shooting his equipment, or
the poor, lonely man who moved back to his granny’s farm, the poor, lonely man who
had originally sold him that worthless patch
of gold-free and Volkswagen-sized boulders in the first place. Gold often runs
in shallow waters, but not often in shallow hearts.
SHANAN did not categorize himself as a beaver: “I don’t have
enough money to purchase dredging equipment,” and opted for the above-water
gravels and boulders, which, in the Big Bar area ran everywhere along the banks
and shallows of the river. In this free-and-accessible material, he would do his prospecting. In special areas, he would dig extensively into the submerged river
gravels located near the
shoreline; and, after a month of tedious “Hmms”
and explosive “Wows!” he learned how to spot the more logical locations in
which gold potentially settled. He was now (as they used to and possibly still
do call them) a gold-sniper. “And a dad-blamed good ’n, too! I can smell the
stuff.”
Shan…
Kram Engineering was at
present in the forefront of dredge sales and recreational mining equipment but
way at the bottom in qualified gold-miner ratings for safety features and
worthwhile gold-recovery. Unfortunately, greenhorns knew nothing of the various
dangers associated with mining equipment and often died in the learning. A
French-Canadian named Jacques Bossuet had allegedly died from carbon monoxide
fumes belching into his air regulator from the exhaust system on the engine of
a Kram Dredge he was operating in the Trinity River. Stories of similar
calamities were drifting anxiously up and down the rivers of the golden hope. With Shanan mindful of these
controversial tragedies and overtly disgusted
with the unprofessional mining assistance offered by those claiming to be
expert in the field, and the back-woodsy mining practices still employed (and suddenly nurturing a desire
to own a five-inch dredge for himself), the invention genes in his blood moved him to design on paper a triple sluice
box, advanced, for the dredging industry.
Concerning his unusual
apparatus, Shanan telephoned Jufus Kram, owner of Kram Engineering, explained
the idea, and inquired about Jufus’s future dredge designs. Kram told him there
was nothing on the table, but if he liked Shanan’s designs, he would assuredly
give him a current floor-model five-inch gold dredge in return for the efforts.
These words were sufficient for correcting and fastidiously drawing the
hydro-mechanical design and testing it successfully, but to a limited degree.
Along with high hopes, he sent his plans to Kram and waited impatiently for his response.
Three high-expectation weeks
passed, and Jufus wrote he was not interested in a triple sluice. This confused
Shanan and broke his heart, for he had proven beyond a headshake that with a
triple sluice box, properly assembled, the extremely fine gold would not escape
as easily during operation as it did in the latest Kram dredges. He was also convinced gold
miners would be thrilled with a product that
would increase the weigh-in of the golden flakes by the end of the day. The
pros (who, when affordable, preferred a Spokane, Washington, Jim Horan
Precision Dredge) were well aware the big money was always dependent on the recovery of the finer gold, Horan’s personal principle in the construction
of his product. Among the
more successful operations, the abundant fine gold (specks and flakes) would
pay all the expenses—dependably. The nuggets,
when or if ever uncovered in the dig, as a rule became jewelry or high-priced
specimens: rewards and
natural trophies of the game.
Two months progressed somewhat serenely, but a providence-powered peek
in a California mining magazine revealed Kram’s New Triple-Sluice
Five-inch Gold Dredge, and at triple price. This news was upsetting enough to
ripple his skin, but the day Shanan saw a factory released model of the new
dredge on the Trinity River (the triple sluice arrangement a near reproduction
of his own), the contents of his stomach wanted to do a high-dive into a
bucket. Even after all of this corporate exploiting (as Shanan perceived it to
be) of his mechanical and hydrodynamical talents, believing there was still a
chance for remuneration, he tried telephoning Jufus Kram, and to offer
technical assistance, surprisingly, but with no success; Kram simply ignored
his calls, delivering not
a penny’s worth of gratitude to the initiator of the contrivance.
The only mental relaxant for
Shanan: He had held back his critical riffle design arrangements and water-flow
plates, and the new Kram was a virtual dud. Gravel that was dredged into the
sluices accumulated quicker and smothered the riffles in a blink and a half,
and the gold retrieval capability of the new machine was no better than last
year’s model, if not worse. The fine gold still blew straight through the
sluice, and the miner ended his day having to separate three times the amount
of dredge material. Nevertheless, trusting gold miners (witnesses to history)
stood in line for the innovative machine and learned the hard way, like Shanan:
forever learning the hard way. He used to speculate whether the day would ever
come in which he would find “…an affluent corporation who would compensate (or
who gave a damn about poor people on government food stamps, who handed their
ingenuity naively to them on a regular basis—But, hey, chump.” he would muse consolingly out loud at
intervals of self-punishment, “that’s life in
the big nursery….”
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH:
THE
THREE SALOONS
sharing the Big Bar / Big Flat areas were—when
it came to push and shove—jostling, bustling, and rowdy, and a fight or a
weighty dispute occurred im.practically every other night. The
twentieth-century gold camps were just as wild and unpredictable as the
mad-dash nineteenth century camps of risk-taking glory, and the incontestable
lust for the color was emphasized, once in a blue moon, by a stray killing.
No specific laws governing current
mining activities were in force, and whenever a personal mining feud
surfaced between them gold-panning hard-jacks, the California Fish and Game
Control and Forestry Department’s hands were tied—circumstantially tied—“Go
find a judge.” The miners enjoyed nearly total and unrestricted freedom. The
law hid frustrated in a far corner of this uncivilized garden of passions; and
half the miners, including their women, were carrying guns, concealed or
brazenly unconcealed—at their sides or in easily excitable hands.
Shanan owned two guns: He had asked Cathy if she would purchase an AR-7
Survival Rifle in Minneapolis, and could soon shoot the flame off a candle at
fifty feet. Hip-blasting beer cans off the ground at thirty feet came on as
second nature. Cathy shot as if she were born with a machinegun in her hand.
Shanan again asked her to buy a used .38 pistol, shortly after arriving in the
historical gold mining town of Weaverville, California, Route Two
ninety-nine, (approximate number of families: fifteen hundred and two;
approximate population: thirty-three hundred and seventy; roughly twenty-five
hundred and twenty-four paved miles from Washington D.C.). Shanan wanted to be
ready for whatever came along in them thar hills.
Twenty-four miles of winding
mountain state highway west from Weaverville was the evergreen-studded mountain
community of Big Bar (One general store, a tiny post office, a saloon, a cafe
with gasoline pump, and a Laundromat). At the tree-shaded and cost-free Big Bar
Campground (fourteen-day limit) near the eastern edge of Big Bar, across a narrow
bridge from a national forestry station, Shanan and Cathy finally prepared
their dual-tented camp and future plans for their gold explorations.
WEAVERVILLE, CALIFORNIA
POLICE HEADQUARTERS
WEST EDGE OF TOWN
’TWAS WAS A BEAUTIFUL Sunday afternoon. The Weaverville Chief of police had arranged a special
meeting for a new-weapons demonstration, and every off-duty
police officer, sheriff, and state trooper,
uniformed or otherwise, in the county was attending.
“This, gentlemen of the shield,” the
grinning Smith and Weston representative declared, rather
officially, “is the Glazer. The Glazer is a
bullet. You will find no other bullet like it in the world. The Glazer is a
killer. The Glazer is used only to kill. Anywhere it hits a man, the Glazer will kill or
permanently disable. The Glazer is a miniature A-bomb. The Glazer is a
hollow-point model, and its lead slug is
filled with liquid Teflon and micro-B-B’s. A grain of patience, my friends, and the rest of
this show will amaze you.…”
An intriguing form of
anticipation was felt silently among the officers, having no idea what to expect next, as they
fastened their eyes on the bullet in the salesman’s hand. The mood now
spiced suitably, the rep drew a pistol from
his black,
crisscross-stippled holster and fired angularly at a concrete pad prefacing a sheet of unused plywood leaning upright
against a post twelve feet away.
“Note...the plywood.” The
S&W representative stood with his outstretched hand motioning elliptically,
referencing the entire sheet of plywood. The officers stepped cautiously to the
board, examined it thoroughly, but could not detect a scratch. “The Glazer,”
the rep went on, as his gaze and voice traversed the distance of the walkway to
the police officers, “is designed for metropolitan use. You can shoot them
downward, and they will not glance off the pavement. This is a built-in. In the
event of pedestrian presence, virtually no chance of friendly injury or accidental death can ensue, unless a pedestrian slips literally into the path of a shot. The Glazer
is manufactured for .308’s, down to .38’s, and
can, believe it or not, be produced for .22’s.”
Further incentives or
demonstrations, though there were more to come, would be unnecessary. As far as
these law officers were concerned, they now considered their current gun
ammunition obsolete and would assuredly want to add to their arsenal a large
assortment of these remarkably effective bullets.
“As I told you awhile ago, gentlemen,” as the law
enforcers retraced their steps, “you’ll be amazed at what the Glazer can do.”
The rep uncurled and wiggled a thumb-up to two assistants standing by a target area in the open-air firing
range. “Okay, boys, do your duty!” Upon receiving the signal, they nodded
and lifted a broad, black cloth covering a large, fresh watermelon resting atop
a crude wooden workbench thirty feet from the salesman. At the completion of their task, the two men returned
to the frontline. The Smith and Weston man raised his gun, took careful aim, and shot once at the melon. “Follow
me, gentlemen.”
As the rep had directed, the
men of the badge walked to the end of the firing-range and gathered at the
tabled watermelon.
“Please note,” the rep
instructed, squinting toward his green but motionless victim, “the bullet hole
going into the melon. You can
hardly see it, am I right? Now take a close gander at the other side of the melon.”
The officers inspected the
entire melon, heads bending down toward it, ascending from it, eyes peering
around it. No other hole was visible except that which was shot into the front
of the melon. A barrage of questions began to rise from curious throats, but
with a high-and-winding twist of his hand, the arms salesman interrupted—
“This—is the Glazer at its best. And for the weak of stomach, I suggest you
ready a barf bag.”
The sales agent lifted a
bulky, sixteen-inch perforated kitchen knife off the table and sliced the melon
deftly down its middle. The melon tumbled open, and both its sides wobbled
precariously toward edges of the table but did not fall to the ground. The officers stiffened in unbelief. Nothing
more than a thin residue of pink mush remained inside the cavity of
the gutted melon, altogether annihilated, its fragrant shell now a mere quarter
of an inch thin.
The demonstrator smiled at the astonished faces of his
highly impressed audience. “If the culprit is hit in the guts, the result is no
different from removing the stuffing from the center of a rag doll. As I stated
before, gentlemen,” the man reiterated: “The Glazer is a miniature A-bomb. When
this superior example of weaponry enters a man, it leaves nil to be desired—especially at the autopsy. And, by the way,”
he concluded, “the gun I was using?” with a grin, “This lil ol’ Smith and
Weston, model forty-three .22 caliber!”
“Just what we need,” a huge, redheaded
officer sneered openly, bouncing a couple of
sample Glazers in the palm of his left hand. “With the garbage coming into our
hills these days, we could each use fifty cases of these little
mothers.”
THE
avant-garde, pleased by the
representative’s gratuitous gifts of a promotional supply of product, and his
parting remark of “ten percent off the first purchase,” disassembled and headed
composedly to their vehicles. “You sure wouldn’t want to use this ammo buck
hunting,” a trooper chuckled toward his fellow officers: “The only thing you’d
be putting in the center of your supper table would be a three-foot-wide hole.”
BIG BAR, CALIFORNIA
THERE WAS SHANAN, and it was indeed a beautiful Sunday afternoon. He and
Cathy were two among a wily bunch of other land and shore miners, carving their
prospective destiny from the landscape of Ingot’s Bar—a state-operated,
roadside rest and picnicking area nestled beneath peaceful pines by the Trinity
River, four miles east of Big Bar. The serendipitous
crowd was totally absorbed in their digging and panning for loose gold they
could snipe from the abundant and thick-tangled roots of water-shrubs or weeds
or bank mosses or the boundless gravel deposits. Everywhere you spied, steel
shovels, iron picks, and alloyed spades were raising and chunking eagerly into the waiting ground at an uninterrupted pace. Men, women, and a collection of
their children hunched near to the earth and close together, their darting hands and variant tools
cracking open ancient reefs of rock crevices
and whiskbrooming the bared prehistoric or redeposited contents into their steel gold
pans—inside-bottoms purposely rusted for optimal attraction of the gold—were becoming
indescribably exultant!
Between their hard-earned,
well-spent breaths, the hopeful and young prospectors would buzz jubilantly the
highest of their prayed-for expectations to one another, “Baby, this pan’s
gotta be loaded!” Pulverized dust and gravels nesting on exposed bedrock were
broomed painstakingly into waiting steel gold pans, and a small army of knees
was bent along the swift river’s edge, balancing their Pollyanna owners as they
shook and washed their gravels gingerly down to the black sand concentrates.
Swirling the water over the blacks until those tiny golden stars lit up
Heaven’s side of the pan would give birth to a feeling only a first-time gold
miner could share within himself. Shanan and Cathy had worked vigorously at
opening a hole for three long days, and now had it seven feet wide square by a tapering
six feet deep, located conveniently not a
stone’s throw from the picnic-tabled rest area. None but this cranky old
gray-haired local whispered his bitter displeasure. “I should call the damned cops!”
The miners of the eighteen
hundreds did not bother with the minuscule gold the above-mentioned parties
were getting. Thus there was enough fine gold in the ground for every one. Many
of the above-mentioned parties, however, abandoned Ingot’s Bar because of lack of knowledge in
amalgamating the fines, spending more than a week in gleaning only an
eighth of an ounce of color, or had left for what they believed to be richer neighborhoods,
and there were many of those.
Paying no mind to state or national
laws, or a cranky old gray-haired man’s
personal displeasure, Dang…! Shanan thought, all of his senses confirming the reality of
the moment: Gold truly is here.
“No denying it, honey,” Shanan mused elatedly and out loud to Cathy, “this is the only life…!
A RETIRED GENT who
had prospected those hills in the mid-nineteen-forties had taken young Bin under his wing and had
schooled him in the rudiments of his new trade. Hence, before the
chickens were fully awake and producing
proteinic ovals, our miner of the gravels had perfected the finer art of gold
panning. Again, it was true, just as true as it is today (verifiably speaking)
gold does exist in them thar hills; and, gold will abide in them thar hills for
as long as gold abides anywhere. Furthermore, impossible as this may sound, Shanan and Cathy were
offered the opportunity to rent a grandfathered-in trailer; and,
whether you’re able to fathom this,
they paid only fifty dollars a month, no utility or telephone bills, and the landlords, Ernst and Shelana
McKinley, would accept gold in place of
cash—at the drop of a hat, and allowed them to use the outdoor, extra freezer, which did have electricity.
The trailer had no electricity (though
it had outlets) or running water (though it had faucets).
Regardless, for the gold mining pair, the trailer was a mansion and a
miracle; and, well before Daylight had crawled herself over the blues and
greens of the Pacific Ocean, the happy couple
was moved in and cooking on the top of their kerosene heater. In contrast with
their first sixty-seven days in campgrounds and a ten-by-fourteen tent, and suffering twenty-nine of
those groundbreaking days in a perpetual spring downpour, the trailer proved a genuine utopia to the twosome. As a
finale to the trailer-decorating week, after receiving welcoming consent from
Ernst and Shelana, Shanan affixed a heavy-duty extension cord and a water hose
to complement the trailer.
Ever so weary of the persistent rain
and the varmints, they now discovered the vast
difference between a thin canvas and vinyl tent in an abandoned creek-side
state campground and a
solid sheet-metal trailer. On top of which, their gold miner’s trailer had real cupboards—covetous high and low
cupboards.
A
retrospect
During Shanan and
Cathy’s tenting days, and their ever-developing chapter among the gold
camps of California, after moving from the
cost-free Big Bar Campground (the free fourteen days having expired) and
establishing a new camp at the free Big French Creek Campground (no day-limit
imposed, abandoned by Forestry personnel, due
to a severe lack of state funds) at the edge of the rippling Big French Creek, their seven- by seven-foot supply
tent contained cardboard boxes instead of cupboards. Unlike the trailer, the supply tent had undergone an incessant
plague of mice, and Shanan and Cathy’s
daily provisions had fallen to infestations at various and distressing levels of unpleasantness. A day of deliberating gravely over this predicament moved
our local inventor to grab a rinsed plastic one-gallon milk jug, pour
three inches of water into it, and smear peanut butter onto the insides an inch
below its mouth. With this accomplished, Shanan placed the milk jug five feet
from the supply tent and balanced a piece of split wood from the ground to the
jug’s neck, an angle not unlike the hour-hand of a wind-up clock at ten after
the hour. The following morning, seventeen
drowned mice were in the milk bottle. The next sunup, in another bottle,
the last nine had met their, as Shanan described it, “watery de-mice.” From
that two-day episode and thereafter, the
unique trap stayed absent of mice, as absent, finally, as the duo’s
canvas living quarters.
With
their comforts secured impeccably,
Shanan and Cathy, having completely finished their trailer remodeling and
reconditioning, could now concentrate hours of sun-filled venturing,
prospecting the endless banks along the Trinity and other Rivers, and creeks,
in diligent search of the elusive color. They filled their pans and sluice at the river’s edge,
making withdrawals from—those banks; and at
eight hundred dollars per ounce, they did well enough.
The Big Bar general store, gas station, and cafe also
acted as trading-post banks and had scales for weighing gold, in exchange for snacks, petrol products, and suppers, and
everyone prospered thereby. Life in those thar mountains had not changed
since the gold rush days had screamed through them in the second half of the eighteen hundreds. Back in those half-forgotten
days, your run-of-the-mill gold miner was usually tapped of legal
coinage and, brining us forth into these
days, so was Shanan. On the other side of
the coin—government food stamps, a fast odd-job-twenty-dollar bill here
and yonder, and peddling his gold off countertops at a handful of general
stores throughout those northwestern hills came in mighty handy. He was hardly
ever without his beer and cigarettes. This entire semblance was, as they used
to say emphatically, “Nawthin’ short o’ Paradahs.”
I mean, let us scrutinize Shanan’s
whole-case scenario for just a moment here:
the slickest “good ol’ dog” on the face of this spinning Earth; a couple of
accurate guns and free venison; fish poles and the best trout holes in the U.S.
of A.; long sunny days; warm and brief winters; food stamps; beer; cigarettes;
a steel gold pan rarely hungering for the color; fifty dollars monthly rent; no
visible sign of conscience, and a lonesome young woman who could verily inspire a new national
anthem! —So, who would want to die and take a
chance on Heaven!…?
SHANAN AND CATHY were sniping their way optimistically along the rocky
banks of the river, on a scantily clouded but dry Saturday afternoon. For three
lighthearted hours, they had plied their talents to digging, chopping moss
(whispering their souls’ desires to each other), cracking open and briskly
dusting a slew of freshly uncovered, and only until now, unnoticed and ancient
crevices for their long-hidden treasures.
They were industriously panning the
ultra-crushed particles of dirt and pea gravels meticulously down
to the assorted black-sand and gold-blended concentrates, which
usually contained a rewarding and bountiful assortment of micro-thin
flakes and wee mini-nuggets, when, quite out of the blue, a forceful
pillar of wind raised a funnel of fine dust
twenty or thirty feet into the air. Over the past years and generally from a reasonable
distance, Shanan had seen dozens of these rascals twisting and carving
their short-lived, dusty paths through areas of dry, powdery earth
throughout the desert-country spanning the
great Southwest, and elsewhere. Dust devils were their traditional names, and they came on like
miniature tornadoes, normally harmless, but
often stretching their spiraling tentacle of sand and dust a mile or more into
the sky.
He and Cathy were as
captivated as a couple of kids thrilling at a lion tamer without a twenty-foot
bullwhip. With no apparent motive,
Shanan took a quick breath and (misty-eyed as if in a trance, and as if he had wings on his feet) glided his steps smoothly into the center of the
coiling spout of wind and dust. Within seconds, the wind ceased, the funnel
disappeared into the heavens, and vanished like a bad dream, leaving the gold
miner standing—mesmerized and shuddering.
“God, Cathy! Memory…! Memory…!” he breathed outwardly
and in absolute awe. “I don’t ever want to jump into a journey like that
again.”
“What do you mean,” she
quizzed, “‘a journey like that’?”
“I’m not positive, honey.
That reminded me of something— something weird. I don’t know if I can explain. But while I was in that thing, I felt like I was commingling with spirits of
God! You have no idea what’s going on inside them devils. Boy! Crazy…!”
Standing, yet limp with a
granite expression on his face, he proceeded to babble. “How long was I in that
funnel? Could you tell…? I couldn’t tell. But I don’t ever—I don’t ever want to
go through that again.” He began to cry. “Even though I was here on the ground,
something inside me was trying to raise itself up and out of me. Them suckers
are scary. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. They’re different, Cath,
different. I’ll never step into one of those things again—in my life!”
Cathy stood several feet from
her man, mute; she had no words for this. His trembling response took her
completely by surprise. She could say nothing, but only try to comprehend: He
used to be so…so durable.
Shanan was not exactly a
religious man, but this, this was a bona fide spiritual experience, and it all
but floored him through the sand beneath his green rubber waders. He was a
regular beer drinker, smoked his pot, but seldom, as it made his gums bleed,
and, before Cathy, had slept with his women anytime he had the urge.
Furthermore, fighting was not part of his makeup. On the other hand, shrinking
from a fight, as he had when he was a schoolboy, was not, either. He cussed,
but rarely. Nonetheless, this whirlwind, this whirlwind encounter, was a
spiritual walk he would remember for the rest his short life upon this Earth.
NEXT DAY
SUNDAY
THE SUN was gliding her beaming fingers of solar stimulation over
the green-capped mountaintops and warming a gentle touch round their noble
trees, through their noble branches, their noble needles, their noble
pinecones, leaves of their highborn cousins, and the peasant-like foliage,
which gathered quietly at all their wellborn feet. The glowing reach of the
foster of the hope of day also shed vertical sheets of yellow-gold rays through
slits in a miniature set of sheer curtains, half the wardrobe of the little
trailer window they now appareled. Cathy, pretty as ever a dream could be, rose silently from bed, faced
a flattened hand downward, streamlined twin
sheets efficiently from wall to wall to wall; and, as was her bright-eyed, refreshing Sunday custom,
enthusiastically prepared for a tranquil and
carefree day.
Mr. Dust-Devil-Rider,
however, already up and at ’em, developed a sudden quirk: He—made a Cross, a
delicate Cross. He tied a couple of small and dry fir-tree branches tightly
together, snapped them free of their twigs, and stuck this delicate Cross into
the soft, pebbly ground behind the trailer. If ever a particular day were
unexpected by the world, indeed this particular day was, and commencing from
this particularly unexpected day and replicated every Sunday morning
thereafter, Shanan would bow his head meekly, say a simple prayer before his
unadorned Cross, and sprinkle a pinch of fine flake gold at its pebbly base. He
figured that if God was generous enough to lead him to the gold, he would give
a smidgen of gold back to God: Maybe God’ll give me more.
HAVING NO DESIRE TO LABOR ON SUNDAYS, they
whiled the early hours with word and dice games, ate and finished a late and
lazy brunch, and attended to a light chore or two. As Noon began to stretch her
broadening shadows across the land of peaks and canyons, Shanan stood, stretched his slender arms,
and exchanged his upright position in favor of
the horizontal as he opportunely laid himself onto the bed. Cathy, swaying her
torso rhythmically to a childhood tune she was humming, wiped the knife and
swept bird crumbs off the kitchen table and vigilantly watched them cascade into a white paper sack.
Feeling somewhat drowsy herself, Cathy decided
to join Shanan in his afternoon nap. Her man was lying lengthwise upon the sheets, flat on his back, mumbling calmly, meditating, and pushing his thoughts mystically to wherever they
would carry him. Cathy loved listening to his copious ramblings, his open ingenuity, until he at last buried himself in the
numbness of his sleep. If they were driving along somewhere, relaxing over a
beer, working the gravels of the Trinity, or doing nothing but idling an
evening into tomorrow, his constant philosophizing could keep her enthralled for hours on end “Right, Cath ?”
Shanan had a kitchen-collage
philosophy on life: a dash of Christianity sporadically mixed with a spot of
will-worship occasionally blended with a grain of confused Zen mixed with a well-flavored portion of contemplation
on paranormal phenomena, strongly dosed with
chunks of shredded mechanical, electronic, botanical, and chemical disciplines,
topped off with a healthy covering of natural sciences; and, this potpourri
stew was served liberally alongside a savory helping of fine arts; and he could
feed his tasty delicacies to ninety percent of the knowledge-starved populace
within his midst, if they were not busy with something important. Identified
with the first percent of the populace, Cathy loved them by the plateful, “Right,
Cath? A pouch of magic beans,
anyone?
She would put his renderings
repeatedly into practice to see if anything could be gleaned or witnessed, and
the results were often storybook amazing: I can’t believe this! Bobby showed up
just as I had envisioned. All I did was contemplate the three points the way
Shan showed me. How did he learn? I couldn’t grow plants by tearing a twig off
and just sticking it into the dirt and walking away. But now, now I can, his
way. Weird! I wonder, though, if that doesn’t border on the occult. But where
does he get this stuff: ‘Aging is only brought on psychologically.
People only grow old-looking because they get more and more angry and frenzied by
this world and do wrong, not because of time and old age. Love life: Stay
young’?
Shanan’s methods (formulas on
life, fundamental principles regarding causes and effects: causes and effects
particularly) far excelled that which Cathy had previously read. If you do
this, Cath, this and that will happen. If you set her picture facing your
favorite chair, within ninety days, she’ll walk in for a visit. Hang this over
your bed, and you’ll dream of…hang this picture over your bed of this young and
peaceful woman with a peaceful baby, surrounded by peaceful colors, and you’ll
stand a good chance of getting pregnant…, “With a wee tad bit of the right
assistance, right, honey? C’mere—” “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!”
An additional element did
also increase Cathy’s supernatural portfolio: She consumed many hours of
reading, especially when Shanan was at his mining. Books containing ludicrous
or profane context were against her codes of sanctity. She read the leading
scholars and thinkers from ancient to modern days; the best-selling novels;
mysteries; sci-fis; paranormals; biographies of famous lives, or stories of
far-off lands; and these literary affairs conjointly expanded her ever-widening
intellect.
When grocery shopping in
Weaverville, she would predictably schedule herself to stop at the local
library; and to return to the trailer deficient of literature would have represented a cardinal sin; and, finally (though no church existed
in Big Bar), the Bible—Cathy read the Bible. This was a wrench that
weakened the framework of Shanan’s and her
relationship. Shanan could not understand her habit. “God already sees you’re a
good person, Cath. Just thank him once in a while and say the Lord’s Prayer. He
knows you love him,” he would maintain innocently. While living under the same
roof in Minnetonka, Cathy had mentioned their sleeping in the same bed “in
sin,” attempting to sublimate Shanan’s carefree attitude toward fornication. He
shrugged off her comment as irrelevant. Now, however, this new event moved Cathy to consider a latent quality in him, a quality she had not witnessed
before: Shanan………made a Cross!
On the other foot, Shanan’s
philosophies, since the inception of their reciprocal sharing, had made Cathy
stronger: self-reliant, even assertive. Now, in her every day conversations,
she was no longer that poor little bashful beauty from Blaine, Minnesota. As a
matter of fact, often, but only when they were alone, she would wax rather
bold, outspoken, no-nonsensical, and matter-of-factly, which perpetually
astounded Shanan.
Nevertheless, her sensitivity
toward the everyday life going on around her had not changed an iota; her
homespun vernacular in the homespun quarters remained the same: “Gotta go
consult with Shelana and see if I can get that recipe.” “Gotta see if Tiana can
corn-row my braids today.” “Gotta get a letter off to Mom.” Cathy loved to
write, loved to write volumes of whatever entered her inner self. Possessed
with a remarkable penchant for the pen and the written word, she would write by
the reams, kept a large cardboard box of her writing secreted from everyone,
shut away in an ample
kitchen drawer. Cathy’s writing was her sole, personal “Mine,” and, as inquisitive as Shanan and their mountain friends
often were, no one else’s,
except for one isolated instance: Tiana’s father
had had a severe coronary obstruction, and during one of Tiana’s frequent
visits, she had requested of Cathy, “I know you write, every free minute you
have to yourself, and I’m sure your sheets are filled with spiritually soothing verses. My father’s really sick since his heart operation, Cathy, and I wonder if you
might have something in
writing that would make him feel better?”
“For you, I’ll look,” Cathy replied
considerately, “but just this once. I don’t
even let my dad, who I honor and who has his own tribulations,” she stressed
adamantly, “read my material,” firmly in defense of her literary privacy.
Still, beyond all of the above marks of manner, nothing had really changed,
except now—Shanan………had made a Cross…!
A MONTH ELAPSED, and either Shanan had over-indulged his spending on beer
and cigarettes, or the gold up at Ingot’s Bar had thinned to a level of poverty. The cupboards were bare, flood layers of gold played more difficultly, and a
substantial spring runoff would be necessary to replenish the gravels richly
enough to provide the table with even a piece of daily bread. Yesterday
they had squandered their last food stamp on a can of hash and were now
envisioning a dreary evening wherein they would have no need to scrub their teeth. Shanan
lifted his eyebrows and smiled sadly at poor,
hungry Cathy.
“If we’re going to eat
tonight, honey, we better hit the river for a mess of trout. We can’t refill
our old banana peels.”
Uttering not a single word, Cathy grabbed the fishing
rods, hyper-spaced through the doorway, threw them into Ol’ Betsy, jumped into
the front seat, and stared patiently through the front window.
Gads! Shanan thought: She
took me seriously. I hoped she’d have gone to the Big Bar Store to mooch a
couple cans of who cares what.
“C’mon, Amy,” he called
animatedly, and his smiling dog leaped confidently into the front seat with
Cathy and sat focused dead ahead, raring to fly down the road. The greatest
desire in this whole wide
world Shanan’s dog, Amy, could ever express,
and with a mere wagging of her tail—Let’s go for a ride. Next to riding: chase sticks, swim, smile, eat anything,
and certainly, of course, tease daddy.
Shanan launched himself in
behind the wheel and headed out of the earthen driveway. “You sneeeeeky lil
self you,” he sang to his
dog. “How’d you get all that fur stuck all over your sneaky lil nosey?” Amy just turned her head toward him, eyeball to
eyeball, as if she were sending a message: ‘Try talking to the gas pedal.’ She
licked his face, and down the old highway they rode, straight to White’s Bar.
The choicest fishing holes in the river were Hell Hole, and at White’s Bar, and
Shanan was familiar with the finest of them.
WITHOUT A MOMENT’S DELAY, Cathy wrapped dexterous fingers hastily around her
fishing pole, leaped agilely from the station wagon, and began hurrying upriver
from the Bar, where she favored her luck among the jutting river boulders.
Shanan, on the contrary, and after yelling, “Honey! Keep your feet steady on
those boulders! They got the dam open again for the salmon, and the water’s
brutal!” favored a past-tested excellent and sandy spot just west of the
enormous ledge of exposed bedrock and beat a direct path to that part of the
shoreline. Amy, smiling in the run, peering back over her shoulder toward
daddy, running ahead and sidestepping nimbly, dodged brush and trees as she
pawed her way over loose cobbles and gravels. Grabbing a stick with her mouth,
she teased Shanan as they scurried to the river. He threw it about seventy-six
miles, for he had serious fishing to do, and Anxiety was accompanying his
hunger as he reached the bank of the swift-rolling Trinity.
Snapping a red-tipped Super-Duper
fishing lure onto his line, he paused, holding the upper shaft of his pole between his clasped hands, the butt resting on the sand at his feet. “Please,
dear Lord and dear God,” he prayed, “we’re so hungry, and we really do need a frying pan full of fish tonight.
Please help us fill our plates. Thank you,
Jesus. Amen.”
He raised his pole silently
into the air above his head. On his first cast, the line jerked as fast as the
lure hit the water, and he reeled
in a baby trout. “Durn near a minner! Sheesh!” he humored to
the fish. “Did you tell your mommy you were going for a swim?”
Shanan’s worldly mind ruled, and
judging this trout just a wee undersized, he tossed it back into the
river. “I’ll get you next year,” he quipped conventionally as he threw
his angle in search for a more impressive supper.
Sixty-plus prayer-accompanied
casts had spun themselves out from rod and reel, with no finny returns
whatsoever, when a flash cognizance suddenly launched him into shock-factor
ten, flipping him into a virtual panic. Throwing his pole quickly behind him and against a sloping bank of sand, he
joined his hands together tightly, and crushed
his eyelids shut.
“Oh…dear Lord…oh dear God.
Oh…my God! Please, God! Please forgive me,” he prayed. “I’m so dumb. You gave
me a fish on my first cast, and I threw her back. I prayed for that fish! Oh,
Jesus Lord, I threw back the first fish you gave me! God, I’m sorry!” he bawled. “Am I a bloomin’ idiot? You gave me what I asked
for, and I wasn’t satisfied…!”
This mortal, now veiled in
unconquerable falling tears, pleaded for tender mercy from the Almighty on
high. The warming sun had escaped completely behind the lofty,
purple majesties; abrupt dusk and the air
suddenly breezed their persuasions from a far colder realm; darkness was painting the eminent firs in
their height; and a shriveling stomach was
crying piteously for benevolence.
In a wretched straggle, he
retrieved his pole from off the indifferent ground, and began casting its line sorrowfully into the tumbling whispers of the Trinity. His humbled immodesty
was no longer strong enough to support his head, it nodded in the task, and his
ears had all but closed to the cool environment.
SHANAN SPIED CATHY,
from the corners of his vigilant eyes. She was walking speedily toward him,
guiding her steps carefully across the
massive lane of bedrock. Amy eagerly wagged her tail and, with a big
smile, greeted Cathy.
“How’d you do?” Shanan
hollered as she approached.
“Zip! How’d you do?”
“Thirteen!”
While driving back to the trailer, he raved and raved excitedly,
describing his entire experience: the baby fish he threw back, the praying. “And after I prayed, you know the
number of casts I had to make
to get these thirteen fish?” —Five fish was the legal limit—Cathy just sat with her elbow resting upon the window’s lower trim. “Fifteen!” he exploded.
“Thirteen fish in fifteen casts! The same
number as the apostles, I think. Is this awesome?” Shortly after the hungry pair and Amy—who was
always hungry—had arrived
home, the well-seasoned cast-iron frying pan
found itself filled with the freshest of mouthwatering trout; and four boiled potatoes were now
sitting beside the fish. Shanan had gone to a
neighbor and mooched the taters, but was exceedingly thrilled he had not
asked the Lord for help in
landing a job, only to reject a broom.
†