Chapter 6
Every trip Sam made to Good Hope would involve another item of adornment for the cabin. A small table and chairs, some throw rugs, and the biggest item of all, a bunk bed. He needed Frank’s help for that one. It took three trips to get that darn thing hauled in there from the truck. The frame was knocked down and it wasn’t too hard to carry. It was easy enough to assemble, a few nuts and bolts. But the mattresses, those were a different story. At first, Sam and Frank figured manly men should be able to stack two mattresses over their heads and hike a mile with no problem. However, they soon found out that those mattresses had a mind of their own. If Sam and Frank wanted to go left the mattresses wanted to go right. They finally resigned themselves to the fact that they would have to make two trips.
After they got the second mattress into the cabin they just let go of it. It fell like a chopped tree onto the cabin floor.
“Hey Frank, look at that, no dust!”
“Yeah, those wives of ours are cleaning fools.”
Like two Olympic synchronized swimmers they both dove onto the soft support of the mattresses and just laid there exhausted from their mattress carrying marathon.
“Hey Frank.”
“Yeah Sam?”
“Are we dying or are we just pooped?”
“Sam, I’m too tired to poop, so I must be dying.”
“Dang it Frank, don’t make me laugh, it hurts too much.”
Well that had been a fun filled two years, exploring his claim, finding that hot spring with two pools of warm clear water. The hot springs were perfect for a nice leisurely bath to get the mountain dust and grime off and to soak away the aches and pains of old age. Nearby, down the mountain below the warm springs was a big cave that was always about 74 degrees year round, rain or shine, sun or snow. Sam theorized that the spring must have had something to do with the temperature of the cave. The walls on one side of the cave were warm to the touch and the walls on the other side of the cave were cool.
He even thought about the possibility of making that his winter home, but quickly abandoned that idea when he found the cave was populated with bats, and enough bat doo to fertilize all the desert around the suburb of Desert Rose. Sam often wondered what ghastly experiment had gone awry when God ended up making bats; hideous little vermin. Logically he knew they were the reason that his mountain resort was relatively bug free, but emotionally he knew they were going to find a way into his cabin some night and suck the blood right out of his body. “YUK!” It gave him the shivers every time he thought about it.
Those were the fun times! The five years since he had moved there after Mary’s death had gotten increasingly more difficult with each year.
The first year was pretty productive, gold wise. He’d usually average an ounce a week of nice nuggets and some little stuff. He could have gotten more, but he didn’t feel pressured to metal detect every day, like he did when he just visited for a weekend. Billy, true to his word, would buy the nuggets Sam wanted to sell him. Sam even dropped his price to $8 a gram. Sam wouldn’t always take cash, many times he just told Billy to credit his account at the general store. The general store and the gas station were the only places he ever spent money anyway, so it wasn’t as if he needed much cash.
That first year was filled with metal detecting, sluicing, reading, exploring, and whittlin’. After all you couldn’t be a real mountain man unless you knew how to carve animals and the like out of pieces of wood. And he was teaching himself to play the harmonica. In the evenings, Sam would take up residence outside his cabin sitting on a porch swing that he had made himself. He’d pick out the notes one by one to “Through the Years”, it was, after all, “their” song, and trying to play it somehow made him still feel connected. It wasn’t long before he had mastered “their” song, and every night, just after dinner, the creatures of the forest were treated to the most beautiful harmonica rendition of “Through the Years” that they had probably ever heard. The birds even seemed to sing along with the melody.
Playing that song each evening was Sam’s way of letting Mary know, that she was still part of his soul, and always on his mind.
As the years came and went, so did the gold. It was getting so he could barely find 5 grams a week. He had run up a debt of over $500 at the General Store. Billy kept buying whatever nuggets Sam found, but Sam couldn’t help but notice Billy was getting quite a display case full of nuggets.
“You sure you need more nuggets Billy? It don’t look like sales have been too great by looking at your inventory here.”
“Oh, no, I’ll take all you got.” Billy said with feigned enthusiasm. “As soon as vacation season comes around and those tour buses start droppin’ in with my customers, those nuggets will fly out of here.”
“Well OK, as long as I’m not overloading you.”
Sam couldn’t help but notice that Ellen was rolling her eyes when Billy was talking about “nuggets flying out of here.”
The metal detector had died a few years back, and whatever disease it had, his truck caught too because it died soon after. Sam had to resort to panning for little flakes of gold and a little nugget now and then. With his metal detector out of commission he wasn’t finding enough gold to afford to get his detector or his truck fixed. When he needed to go to town he’d just walk the four miles out of the timber to the highway and catch a ride into Good Hope. Sam had been around those parts long enough that most everyone knew him. Those that really knew him, thought well of the generous old mountain prospector who always bought hard candy at the general store to give to the town’s children. Those people outside of Good Hope that only “knew of him”, just considered him some crazy old hermit.
Billy had told Sam whenever he needed something to just power his generator up, and get on the CB radio and give him a call and he would bring supplies up to him. When Billy was ready to leave the store he’d call Sam and let him know. That gave Sam enough time to walk down from his cabin and meet Billy at the truck. Or Billy would just leave the stuff in the bed of the broke down pick up truck and close the shell to keep the animals out.
When it was in the dead of winter that CB radio was Sam’s only life line. If Billy didn’t hear from Sam each day, Billy would hop on his snow mobile and take a run up to Sam’s cabin to make sure everything was OK. Everything was always OK, when he went to check, with the exception that once Sam couldn’t get the generator to start because it needed a new spark plug, and another time, a wire had shorted out in the microphone on the CB. Both times, Billy came to the rescue. He analyzed the crisis, and zoomed off across the snow covered mountain side to return in less than an hour with whatever was needed to get Sam back in business. Billy would also bring the letters that came every two weeks from Sally and Frank. The letters were always full of news and included pictures of Jessica. Boy was she ever getting big. Sam had never been back to Desert Rose since he had left five years before.
According to Sally’s letters, Frank had been really doing well at the law firm. He now headed up their mergers and acquisitions division. Frank was no dummy when it came to playing the stock market either. His hard work had been paying off. He and Sally had built a big new two story home with five bedrooms. Sally said her and Frank wanted a big ol’ fashion Catholic family. “Daddy, Frank and I are going to have so many little kids running around here people will think we’re Mormons!” Sam laughed at that one. In one of Sally’s letters she sent pictures of the new house and a beautiful little two story guest house with a balcony situated out in the back by the pool. It had a wood sign on it that said, “Grandpa’s Place.” There was always the plea from Sally for Sam to come home where he belonged. “Daddy, Frank even had your own little place built out back. Jessie helped Frank make the sign.”
Sam would write back and tell them he was fine and he was just way too busy to come back for a visit. The truth was, he was too embarrassed to tell them he didn’t even have a car that ran anymore. Finally, in one of the letters he wrote to Sally and Frank he said, “I’ll make you kids a deal. Sally, you know that buckskin pouch you bought me for my birthday a long time ago, the one you told me you got so I’d have something to keep my gold in? Well when I get that pouch filled up with gold then I’ll come back for a visit.” That seemed to quiet Sally down and she hardly ever asked when Sam was coming to live with them in her letters anymore, she’d just write, “How full is that pouch getting?” Sam had once wrote in reply that the fullest that pouch ever got was when he would put it under the tree at Christmas, and the next morning it was always full of coal. That really wasn’t the whole truth. He did put it under the tree each Christmas, just in case, but when morning came it never had coal in it, it never had anything in it. It was just as Sam had suspected. There was no God, and no Santa either.