As I walk Along

I muse about the responses I received,
on and off blog,
about my plight and quest ...
enough though to give me confidence
to make up a story ...

Me and Will

I didn’t drive yet, but knew a lot about cars, which is why Will let me wash his 1938 Buick that didn’t need it. He wouldn’t let me wash his 1953 Roadster, which did need it – said he had to do that himself. So I learned a bit about people. Truth is, I seemed to be the only kid around who liked to listen to the stories old folk tell – and didn’t care much if I could tell which were true and which were funnin’. He was 93 at the time and still driving. He had the first drivers license in the State of Nevada in 1906 and had never had an accident up till 1958 – can’t tell about tomorrow.

His wife ‘Misses’ was a tad younger and didn’t tell many stories – just made things; scarves, doilies, mittens. These told stories in a different way, I guess, but it took me years to realize it. Instead, she paid me to do simple chores and tell her stories. Her’s were real tasks, though – washing low windows and high shelves beyond her reach. And sweeping the basement. That I would have done for free just for the company of wonderful things stored there. I could write a book about ‘em – maybe I will. Anyway, it surprised me a bit when she asked if I would come to the sewing room after Will had left for the store. She made special request – best in my life maybe, leastwise at fourteen. I just touched her hand and left.

I told my parents what I was going to do – didn’t ask. I arranged for my brother to handle my paper route and paid in advance. Then, Tuesday morning at 5:30AM, Will got into his Roadster preparing to leave on a trip. I got in beside him. He stared a bit, but didn’t say anything, then glanced at the kitchen window. She was there. We drove off, alone on the street. “I was wondering why she finally trusted me to go,” he stated firmly. Afraid I’d fall in a hole and lie helpless, I guess. Never had a broken bone I couldn’t splint. We’ll stop for pancakes in ‘bout an hour.” And that’s how I came to be with Will, and to be the one with the secret.

I’ll skip over all the stories about ‘what used to be in that building’, and ‘the trouble with this pass before they paved it’ sort of thing, and whittle down to those that relate to the ‘Lens’. Maybe I’m leaving the best part out, but this is a short story, after all. Back in the 1890’s, Will was a prospector and got involved in a couple of important digs. In ’98 outside of Goldfield, he and a friend ‘pick and shoveled’ sixteen hours a day for three months with nothing but beans, jackrabbit, and water cress. They pulled in three wagons of fine ore and shared more than a million dollars – back when a dollar bought a suit of cloths. Two years later he had little left, mostly from grub-staking friends. Said he had no need for hard money except to help folks. Then he got married and decided to take a regular job. Everyone respected him, and at six two by 230 he was an ideal foreman. There was a new gold vein being opened up – a promising mother load. Overnight about 6,000 men were camping under juniper brush ready to work continuous twelve on twelve off shifts in the tunnels. No machinery, no safety equipment, no excuses. They worked on solid rock with carbide lamps of their heads. Old Will chanted the rhythm of the mine, “whang, twist, step, set.” Inch by inch, groan by groan they’d drive the drills six feet in for blasting – except when they hit the green! The drill would vanish with the ‘whang’, while ‘hammer’ and ‘set’ collided in warning shout. The green was soft, and sticky and rankled in the lunges when you breathed. No one liked the green.

It was an amazement how Will could drive and play three different characters at once – take me back to a time fifty years gone – to a place drawing closer every minute. He was returning to the mines and the green. Turns out, most of Will’s job was supervising construction of special scaffolding around the soft layers of gray-green deposits. Will knew it was copper ore and had it assayed for poisonous impurities – low grade, worthless and dangerous. Thousand year old water sometimes leached out onto the floor to cause slips and falls. Everyone cursed the green – all twenty six shafts had them – bad luck to find them weaving through the rich quartz ore. Two and a half years and it was done. Hundreds of millions of dollars of gold taken, tunnels boarded up – a ghost town over night. Richer than most, quickly forgotten. Except by Will.

Will had to wait fifty years because old claims were set by time, some 50, some 75 years. New laws required yearly working of a claim or forfeit. Not these – ‘grandfathered’ in. It didn’t matter that Will didn’t want the gold still hidden there. During the years he researched the claims and knew when each would expire. He placed the sample bottles from the twenty-six shafts like chess pieces on a gigantic board, and drew an imagined map of the vein of copper resting there. He described it as a lens, thicker in some places than others, but always present, “A little longer than round,” he said. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He chatted about it as something he could hold in his hand and stroke – like a clam shell maybe. “’Course, I don’t know how big she really is,” he laughed. Maybe you can tell me.

That afternoon he scrapped away piled sand from hidden boards. No one watched – no footsteps had passed by for years, telling from the rain drop pocked sand. “Six should be enough,” he said, and we went into fearsome maws of lonely memories. I wasn’t afraid, exactly, but felt a chill at the thought of being buried alive and no one knowing – you understand. Sometimes we went down thirty feet – sometime a hundred. Each time we found the green, a ribbon winding through every level and angle – sometimes only a few feet high, sometimes fifty feet or more on several levels. Will had a map with little ‘X’s on it. We went down in eight holes in all, confirming and adding to his sketch. In the four mines around the edge the vein was high – extending into imagination alone. We covered the holes back up and drove back to a small town and single room hotel. Food was good though. He didn’t talk much that night.

Next morning we walked forever – pacing from one rock pile to another, picking up old tobacco cans along the way. On six points he stuffed some papers into the cans and we buried them with boulders. After lunch we drove to some distant points and he placed four more. In town, he had some papers witnessed and left at the BLM office. We started back towards home, but he stopped and got out to look at the mountain range where the ‘Lens’ was resting. “Just once,” he whispered, “I wanted to be the richest man on earth.” On the way home he told me the rest.

“There is no way to get to that ore right now,” he chuckled. “Too expensive to remove the overbear and it’s too low grade from tunnel mining. It’s going to have to be an open pit like over at Ruth, except that the part I staked is 20% bigger and 4% richer. I could only stake 600 feet beyond what I could see – that’s ‘vein’ law. Copper is ‘bout eighty cents a pound right now – just doesn’t balance out, especially since there is no water here. Someday that price is going to climb – someday there’s going to be a need for that copper lens. I won’t see it – maybe you will. Hope you see these riches do some good.”

I didn’t think much of it, really – just glad to be along. Will died the next year and I am now three thousand miles away. But I’ve done some checking. The Ruth pit produced 4.5 billion pounds of refined copper, plus as much in other ores. If Will’s estimates are right, the Lens holds more than six billion pounds – maybe a lot more. I reach out in mind and spirit and see Will holding that Copper Lens in his hands – a lot bigger – just a giant shield to ward against pain and hunger. Copper is approaching $4.00 per pound. Recon Will might have been the world’s first trillionaire. At least his heart was that big.

I’ve started putting some ‘X’s on a napkin. “Yes, Will,” I remember where it is.