Chapter-- 

So we packed up the old horse Woolsey and started the trek over the mountain down to where we hoped we'd find gold. As a guest I couldn't say it outright but I believed all along it was a foolish crapshoot and we'd never find the gold in a thousand years. But the gift of it was the breaking of the rountine, the ability to see something else of the big country around us, and to get to know some of the members of the farm on better terms. Besides Rasputin there were five others including myself. Pete, Erich, Justine, and Bart. Justine was the "intuitionist" as Rasputin called her for her powers of knowing where the invisible things were. "She sat at a table and conjured up one of the caved in mines," he told me, "and we used it as a food storage."

Rasputin figured it would take three days before we reached the area Rattlesnake Dick had buried the gold. "We'll grid if off and make some decent searches using this metal detector hanging on the side of old Woolsey."

The first thing was to get to the mountain top what had a crude trail and the kindly creek running next to it. It took us four hours to make it and we stopped for awhile and brought out some food and drink. Rasputin was luunging against a log with his legs crossed and said to non one in partiuclar. "Whether we find it or not is not the point. It's all about getting there and getting back."

Pete laughed, "Yeah, the experience. It's almost as though we are going to the center of the Earth."

"You never know what opening we might find!"

Delight comes when acquaintences are transformed into comrades. And these were comrades as we went up the trail, swapping tales, cussing, laughing, pausing to eat and drink some poor old Rasputin huffing and puffing most of the time. Out there, away from everything men are who they are and you no longer fear them. They are funny and startled as though some day has descended to put them on a distant moon and all they are left with are a satchel of gestures to show their derision for the gods that put them there.

They kept telling Rasputin to shut up.

"We will fund a new hothouse with this loot. We'll give it to the women and they can buy new curtains for the place."

"Oh shut up."

"And in the end we will show the unbelievers that truth can be lived out among rational people."

"Shut up there!"

"Did any of you guys ever read Rosseau?"

"Shut the trap there."

"Do you know Thomas Jefferson knew Madame de Stael when she was a young woman?

"Who's talking all this shit?"

"He also knew Diderot. Think about it."

"It's our leader, the fearless one."

"And he fed Madison a lot of books on political science from Paris when Madison was working on the Constitution?"

"Oh, the owner. Ha. The owner speaks."

"You guys kill me. Yeah, I'm a regular guy treat me like it."

And then there would be long discussions about the women and who sort of thoughts and fantasies emerged. I found it odd that the men seemed to slightly hate the same females they seemed to need when around them.

Justine soaked it all in and didn't say anything but you could tell that she listened to what the men said about the other women and it registered something in her as though she now had an advantage. There was no doubt in my mind that she felt being out with the boys on their adventured gave her an in no other women had and she played it close and well, later describing the adventure in ways that I couldn't relate to but were entertaining to hear at any rate.

On the second day we found a meadow of sorts on the downside of the mountain and pitched our tents and made a fire. Justine got some ribs and corn and wrapped them and threw them on the fire while Rasputin brought out some red wine he'd tied up on the saddle of old Woolsley. It was a pretty night. We were looking for shooting stars. "You know it isn't what it appears to me. Someday we'll fly free through those spaces as though there's nothing to it. We have a very long time to figure it out or have it strike us like a bolt of lightening. Nothing tells me we want to stay on this planet, the rate we kill it off. And then we kill each other off. It has to be restlessness. We feel the limits now and it makes us onery."

"Maybe we fly through it already. Out of body you know."

"Oh, I know all about out of body. But those are premonitions of what could actually happen. Those are seeds to put a bee in the bonnet you know."

"Does it matter whether its dream or reality?"

"It will to those who see the sun die."

"Ah, it will be a vast entourage of flying spirits."

"Could be. Anoher couple of billion years. Sure. I have no problem with that. It will happen."

So we ate absorbing this thought. It was so pleasant to think about, even a bit eerie. As long as we could come back if we wanted to. I didn't say that but I wanted to. They were getting drunk and laughing like they didn't care one way or the other so I didn't want to expose my sincerity to them.

The food was good. It tasted important at night along the slope of the mountain. I ate slowly and listened to the weird conversations of these people who seemed, at times, out of their minds and then back deep into some sorrowful place. I thought to myself, "I know why they moved away. They could never survive in the city. Their imaginations are too large and generous for that. They were too wounded by slights and deviousness one encountered daily in the city.

In the morning we moved further down the mountain toward a pretty valley. The other side was neatly furrowed with rows of unidentifiable crop or crops. Someone said it was pot but that was rulled out. Then there was the suggestion is was grapes. "Too hot for grapes." This speculation and general admiration for the work that went into the furrowing occupied most of the conversation down the mountain. We moved slowly but rather boisterous like a small family that has finally found a hike that has made them all free and generous with words.

Rasputn sat on a rock with Erich and Bart around them. He had neatly trimmed off an area of the topographical map with a red pen. "From my research if he buried the treasure somewhere it would be in this coordinate. They always mention a valley and the markings on some of the rocks around here, things you can see if you look around you."

After a short rest we moved into the mapped area. Bart had gotten the metal detector out while Rasputin dismounted and started to make camp. He had a portable table with them that he put up, then his tent. J started collecting twigs and branches for a fire and Erich dug a pit. My job was to make a latrine which I didn't have a clue. I was told to do it out away from the camp. I had a shovel and post hole digger so I could make a crude stand for the party to sit on. I dug a deep pit and dumped a bit of sand in the bottom. Then made the post holes and stuck two strong limbs in them and then made two more behind for first two and put two more in and then brought to paired limbs to a point and crossed them where I could lash them good and secure them. Then I got a long sturdy limb and lashed it to the stand so a person would sit and steady himself a bit as he went along. The woman too would have no problems. I tested it even though I was bone tired and then went back to the camp to get something to eat and pitch my tent. "The journalist has made a crapper." And there was general clapping among my comrades. "It's waitng for your asses." And I made a wide, facetious bow to them all and went about pitching the tent. Hours had passed. Hours of thoughtless labor. It was wonderful. I knew now that the stubborness of the earth had a lot to teach, especially to people who lived thourghly in the mind. Many useless abstractions fell away at the simple effort to build the latrine. I did not want praise only a little satisfaction.

I knew it was a wild goose chase but that's exactly what we needed. We didnt' do much that night except eat quietly in our own private thoughts before heading off to our tents. "Tomorrow we will rise early and begin our hunt."

So the hunt would go on in the morning after a big breakfast. At first there were shouts of encouragement and a lot of enthusiasm but as the day lingered no one seemed to be wanting to be there. "Keep looking," Rasputin would shout. "Something good is giong to turn up." And he'd get Justine to put her intuitive mind to the quest and she would wander around without a thought in her head it appeared to me. I half expected her arm to suddenly thrust down into the soil and announce she had intuited the gold there but it never happened. She would wander around for an hour in and among the digging and sometimes toss her head back so her red hair would fall back and make her look like something from a fairy tale or Victorian painting. She had eyes that seemed like they were going to break at any moment. She was the whitest person I ever saw and painted her nails in bright colors.

David Eide
January 24, 2014