We paused. We’d reached a fork in our trail. The Shelburne family offshoot tangled with other offshoots of the main blue lead and there were two paths to take us where we needed to go.
Walter said, “Which way?”
“The fastest way,” Shelburne said, taking the high path.
I fell in.
Walter, behind me, muttered something.
Wanted to avoid this, I thought he’d said.
I turned.
He waved me onward.
I figured I knew what lay ahead.
The trail began to descend and in another fifteen minutes we found ourselves funneled onto a narrow path that traversed a steep slope. We were yet again closed in by the woods. It was easy going, gentle hiking, but my antennae were now tuned to Walter and I was hiking brittle. We penetrated a scented grove of cedar and Doug fir and a thicket of manzanita, in which anyone might have hidden, and then we came upon a wide gully that exposed a pitch of cross-bedded gravelly sandstone, upon which my boots slipped, shotgunning gravel.
“Careful,” Shelburne called, ahead of me.
“Careful,” I called to Walter, behind me.
Henry hadn’t called careful when he’d accidentally kicked rocks off the ledge. If it had been Henry, and not a squirrel.
The trail twisted out of the woods.
The trail bent sharply and took us to a precipice that gave a view of what lay below.
I halted. Slayed.
I’d seen it mapped, on paper an elliptic of dotted pale pink against a field of green, but the map was utterly two-dimensional. Walter knew it by experience. He’d been here once before. Why hadn’t he warned me? Why hadn’t he said, you’re going to have to brace yourself?
Because a warning was not enough.
There were no words for what I saw down below. I simply had no words.
7
Finally, words did come to mind.
Catastrophic event.
Those are the words geologists use for earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, floods.
There had freaking well been a catastrophic event here only you couldn’t lay it at the feet of Mother Nature.
Walter asked Shelburne, “Is this the way your father took you?”
“Yes. It’s in my grandfather’s letters. It’s a bloody monument. It’s mining on the grand scale. It’s what the great bullshitter called the void.”
Walter grunted. “It’s what’s left after taking out a mountain.”
I stared into the monumental hole. “How much did they take out?”
“Four millions bucks in gold,” Shelburne said.
“I meant, how much of the mountain?”
“Forty million cubic yards.”
Walter said, “You know your numbers.”
Shelburne shrugged. “I’m a numbers guy.”
I stared down into the great pit, trying to corral it with numbers. “How big is it?”
“Mile long, half-mile wide,” he said. “I learned this shit in my teens. Hydraulic mining. How they did it. The dudes had to get down through six hundred feet of compacted gravel to reach the holy grail. Built forty miles of canals to bring enough water to feed the cannons. Eight cannons, twenty-four hours per day, firing sixteen thousand gallons of water per minute to ream out the mountain. Ridiculous name, though. I’d never green-light a project with that name. They called it the diggins. No third g. Just the folksy diggins.”
Of course they did, I thought. They would not have called it a catastrophic event.
Walter had picked up a chunk of andesite breccia and was examining it like it was the Rosetta Stone.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement on the cliff tops on the opposite rim. I turned to fully look. Nothing. Maybe a hiker, now absorbed by the trees.
“In the end,” Walter said, “it was mined to extinction.” He tossed the chunk of andesite into the void.
I watched the rock fall. Into the abyss where a mountain had been. The great pit was shadowed now, clouds moving overhead, shapes moving down below. The wind picked up. For a moment I thought I glimpsed something other than a shadow moving down there but maybe it was just the wind moving the vegetation. I caught that odd odor again, carried on the wind.
Walter said, “What did Henry make of it?”
“A big playground. Fantasyland.”
Fantasyland. I could not stop looking. And what was empty, nothing — a void — became strangely beautiful. Where the mountain had been washed away, the ancient gravel beds were exposed in the cut cliff walls, layered like a summer cake in yellow and red and white and orange, eroded here and there into spires and fluted hoodoos. It had a fantastical monstrous beauty.
Walter said, “So it’s likely Henry came this way, this time?”
“Beyond likely.”
“And from here…”
Shelburne jerked a thumb. “Down there.”
Shadows flickered, down there.
I said, “Hey guys, I think there’s somebody down there right now.”
“Henry!” Robert Shelburne’s shout echoed.
All of a sudden thunder sounded, in the distance, but there was no other reply.
“I just caught a glimpse,” I said. “Could have been a pack.”
“Backpack?” Shelburne asked. “Day pack?”
“I’d say day pack.”
“Then he has made camp. Then he is tracking.”
“If it was a pack,” I said. “It was moving in that willow jungle down there.”
Walter asked, “Could it have been an animal?”
“It was brown.” Brown deer, brown bear. Too big for a squirrel. “Could have been.”
“Henry!” Shelburne shouted again.
No answer. No discernible movement.
Come out come out wherever you are.
We started our descent into the pit on another of Robert Shelburne’s unmapped trails. Hardly a trail at all but it was the most direct way down.
The soil was too sandy to hold footprints. If there were any recent scuff-marks, Shelburne, in front, was scuffing them into oblivion.
We descended single-file, Shelburne then me then Walter.
Now and then, when I could safely take my eyes off the treacherous trail, I scanned the landscape below. Nothing. The lower we got, the more limited the long view became.
I shifted my focus to the near view, right under my nose. The trail was so narrow I kept brushing against cliff walls and acquired a coating of dirt. The walls told the story, without the romance. Volcanic andesite breccia capped layers of Eocene river gravels, which were interbedded with sand and clay.
Shelburne said, over his shoulder, “My dad called these bastard gravels.”
Walter, behind me, said, “All the way down. And then the good stuff’s buried.”
Yeah, I got it. No holy grail awaiting us down there, because the basal blue lead, laid down upon bedrock, was now buried beneath the tailings and landslides in the bottom of the pit. Any blue gravel that happened to crop out would have been oxidized into reddish rusty rock.
Would have been mined to extinction.
The Shelburne family offshoot, according to the map, zigzagged through this neighborhood.
What I did see, once again, was a flash of something brown, off in the far side of the pit. And then, deer-like, it bolted. And then Shelburne shouted Henry and a clap of thunder came in reply and the wind picked up and a few fat raindrops fell.
And then ceased.
We continued down the trail.
Alice hiking down into the rabbit hole.
8
Five hundred feet down, we bottomed out.
If I had not known a mountain once stood here I would not have known this was a manufactured landscape.