They went and got a short handled hoe, and had some coffee. Syd grabbed a pack, and put in some water and a first aid kit that was sitting around. She put some granola bars in the pocket on one side, and put it on.
They walked all over the place, finding some nice pincushions and barrels. They took pics with cell phones, and chopped weeds from around the nice cacti. Syd worried some pretty large sagebrush out of the ground to let the nice cacti grow better. They picked up some rocks. In one spot, there was an inexplicable splatter of garnet. They picked those up, Frank reminding Syd that the Barkers would probably polish them for them. Syd dragged the little hoe around, and pulled out a beautiful fist sized stone. They put the location on gps with the cell phones. Perhaps Emily would come calling to see if there was a mother lode. Garnet is not very valuable, but it’s nice, and should be more admired than it is.
Our intrepid wanderers found a little tip of a quartz rock sticking out of the ground. Some rock hounds call that an ear. Frank picked it up, and looked at it, hoping to find some nice quartz crystals. The quartz was all right, but what made it special was not the quality of the crystals, but the fact that they had wire gold in them.
“Look at this, Syd!”
“Wire gold. If you have more, you can have the Barkers sell it. The gold is worth something like $1500 an ounce, but a rock like this, with a tenth of a gram of gold, is worth much more than the gold that is in it.”
Frank dug a little with the small hoe, and hit a larger rock. “Record this location, Syd.”
“Done that.”
Frank opened the ground around the larger rock, and Syd grabbed it and started pulling. It came out of the ground. It was a lovely mass of quartz crystals in varying colors with wire gold in them. “Oh, my, Syd. This is a museum piece.”
They put it in Syd’s pack, and filled in the hole, carefully making it look as undisturbed as possible. They went back to the house and washed it off. It was better than they had thought it might be. Syd called someone she knew, and had the Barkers checked out. They came back fine. The databases, dear reader, that Syd can get on are a little more inclusive than being Googled. Syd will have your grades from third grade, your great grandfather’s citizenship, and a lot of other things she shouldn’t be able to get, but can.
“I figured to let you keep that first rock, but maybe we can use it to test the waters.”
“No big deal. I do want one of them, but I think you will have more, so.”
They looked at the big one. “Frank, this one has to be worth like $100,000 or something.”
“I’m going to hide it for now.”
“You should put it in a safe deposit box.”
“Probably will not fit.”
“You could loan it to a museum, but I don’t know if they will keep your name secret.”
“I’ll find out. In the meantime, we can show your rock to the Barkers?”
“Sell it if you want. We’ll probably find another, and I don’t need mineral specimens anyway.
“07 Gold”
The drums arrived on time, and a few got filled before the Barkers arrived. The Barkers had gotten a nifty tool for the forklift that could grab a drum. Frank asked them into the study.
“We found this a couple of days ago, Les. This is top secret.”
He showed them the little rock.
“$200 to $800 retail. I can sell this kind of stuff for you. But you will find a bigger one that we will not speak of. You can auction at Roberts & Dale. Mesa Armored will take things to the auction house. Pickup is expensive. What you do is you find out when they are coming to your local bank. Then they will call you and say something like ‘this is Mike. Want to meet me for coffee at 3:45 ?’”
Sally gave him a slip of paper with phone numbers and email and all.
“One last thing before we load, Les. Could there be gold in the settling pond?”
“There is. But what you want to know is if there is enough to be worth recovering.”
They went out to the pond, Les holding his pan casually. He scooped up some slop from the sorter, and sat at the pond panning it out. He came over to Frank with the pan. He showed Frank a stripe of color. “This is good. You should start recovering it. You can dig another settling pond, and then put this one through a separator to the second one. The machine will cost $7,000 used. I can get one for you. Maybe we will talk him down to $6,000. You could have a new one for 14 or 16.”
Frank called Jan. “Could you come over for a few?”
Jan came in from the back. “What’s up, Frank?”
“Gold. Buy a $6000 machine, take half of what it brings up.”
“What will it bring up?”
Frank showed her the pan.
“Les got this in one panning of the sludge.”
“Is it worth the machine, Les?”
“Very easily. I wonder why Frank is offering you so much.”
“Jan sold me this hill cheap. We’re friends. I don’t have time to mess with this gold thing. She has a kid to send to college. A niece’s daughter. I have too much to do. I would rather get something without working than some more things I need to do.”
“Jan, would you like to talk to the guy with the gold separator?”
“No, you can do that. Les, if we put it alongside the sorter, will it look like part of the sorter system?”
“It would, especially with a direct intake on the sorter waste line, which is the way they usually use them.”
“How often do they need to be serviced?”
“Daily for the gold, weekly for lube and all.”
“I’m in. If it doesn’t work, you will take it back?”
“We will, but it will work.”
It certainly did. Jan was taking about an ounce a month out of the separator. The machine was grossing $1500 a month. Costs were $100 or so. She took her product to the bank every few days when she went to town, and put it in a safe deposit box. Every so often, she would wait for the armored car to visit, and hand the guys a box.
Frank and Syd dug out their pocket of stuff, and put it all in the back of a pickup. It didn’t turn out to be a very large vein, but Syd ended up with a real nice multicolored quartz crystal block with wire gold in it, which she had to insure for 9k, and Frank put a few little pieces around the house that he should probably have insured, but didn’t. The biggest piece that came out of their little find sold at Roberts & Dale for 19k. The IRS told him how to save it for retirement. At a stockholders’ meeting, the minor shareholders agreed to a dividend, and took theirs as a specimen. Al Goodman recommended a 401(k) provider, and it all got done.
Jeremy and Shelly had a baby, and named her Karen. Jan and Frank put some gold money into an annuity for Karen that would pay for everything from diapers to a retirement home. Money could be added any time. Shelly could decide they were all right for the month, and have the check added to the fund or, sell some stuff on eBay, and pay pal the money to the insurance company. The company’s computer would update Karen’s life expectancy and the expected return on investments, and add the result to her monthly check. Shelly had it set not to issue checks. She liked looking at the notices in the system telling her that Karen was now eligible to draw so many cents more per month.
Frank started taking his share of the gold and putting it in 8 oz Mason jars in a safe deposit box. His understanding was that it was not taxable until the value was ‘realized’ just as a quarry does not pay income taxes on rock piles, but on rocks sold. Nobody knew it was in the box anyway, so if he was wrong, not much could happen. He figured on taking it as income when it was sold.
He kept thinking about how they did nothing to capture nuggets over 3/8 inch. He showed Jeremy and Shelly some small nuggets, and alerted them to the possibility of large ones in the grades above 3/8, especially the ¾ clear. If they found one, they could show it to Frank and keep it. If they found a bunch, there would be some sort of finder’s fee thing. In typical Frank fashion, he didn’t know what he would do, but while Frank knew he had not prepared for every contingency, most people think they have it all plotted out, and find out later they didn’t.
The second planting of cantaloupes was in, and the third was coming along. Jeremy and Shelly had sold a lot of stuff over the last few months, and the gang had eaten watermelon until they didn’t want to look at them. Lots of seeds had been saved. Some of the seeds were saved out of sight. Someone wanted those seeds and Frank didn’t want to know who it was. It had been a real good year for America’s #2 cash crop as it had been for #1:corn. Massive quantities of crop #2 were set aside with care for the future needs of a grateful public. Organized crime, of course, made a lot on the trade, as did corrupt politicians and so. Not since prohibition put Al Capone in business have criminals had the opportunities they do today.
Frank fed the sorter, and ran the lake water feed faster than needed for dust control, keeping Jan’s separator working. He took sludge out of the original settling pond and fed it back. The original settling pond now only got what did not go into the separator when the flow was too high. He found some more big rocks that were good, and lots that were worthless. The sorted but not selected piles got bigger.
Jeremy and Shelly opened the rolling door and asked for some sorted but not selected. Frank piled some in. They closed the rolling door and started selecting.
Jan and Melody came, and Frank went in to see if they were going to throw pots. They were trying, and Frank sat across from each of them, calling for an increase or decrease in speed, and showing them how to push the clay where they wanted it. “Strong hands help, but it’s a lot more than that. You push, not ride the waves. Take control of the clay. Run your fingers on the clay while I shape it. Look at my hands, feel with your own. Gently. Don’t try to move it, just feel. Feel how it’s thick at the bottom. Now feel it gently while I turn that thickness into more height. Good pottery isn’t very thick. There is no need for it to be. If you want something strong, come back to the machine shop, and we’ll turn it out of high carbon steel.”
Frank went to the study and printed the labels for the new orders. He came out and asked Jeremy and Shelly what could be filled by the time the Post Office closed. They thought they could run them all, so Frank got out of their way hoping they could.
He took Emily’s small bucket, an 18” one, into the shop He sandblasted it and set up to hard face it. Jan came in. “You’re going to hard face backhoe buckets while Rome burns?”
“I didn’t know Rome was burning.”
“Syd is going to New Mexico.”
“She has two sections next to her old buddy Dave Cale. Why shouldn’t she go there?”
“She’s unbalanced. Don’t you worry about that?”
“No. She’s my friend, she’s unbalanced. Everyone knows that. So.”
“Is this Dave Cale a good influence?”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t seem to know much.”
“I have an idea about Syd. Imagine that your mental time ran 10 times as fast as a normal person. You would blow away IQ tests, even though you were not actually smarter than other people. You would be bored all the time. You would be great in athletics, but they would bore you. You would read a novel in an hour. You might go out for the SEALS, and the fact they wanted to keep you out would only get you going. Then imagine when they try to get people to give up by depriving them of sleep, for one thing. You normally sleep 3 hours a night. They try to wear you down by making you run around all day. You run around every day. She told me once that BUDS training was ‘really easy’.”
“So I shouldn’t worry about her.”
“Everyone does. But there is nothing to be done.”
“I’m going to rake rocks pretty soon. On the pasture I lease from you, also.”
“That’s fine. What is the idea, that a rock mulch isn’t as good as bare dirt?”
“Well, we rip on the contour next, and then plant prairie short grasses.”
“Why are those better?”
Jan said, “These are native grasses. So you have the natural balance. Erosion resistance.”
“That’s all for the good. What we have now is whatever survived overgrazing for who knows how long. Did I tell you my latest idea?”
“I hesitate to ask.”
“A Koi pond near the patio. I will need to extend the lake water pipe line a few hundred feet to get to it. I can plumb it to allow using settling pond water, which I want to do, so I can seal it with muck. The Barkers are going to let me know when they go by the fish place. They will go from there to here in one rush if we ask for the koi. They want to look at them all.”
“How big would it be?”
“I’m thinking about 50 x 200 and 10 deep so it will not freeze.”
“Big time. But we could all sit around it and throw them bread. You could get some ducks, maybe. You could put some crayfish. Do you suck the fat?”
“Yes. Someone else can eat the tails.”
“Well, Mr. Coonass.”
They marked the area out with ashes. “Frank, this has got to be the coolest thing to have at your house.”
“Not everyone thinks so. I read a novel where the protagonist shows how much he loves his son by paving over a koi pond to make a basketball court.”
“That’s like taking a tape of Mozart and over writing it with a badly dubbed copy of a Rap album.”
“Tell it, sister.”
“I knew our broadcast media was crap, but the Philistines are writing our novels, too?”
“Come on in and let’s see the latest on Fox disinformation.”
They went in, and called Freddie and Jeremy. Fox news was now saying the roadblock had been manned by the FBI, which had stopped the killer with what Fox described as ‘an extreme long distance sniper rifle.’”
It was the best shot since the FBI killed an unarmed woman with her baby in her arms at Ruby Ridge.
Jan turned the TV off. “At least they didn’t prosecute whoever it was for shooting a serial killer who was trying to kill the cops when he got it.”
“You have a point. Nobody here questions the Fox story, OK?”
Nobody would.
Ned walked in to the tune of Sheryl Crowe’s ‘Superstar’.
Jan said “Frank is thinking of a large koi pond out from the deck where we sit.”
Ned said “cool.”
Jeremy suggested bluegill.
Frank asked, “You have any reason to think we can’t put them both in the same pond?”
Jeremy didn’t.
Shelly said “I think you should get some old telephone poles, and make a deck out into the pond, so if we were sitting there, it would be like we were on the water.”
Jan said “Floating dock.”
Frank said “It has to be, yes. I suppose bug zappers for lighting.”
Jeremy said, “That will feed a lot of fishes. Bugs that are just stunned or not even will fall in the water.”
Ned said “I have some paper patterns for benches that are curved to be comfortable. You just trace them and cut the line, put some 1 x 4 on it. Much better than straight line benches.”
“That’s great. We will make a cantilevered barbecue so it spills coals or something in the water, not on the dock.”
* * *
The next morning, Emily dug the koi pond and the trenches for the plumbing. Frank put in a deeper hole with forms in it. It was a viewing spot. He had the forms poured with concrete. There was a steel ladder hung from cast in bolts. When the concrete was dry, Frank brought in a 4x8 sheet of heavy plate glass. They put it in, bedded in some icky asphalt and glass wool stuff. Jeremy got the pipe, and they laid it together. They backfilled with fines that had already been through the separator. They topped it all with some 2” minus. They pumped sludge for a few hours, and sealed the bottom. Then they pumped the old settling tank. Jan watched, since it was her pump doing the work. Then they ran the sorter for the morning, spewing the muck into the koi pond. They shut that down, and sorted for the rest of the day, giving Jeremy and Shelly an immense backlog. When the water got to the top of the second settling pond, it passed a floating barrier, and ran very slightly downhill in the pipe to the koi pond. Frank called the Barkers, who got some fishes the next morning. They came in the afternoon with tiny koi, bluegill, crayfish, and mosquito fish. The fishes were put in their new home. A little shed was erected over the viewing area.
The new hardware for the forklift was very impressive. The operator could fold the forks up, and drive up to a drum. The gripper would grab the drum and it could be put on the flatbed. As if that were not enough, he could release the rotator on the gripper and that would allow him to pour the contents of the drum out with the forklift holding it for him.
Les looked at the rock bill and the fish bill, and decided it was close enough for him. Les and Sally asked how Jan’s new “environmental” equipment was working out. Frank said it was just fine.
“There is quite a demand for those yellow pebbles, even very small ones. So if you have some to sell, don’t let them go for metal price. I can get you much more.”
“You will be the first to hear,” Jan said.
Frank said, “If you want to sell them, Jan, we can just split the proceeds. Otherwise we can split the nuggets. We probably won’t have a lot.”
“Would you like to stay for dinner and park here, Les?”
“We would. I was trying to think of a polite way to ask, Frank.”
“Any time you are here, Les. There is a bathroom in the boat house down on the west, left side as you face the lake. You can get a key and use that, or the one in the house whenever you like.”
They went into the house, and found that Jeremy and Shelly had decided it would be enchilada night. They were just finishing up a bake pan of them and putting the foil over them to bake them.
Frank showed Les the boathouse key. “If you decide to park down there, take that key so you can use the bathroom. Keep all the gates closed. Jan has cattle running around down there.”
Jan said “Let’s go down on the new dock!”
Frank got some tequila, Jan got some glasses, and they all headed down to the new little floating dock.
“Ned, you and Jeremy made this?”
“Shelly too, and it isn’t finished, so be careful about splinters.”
Jeremy went to the house to turn on the lights. They were not yet wired as planned, just improvised. 4 big bug lights came on, all of them on telephone poles around the floating dock, supported by 2 x 8 supports spiked to the poles.
A large number of moths and such came to be put out of their misery.
“We’re going to wire it so they only come on if it’s dark, and only automatically if it is over 70 degrees. If you turn them on and forget them they will still shut off at first light.”
“Cool.”
Frank looked around. “Jan, why isn’t Melody here?”
“She thinks you are mad at her.”
“I’m not. I don’t even know why she would think that. Ask her over, please.”
Jan called. “He says he isn’t and does not know why you would think so. Come and get some enchiladas.”
She tuned into what Frank and Jeremy were talking about. “Jeremy, you can’t say it is non integrable because you can’t integrate it. It isn’t even discontinuous. Can you do it by parts?”
“No. Well, I can express it as parts.”
“So divide through by the cube root of z.”
“Can you integrate that part there?”
“Sure. By trig substitution.”
“And the rest?”
“By algebraic substitution.”
“Fact is, you knew how to solve it, but you let yourself get overwhelmed.”
Melody was looking over their shoulders.
Frank said, “It’s not even a hard integral. When you made these benches, you knew where you were going, and you didn’t let it bother you that at some point the slats would be on a different piece of wood. Why do you now give a damn if this integral sums up two completely different things?”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“If I want the volume of a screwdriver, you are going to tell me that?”
“No.”
Frank turned around. “Hi, Melody.” He sort of brushed her arm. “This is about something like, if you have a dresser you want to bring in, but the drawer handles hit the door jamb when you try to bring it in, what do you do?”
“Take the drawers out and bring them in separately.”
“You need the weight of the whole dresser.”
“Weigh the drawers and the dresser, and add it up.”
“Right.”
“Now we could, if Melody wants, discuss her problem.”
“Do it, Frank.”
“Melody thinks I don’t like her, which is wrong. And I don’t even know why she thinks that.”
“You called me a kid.”
“Ignoring the fact that I call Freddie a kid, even though he is 10 years older than me, what is wrong with being a kid? If this is embarrassing, we don’t need to do it here, now, or for that matter, at all.”
“No. We will do it right now. You said I was too young for you.”
“Actually, I said I was too old for you. What year were you born in, Melody?”
“1987.”
“The day you were born, I had already gotten a masters degree in computer science. I was writing code for the navy, and for my buddy Robert.”
“What difference does that make?”
“We come from different times. When I get too old for sex you will still be in your prime. It would be wrong for someone to ask his spouse to give up 25 years of her time as a young woman to be loyal to a man who hasn’t got it any more. I’ve been down lots of wrong roads before. If I was your age today, I would probably invite you to try the next one. But I am not. You deserve something I will not have. It would be bad enough if I had taken you to San Francisco to program computers. But to take you down a road that leads nowhere, no, that goes beyond just a bad move with your girl in tow.”
Freddie waved his hands. “Enough of this suffering and emotional pain. We are not here to get depressed. A new game, kids. Your most memorable moment with a wild bird.”
Jan got a shot of tequila. “I was getting ready to bait a hook. I was pretty little at the time. I had a shrimp in my hand. A seagull landed on my shoulder, ate the shrimp, and flew. I was astounded. We had lots more shrimp, so it was no problem, but what an audacious fellow he was.”
Frank said, “We were backpacking in the Cascade mountains in central Oregon. There is this bird called a camp robber jay, a relative, it seems, to the blue jay. They are dark grey. They were totally fearless, and would eat from our hands, off our hats, whatever. We were surrounded by birds. My friend is a bird freak, so it really did it for him.”
Freddie said, “I saw a great horned owl cruising around. I froze, didn’t move a bit so I could see him. He flew right over me, and he knew I was there. Then he was gone.”
Ned said, “I was a kid. This snake came close to me, and I got a stick to keep it away. A road runner came up and stood in front of me like a waiter ready to take an order. I got the stick in a loop on the snake and flicked him out, and the road runner gulped him down and headed on down the road. He was fast.”
Melody said, “I was sitting outside, and this stupid fat fly kept landing on me. I would shake my arm and it would leave, but then come right back. That must have happened 20 times. Then the fly landed, and a wren landed, ate the fly, and flew, all in a fraction of a second.”
Jeremy said, “This is probably mine and Shelly’s. We were in Louisiana, filleting speckled trout. I finish one, and I am just about to throw the carcass, and a pelican lands right there. So I toss the carcass to him, and he takes it, and flies off. Then when I finish the second one, here he comes again. We had a lot of specs, didn’t we, Shelly?”
“We did. Maybe not a limit, but lots. And every one we finished, he ate it.”
“Let’s move on to fish stories. We’ll start with Frank, who probably has a lot. An encounter with a wild fish.”
“How about a whale?”
“We are accepting whales at this time.”
“I was sport fishing at Fort Baker pier at the mouth of San Francisco Bay. A grey whale came in, and stayed about an hour, inside the pier, in 15 feet of water or so. Apparently feeding. There were guys fishing within 100 feet of him, but nobody bothered him.
Melody said, “I was in Louisiana, and sitting on a dock with my feet in the water. Suddenly hundreds of tiny mullets came. They nibbled on my feet. They didn’t hurt me. I guess they were eating dead skin and stuff. It was probably the only free pedicure I will ever get.”
Frank said, “You might do the same thing here. In a few days these fishes will be used to their new surroundings, they might do the same thing.”
Freddie said, “I was fishing for catfish at a Phantom lake in Texas. We were getting ready to leave, and stripping the bait off our rigs. I threw a chicken liver over the side, and a huge blue cat came up and ate it, and then went back down.”
Jan said, “I was in a boat with my grand dad. I wasn’t fishing, I was too little. So he was making a big deal of fishing, and I was eating a sandwich. I would peel off the crusts, which I have never liked, and throw them in. This big catfish followed us and ate all my bread crusts. I never told my gramps, who had this secret bait that had brake fluid in it.”
Jeremy said, “I was sitting on a dock because I was too small to go out on the boat. I was catching shiner perch that my dad and my uncle might use for bait. As I was reeling up, a big striper came and took my shiner, busted the line and all. I was upset because I didn’t have another sinker, and I could never tell my dad what had happened.”
“And back to Frank.”
“We used to fish stingrays commercially in Tomoles Bay, California. We were not legal, I suppose, but nobody cared. We were using 6/0 Penn Senator reels with 125# mono on them. We would place two anchors, and catch stingrays until the boat was overloaded, and then we brought it to a place where you could unload. We were selling to a Korean guy who kept us in beer and bait, and his kid who was like 12, would take the stingrays to his dad’s market.”
“One day, I got a bite, and the line just kept going out. My buddy poured water on the reel, and told me to tighten the drag all the way and restrain the spool with my thumbs. I did it, and the fish broke off. He said, ‘I didn’t think you could boat that one’.”
“The line was abraded for 20 feet. You tell me how that happened.”
Freddie said, “Let’s try two lies and one truth. You make three statements, and everyone guesses which one is true. Frank, can you start us off?”
“OK. Everyone knows Syd, so I will tell you three Syd stories. One: I have an un retouched picture of Syd standing on one hand on the top of the South Tower of the Golden Gate bridge. Two: Syd has stolen two ships and two helicopters. Three: She is an Admiral.”
The vote came in. Freddie couldn’t swallow the Gate Bridge story. Frank got a laptop, and showed everyone the pic that had caused our little Syd so much trouble. Jan led the main contingent that said she couldn’t possibly be an Admiral. Frank showed her being promoted by the President on the laptop. Jeremy was left to defend the ship stealing. “You did get close, Jeremy. A destroyer from the Iraqi navy, a freighter from the Medallin cartel, and a helicopter from a crime family. But just the one helicopter. That’s where we get you.”
Freddie went for it. I have met “Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, and Janis Joplin.”
Most of the vote said no to Elvis, with a few to Jimi, and nobody said Janis.
“Foxed you all. It’s Janis I never met.”
Ned took a roll. “I have met Martin Luther King, Ralph Nader and Bobby Kennedy.”