“It’s a gold mine,” he said.
“A gold mine gold mine?”
“Yeah. I got this picture of my great grandparents hikin’ up there. They took it back in the 1920’s, 1930’s.”
My friend, Tern, looked up the name of this gold mine on Encarta online, and sure enough, the coordinates showed up. He patched them into his Garmin, and we followed them all the way to the adit. Up mountain roads, up mountain trails through blue spruce and lodge pole pines. Past the ruins of old stamp mills and mineworks. Following a stream up above treeline. Over a pass. Down through slick mud, skirting snowfields still leaking sheetwash in mid-July. It was good snowpack, 170% of average.
We navigated boulder fields, crossed muddy creeks, and scrambled up steep talus slopes.
“Go left,” Tern would say. “Now go right.” “Just a little to the left.” “This way. Should see it just along that cliff up over there.”
I was dubious.
But then, there it wasn’t until it was: the small, square adit, a black archway painted into the yellow cliff face studded with sharply hewn basalts that seemed cut by the same stone mason who hewed the Giant’s Causeway, the gold and ebon tumbled with iron red boulders.
We waded through middens of glass and rusted metal — jars, bottles, cans, nails, the shattered remnants of a cast iron stove made in Belleville, Illinois. The air muttered out dank and stony, from a surprisingly cool Hadean world.
It didn’t take long for Tern to slosh in through the cold standing water that trickled down through the ceiling from seeps in the mountain high above, allowing Kelly green algae to sway like maidenhair in the cold clear water between the cut wall slabs that stretched from our crowns to our soggy boots.
He stopped and craned his head out of the shadows. “You comin’?”
I stepped in after him, following the tracks for the rail cart, which arced into the tunnel in the parallel way rails are bound to do, about 18 inches apart, skew lines erupting from the mine portal out into the day world of sun and blue and cloud swirling in the soup of the mountain basin. As I stepped farther in, my eyes adjusted to the black space, and made out a wooden ore cart leaning to one side. Tern stepped carefully around it.
“Tern, you sure this is safe?”
“Look at the ceiling, then look at the floor,” he replied in his gentle drawl. Tern worked as a reliability engineer in the coal mines. He’d grown up at the base of these mountains, His family had raised cattle and hunted in these mountains for generations. “There’s no rockfall on the floor. It’s structurally safe.”
The ceiling was chiseled flat. Stoping, they called it when you reached a room higher and wider than the 6′ x 4′ drift that led deeper into the mountain, which I’m not going to name. “Maybe, no one’s worked this here since it was mined,” he explained, his voice a little hollowed by the long drift.
“When was that?”
“Judgin’ from the square-head nails out there from the cabin roof, no later than the 1920’s. Mine probably played out by then. Could be as early as the 1890’s, 1900.” Through research, he later discovered that the mine was excavated in the 1870’s.
He didn’t have a meter to detect damp: the poison carbon monoxide or nitrogen gas they used to use canaries for. “Other danger is unexploded dynamite,” he said.
But he treaded in carefully just the same, me following like a little boy. All he had to light the way was the blue light from his Garmin route finder. As the drift curved beyond the last of daylight, we reached a split, where the drift divided into a Y shape.
“Tern, I’m scared.”
“Most people would be, should be scared. I don’t think we should go any further.”
As we turned back and slumped toward the adit, the daylight returned, scouring the rough wall. The far side of the mountain basin, hued with forest, rusted talus and bolts of snow, returned to view; the familiar, comforting view of an outside, if not an upside world. We could see the sunlight, but couldn’t feel it on our skin, couldn’t be part of that world yet.
We should’ve had a rope, too,” Tern said. “In case a rockfall separated us.”
“Why?”
“If there’s no pull on the rope tied between us, the man on the wrong side of that collapse is dead. You untie the rope and leave,” he said.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within