Wanderlusting

By Gary McWilliams

Wanderlusting is one man's story, alternately funny and hair-raising, about his travels after he dropped out of graduate school in the 1970s. Gary McWilliams chose a working man's life, and worked side by side with an international cast of miners, sailors, and fishermen, also crossing paths with missionaries, smugglers and revolutionaries. His unusual adventures will keep you reading into the night. His adventures will lead you through The Mosquito Coast, Honduras, Lake Baikal, Russia, Rocky Pass, Alaska, The Amazon River, Peru, Ponaire, Dutch Antilles, Silverton Colorado, the Sierra Madre Mountains, Mexico, Wrangell, Alaska, Pacific Coast of Washington, Oronoco River, Venezuela, the Ussuri Siberian Tiger Preserve, Russia and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gary McWilliams
• Release date: May 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310194443

Gary McWilliams

In the 1960s, Gary McWilliams taught political science at an east coast university. In 1971, he “dropped out” and went traveling. He worked as a hard-rock miner, a deckhand on ocean going freighters, a beekeeper, a tree planter, a trail builder, a charter-boat captain, and a stone artist. He founded Stone Arts of Alaska in 1999, a small business “dedicated to the beauty of stone.”www.stoneartsofalaska.com. Gary divides his time between southeast Alaska, northwest Washington, and places where the coconuts grow.

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Author’s Statement

And a Bowl of Caveats

In the mid-1960s, I wore a herringbone sports coat with leather patches on the sleeves, had a conservative beard, and smoked a pipe. I was both a graduate student and an instructor of political science at Penn State University. I taught a course called International Understanding, which dealt with such abstract concepts as nationalism, ideology, and political perception while focusing on specific disputes between nations, like that between the Arabs and the Israelis. At the same time, I was completing the requirements for a Ph.D. The course work, the written exams, and the oral exams were all behind me. The last hurdle was the writing of a Ph.D. dissertation—a book essentially. Then specializing in American Government, the dissertation was to be about the political attitudes, values, and beliefs of political party activists. For this, during the summer of 1970, I interviewed the Republican and Democratic Party Chairmen of every county in Pennsylvania, all sixty-seven counties. All that was left was to collate the data, do the statistical analysis, and write the thing.

But I didn’t. Instead, I dropped out and went traveling. I had come to believe, as had Goldmund in Hermann Hesse’s classic, Narcissus and Goldmund, that to know life was not to study it but to live it. Book learnin’, as my father called it, helps in its way. Beyond sharpening the tools of language, it enables the student—of life—to see things in bigger pictures, to place objects and happenings in context. But it does not go to the marrow. That can come only from miles logged and calluses on the hands, from exploration and experience, from living as vitally as possible.

A Bowl of Caveats. Most narratives in Wanderlusting were written long after—as many as thirty-five years after—the actual events occurred. While some of the stories are solidly based on journals or notes I kept at the time, most hang more loosely on the skeletons of old memory. To relieve a burden I do not wish to carry—Hey, such-and-such occurred in 1985, not 1986—I make no claim to have written a thoroughly researched memoir or an objective history. Of lower loft perhaps, my goal was simply to write stories based on remembrances of my experiences. While I certainly aimed at accuracy in all the stories presented, my bull’s eye was always of a more general truth, of capturing the overall look and feel, of tapping the essential core of being there. Most of the smaller details are true as best as could be remembered. However, where the old bones of recall were just too bare, where the stories begged for a bit more flesh, I freely inserted small happenings and details from other real episodes in my life. Time sequence in some of the stories was manipulated, usually compressed—why walk the reader through the deserts of uneventful days? The exact words of conversations were only as I imagined them from the context. All names were changed. Visual snapshots from later travels—I often wrote of one past journey while in the midst of another—may have found their way into some of the narratives. All interpretations of events were, of course, entirely my own. Other witnesses to the same events would remember them differently. (And, I would remember them differently, if written at different times of my life, or in a different mood, or before or after morning coffee.) Finally, in writing accounts of this sort, one always remembers, and highlights, the exceptional people, events, and colors. Perhaps it would be more accurate to give equal time to the boring and the drab. I did not give equal time so my recollections in this sense might be enhanced. I tried to not overstate anything, but if I did, I can say with assurance that I understated just as often, and probably more often. In fact, I believe that all I wrote about—and, for that matter, all of everything in this amazing world—is far richer in story than my words can possibly convey.

Now, in lieu of the dissertation that I failed to write forty years ago—that would have been read only by my Ph.D. advisor, and would have bored, I am sure, even her—I submit: Wanderlusting.

The Feather Lip Stories

I had no idea what lay in store—and was heartily glad of it—when I put out my thumb that September day in 1971. I only knew that I owed not a penny, had two hundred dollars in my pocket, and wanted first of all to see the American West.

1. Wild West

2. Feather Lip in a Gold Mine

3. Rhodochrosite

4. Over the Rim

WILD West

I could cross the country at the same latitude as Penn State but, with fall weather coming and the likelihood of having to sleep out at night, I opt for a more southerly route. Short rides get me out of central Pennsylvania and into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

Let off near Winchester, my luck fails. Traffic zooms by. Oncoming faces ossify. Eyes lock straight ahead. Noses lift—a hitchhiker, a vagabond, riffraff.

To retaliate, I mess with their minds. With good balance (maybe a carry-over from some years of wrestling), I can stand with perfect ease on one leg. I hold the other, bent at the knee, out of sight behind me. The oncoming faces have time enough to register the familiar pattern of a standing man, but, like a billboard with a panel gone, with some part missing.

Maybe by this silliness alone I administer a hair of havoc into their thought processes. Small battles, small victories.

I wait for the real sourpusses. Can spot them a mile away—in Buicks and Chryslers, the colors of hearses. Timing is everything. The instant before the sourpusses pass, when I still occupy some one-legged space in the corners of their eyes, I fake toppling over. After they pass, I catch myself.

Maybe I watched too much slapstick as a kid—whatever, we make our own entertainment by the road. Most of the time, I just kick dirt and allow my mind to wander.

This valley—the Shenandoah—has always tugged at me. I passed through it a lot as a kid, in transit between living places in North Carolina and Pittsburgh. Partly, I’m sure, it’s the call of the name. The ballad plays through my mind, Oh Shenandoah. Partly, it’s the physical beauty of the Virginia countryside—the grass-covered rolling hills, the white fences, the oak trees. It’s also the history. I think first and foremost of the Civil War: of Stonewall Jackson and Jubal Early, of running fights between North Carolina Tarheels and Pennsylvania Bucktails, of Winchester changing hands—according to the historical marker—seventy-two times over the course of the war, and thirteen times on one single day.

And I imagine the scene right here in the 1700s when this northeast-southwest trending corridor between the blue ridges of the eastern mountains was known as the Great Wagon Road. Leaving their ships in Philadelphia, German immigrants tromped through here to populate North Carolina’s Piedmont, the newly-arriving Scotch-Irish to seed the whole of southern Appalachia. It was an Indian trail before that, for war and for trade, for the Tuscarora, the Cherokee, and the Catawba going north, for the Iroquois, the Lenape, the Shawnee going south. Maybe migratory buffalo first trod this path. Maybe they trailed the mastodons of the Pleistocene.

Hitchhikers do better with Fords and Chevies—working folks—and with trucks of all sizes. Volkswagens, with single occupants, often pull over. Volkswagen vans are best bets.

Finally, a VW van comes along and stops. Its driver, a long haired fellow, moves a guitar case from the passenger seat for me to get in. Good news—he says he goes all the way to Nashville.

Charlie can’t wait to get home. He returns from a visit with his parents on Long Island, that was far too long. He informs, with more meaning than I care to plumb, Music is all that matters to me now. As we pass through southwestern Virginia, Charlie talks of music and Nashville interchangeably, as if the one can only be understood in relation to the other. Nashville is where it’s happening. And as we continue through east Tennessee, You should check it out. And with the Nashville skyline ahead, You’re welcome to stay at my place.

* * *

Six people—all musicians, all from different parts of the country, all seeking fame and fortune in Music City—share Charlie’s minuscule third-floor apartment. I shoehorn some sleeping space on the floor between a pile of amplifiers, a stand-up bass, and the bathroom.

A music bar, owned by the legendary bluegrass picker Bill Monroe, is newly opened down the street. Joining Charlie and his friends, I drink beer and tap my foot to the living greats of the genre. This bar has the bursting energy of a new establishment still in party mode. I think I am the only person in the place who does not play something. Leaving their half-empty drinks on the bar, other patrons get up to join in turn the ever-changing ensemble on stage.

One night at the bar, I sit next to a man—outstanding in his OshKosh bib overalls—who tells me that he makes string instruments for his living. When I show interest, he laments, But I can’t find an apprentice. I want to pass on what I know. No young people are interested. Several beers later, he proposes that I should learn his craft, that I should come and join him back in his holler in the Smokies. I have an extra cabin in the woods, with a fine pot-belly stove and good spring water.

It tempts: such a beautiful, old-time lifestyle. But first, he could not possibly know the tin of my ear; and second, his offer entails a sedentary lifestyle; and third, it aims in the wrong direction. I go west.

I spend three nights in Nashville. On my last, I chance into the apartment as Charlie and several others are sticking needles into their arms. In shock and dismay, I depart the music scene in Nashville. The music lifestyle is great, up to the heroin.

Memphis comes next. Good luck puts me there on a Saturday night, a fine night to hear the blues in the black bars of Beale Street. I do not see skin the color of mine the whole time there. In one bar, a local nudges up to say, Aren’t you afraid in this place?

Sometime after midnight, I walk back to the highway, catch another ride. Within minutes, we cross the Mississippi River Bridge. It is symbolic. Now, truly, I leave the East behind.

After an hour or so, the driver reaches his exit and turns off. I get out of the car in the black of night somewhere in rural Arkansas. Not a light anywhere. I locate a dirt path that goes into a field. Very tired, I lie down between two rows of cotton and pass out.

The next morning, an African-American family, all dressed up in their Sunday best, walk the path on their way to church. Spotting me, reckoning me dead, they sing Hallelujah and Praise God Almighty when I sit up blinking.

* * *

An old Penn State friend lives in Texas. I hitch south to Austin and stay a week. Departing Austin, I catch a ride in an antique MG roadster, a fire-engine red convertible. The Red Baron himself—a man wearing a World War I flying helmet, with goggles, and a long scarf—sits at the wheel. His little flying machine zips along flawlessly, his long scarf trailing in the wind—except for the hourly failures of its clutch. The Red Baron then coasts his car over to the shoulder, where, in the roar and wind of passing semi-trucks, he first burns another joint, then shinnies beneath. He disassembles and reassembles the clutch for half an hour, wiggles back out, burns another joint, re-dons his flying apparel. Again we rip down the highway at one hundred miles an hour—West Texas in a blur. At El Paso, we turn north to Santa Fe.

Santa Fe is a place of dreams: the old plaza, the Spanish church, the governor’s house, the Indians on blankets selling silver and turquoise. An Anglo schoolteacher offers a place to stay for a few days. A Spanish woman shares her bed for a night.

I hitch north from Santa Fe to Bandolier National Monument, the site of a long-abandoned Pueblo ruin. I share the place only with ghosts and one old Pueblo man, a caretaker. With a face composed of nothing but deeply etched lines, he looks as ancient as the earth—and somehow as wise. One of the roofless adobe dwellings has a sprinkle of tiny quartz crystals at its doorway. When I inquire about these, the old Indian allows, They were ceremonial. I don’t press for more.

The Red Baron told me about Arroyo Hondo, a commune north of Taos. I hitchhike there. The commune sits on a mesa overlooking the Rio Grande River. Hot springs in the canyon, dammed into little pools, serve as a bath. The commune itself disappoints. From what I see, the place functions not at all by group effort but by the hard work and idealism of just one man. While he labors in the hot sun, clearing an irrigation ditch, the commune’s other residents get high under a shade tree, and philosophize the virtues of the agrarian life.

A Hollywood movie, I learn, is to be filmed in Chama, a little town to the northwest. Extras needed. I hitchhike to Chama. The interviewer, a woman straight out of Los Angeles, gives me, straight out of Pennsylvania, a glance-over and says, You look like an old-time Westerner. It must be the moustache and sideburns. Saying the shooting will commence as soon as it stops raining, she recommends my sticking around. The movie, I understand, is about a train robbery.

I meet the movie’s outlaws: Luke and Bart. They offer me floor space in their motel room. Like people in all professions, Hollywood actors have their own language. Luke and Bart refer to the star actors of the movie—to all big-name actors—as "the talent." Buzzed on pot and coffee, tormented by the rainy and cold weather, the two bad guys bounce like ping-pong balls off the walls of their motel room. They swear and fume, turn the television on and off, speed-walk to the Chama Café for yet another cup of coffee.

The following morning, Ms. Hollywood relays with regrets to the gathered hopefuls that the talent remains in California, that the filming simply cannot begin until the weather clears, and—in a lowered voice—that rain is forecast for the whole of next week. I proceed to the highway and stick out the thumb.

* * *

I’ve been to Santa Fe; no reason to go back there. I try the other way, toward the Four Corners. A one-ton flatbed pulls over. I swing open the door, climb the running board, push some tools and auto-part boxes toward the middle of the straight-backed bench seat, and get in. The driver offers a chew, then, Howdy, name’s Arnold, or Arnie. Ah, call me Arn.

Arn, you going to Farmington?

Yep, but—motioning toward the load of sacks in back—gotta deliver this mud first.

Mud?

Drillers mud, for the oil rigs. He says it with a little surprise, as if not having met many people who would not know what mud is. Arn explains as we go that mud is made of the mineral barite … comes dry … is mixed with water at the site … is used in drilling to reduce friction, float out cuttings, and clean and cool the bit.

Arn says he’s delivering the mud to three holes in Forty Patch.

Far off the highway?

Nah, no more’n five hours a dirt. Then, Come along, if ya ain’t got nuttin’ (rhymes with mutton) better’n (rhymes with veteran) tado.

Sure.

Swinging off the pavement onto a rutted track, we weave and bounce over the red rocks of juniper-covered mesas and through the loose gravel and sand of mesquite-sided arroyo bottoms. Completely devoid of people, houses, or fences, it is the wild and wide-open land I wanted the West to be. This is Apache country, the territory I had seen in the movies, the land I dreamed about as a kid. I confess and can say without embarrassment that I have fully romanticized the West—the frontier west, the Wild West—from my first childhood reading, from when I was a knee-breeches boy back in rural North Carolina. With heroic pictures and oversized print, the stories of Lewis and Clark, Jim Bridger, and Geronimo brought me here.

Arn jams the brakes. A mule deer—a proud buck with a magnificent rack—stands in picture-perfect silhouette atop a rocky ledge. Arn extracts his 30.06 from behind the seat and eases out of the cab. Holding still and broadside, that buck, I think, is what my hunting father used to call a gift shot. Arn’ll nail it for sure. He leans over the hood, bracing with his elbow. He adjusts his cowboy hat, takes a deep breath. He aims carefully. The shot cracks loud but the deer does not fall. Nor does it run. Arn shoots again, misses again. He curses, spits a brown juice, fires twice more. Finally, the untouched deer saunters away. Arn is beside himself that he missed. I feel relieved; did not want to see that regal deer go down. Somehow, I think, my psychic intervention protected that animal.

I help Arn unload his mud at three different drilling rigs, each an isolated platform of derricks, pipes, tool shacks, and loud generators; each with eight or ten sweaty, tobacco-spitting roughnecks. When I aside to Arn, Seems few of these ‘fellers’ have all their digits, I learn that a lost finger or two comes pretty regular, with all the heavy equipment and spinning pipes they handle.

Back on the highway, I tell Arn about my on-the-road experiences to now. I also reveal that my travel funds near depletion and that I need to park someplace and work a while. He offers, Call my company, we’re short a driver. He tears a corner off his brown paper lunch bag and writes the number for Aztec Oil Patch Supply.

Arn drops me off in Farmington. I go to a bar. Playing pool, I meet four oil field workers—thirty-eight fingers in all, if you add two halves. One, Hambone by name, offers me a place to stay while in town. That night, I come down with a severe flu. I hardly move from Hambone’s couch for three days. Then, feeling better, I call Aztec Supply.

Nope, sorry, we hired our man yesterday.

* * *

I have always wanted to see the Rockies. They get big in Colorado, not far away. So, figuring I can be without funds in Colorado as easily as in New Mexico, I hitch north. A pickup truck with Colorado license plates stops. Richie says he goes not just to Durango, barely across the state line, but to Silverton, seventy miles beyond. In the heart of the Rockies, he promises.

Richie suggests that maybe I can get a job at the mine where he works. They’re usually hiring. Company office in Silverton.

We weave around switchbacks and crest high passes. With darkness fallen, I see neither the high mountains we traverse nor the town of Silverton as we enter.

Richie, thinking of a place that might offer a night’s shelter, drops me off in front of—in his reference—the hippie house. At my knock, the front door opens and I am greeted by a friendly long-haired man; and an olfactory bomb blast of wood smoke, marijuana smoke, and dog excrement. Nevertheless, I am thankful when Richie’s friend, Hippie Don, gives me a place to stay.

* * *

Itching to look around, I burst outside as soon as I wake. Mountains—real mountains: sharp, vigorous, young mountains; not the old and tired Appalachians—surround me; enclose me, in every direction. I am taken aback by the splendor. I am astounded.

Silverton sits in its park—a Colorado term, Don explains, for a flat, alluvial valley between mountains—at an elevation of 9,380 feet. The mountains around, the San Juan Range, reach upward to almost 14,000 feet.

I walk to an empty lot, to where no houses block the view, and slowly turn the cardinal directions. The peaks of the Rockies, crested by early snow, glisten white—I think an artist might add a dash of blue. At mid-slope, the mountains radiate the vibrant blue-green of spruce and fir. Groves of aspens swath the lower slopes with the golds of autumn. Overhead, the morning sky glows an intense, almost azure blue. I have never seen—have not imagined, have not known the existence of—such intensity of color. Don explains, It’s the thin air. Surrounded by desert and at very high altitude, it holds little moisture, dust, or pollutants to mute the true, natural color of things.

Today is Sunday and the mine office is closed. I accompany Don as he walks to the grocery store. As we approach, an older man, in wire glasses and no-nonsense all tan clothes, exits. Don says, That’s the Old Man, the guy you want to talk to about a job.

I run to catch up with the Old Man as he goes to his car. Breathlessly, I blurt: Excuse me sir. Is the mine hiring?

Without giving me a second’s glance—his arms wrapped around two full bags of groceries—he snaps something like, If you want to ‘rustle’ me, do it in the morning.

Did he say rustle as in stealing someone’s cows? Or, wrestle? Wrestle an old man for a job? Ridiculous. Guess I’ll find out in the morning.

Feather Lip in a Gold Mine

I feel pretty obvious in my spanking-new, yellow diggers—the rubberized-canvas coat and pants issued by the company store. All the other men on this small train into the mountain wear diggers turned brown with work and grime. Without a ding or a scratch, my bright yellow hardhat looks, as it indeed is, fresh out of the box. A miner’s lamp is affixed to the front of the hat. It connects, via a flexible cord running down my back, to a heavy-duty battery carried on my belt. High steel-toed rubber boots and thick rubber gloves finish the outfit.

All this rubber raingear strikes me as a bit curious—for working underground, you know. I don’t ask questions.

I soon discover that a mine—at least this mine—can be a very wet place. It might as well be raining with all the water dripping from overhead. Not just that, underground streams enter the tunnels from fault fractures in the walls. Most dribble like water fountains—the under-pressurized ones that always seem to exist in schools—but some gush like garden hoses. Water pools inches deep on some of the tunnel floors. Drainage of ground water, I am told, can be a major issue in mining. Without sump pumps, a mine quickly floods.

I could not quite fathom the two miles underground I was told this morning. I visualized two miles straight down, toward the center of the earth. Now, on the night-shift train, I comprehend that our train is not an elevator. It runs its two miles under a mountain in a horizontal direction. The surface, I am assured, lies a mere hundred feet above the top level of the mine. That’s a relief. I’ll have only a zillion tons of rock on me with a cave-in, not a zillion zillions.

* * *

I thought it a peculiar quirk that Silverton men do not face one another when conversing. They talk with their heads turned slightly to the side. I noticed this at the grocery store, on the sidewalk, in the bar. At the mine I am straightened out on this in a hurry—you do not directly face another miner when you talk to him because your headlamp blinds him. Conditioned from work, the miners do the same above ground.

* * *

Two lights come my way. Dim in the fog-thick air—air clogged with dynamite smoke, diesel exhaust, and rock dust—they bounce up and down with the rhythm of men fast-walking. The two miners materialize in the murk. They do not slow down to greet as we confront in the tight-walled tunnel. Instead, as they brush past, the lead man of the two shoots a side glance my way and mumbles something I do not understand. I sense from his tone that it is something I should know—perhaps important—and something assumed familiar, no explanation needed. Walking alone, I ponder it as I continue down the drift.

Twenty seconds later, a flash of white light obliterates my world. A blast of concussion staggers me, whooshes me back. Something like birdshot peppers my face. My hardhat, and with it my mine lamp, flies off and lands ten feet behind.

After some pause, my mind reboots. Yes, you idiot, you walked into a dynamite explosion. That birdshot was bits of flying stone. Be glad you did not walk a few steps further, around the bend. I reconnect my mine light to my hardhat—the unit had uncoupled when it hit the floor—and place the hat back on my head. I vow to never tell of my stupidity.

The two miners who high-balled past, come to find out, operate a small ore train. An overhead ore chute had plugged as they were loading their cars and they were blasting it open with dynamite (standard procedure). They had just lit the fuse. The expression mumbled in my direction was fire in the hole.

* * *

I learn "fire in the hole" on my third day at the Sunnyside Mine. I learned rustle on the day of my hire: I rustled a job. A lunch bucket is a pie can. Dynamite is powder, no matter that it comes as a stick. One particular kind of powder is donkey dick. There are hanging walls, foot walls, muck piles, man-trips, jack-legs, and stopes. When miners talk about a face, it is the working area directly in front of them, in their face. Daily, I gain fluency in the language of hard-rock mining.

It is not coal mining. Hard-rock mining has to do with the mining of ores, usually metallic, in hard geologic structures, usually quartz veins. The modus operandi is to locate an ore body on the surface, tunnel under it, and then use gravity, instead of fighting it, to extract the ore. The entry tunnel goes in from the side of a mountain—from somewhere below the outcrop—to where it intersects the vein, then mining proceeds upward by levels and stages. Broken rock falls downward through ore passes. Eventually, it reaches the main haulage tunnel (usually the same as the entry tunnel) where it is loaded into ore cars and taken out by train. At the Sunnyside, we mine gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, and cadmium. All occur together in the same hydrothermally deposited quartz veins, the actual metals later parted in the milling process. Having their own methodology and terminology, the people here identify themselves with emphasis and pride as hard-rock miners.

* * *

Nine miles to the northwest of Silverton, Colorado, the Sunnyside Mine enters its mountain at 10,500 feet. After taking the man-trip inside, miners ride a hoist up another 1,000 feet, to F level. From F, they ride smaller hoists, or climb ladders, to yet higher levels. Most of my work takes place at between 11,500 and 12,500 feet in elevation. So little oxygen up here! I pause often to catch my breath.

I work as a nipper—the entry-level, bottom-rung position in hard-rock mining. The job sums easily: carry stuff. Maybe inject the word heavy. But note: the verb carry is not used. Here, the operative infinitives are to pack and to jackass. The old-timers, in fact, used mules and burros to transport ore and supplies underground. Their words hung on, as people in other places still use to sail or to steam for a vessel that does neither. In modern mines, diesel or electric-powered trains do the distance hauling. But the trains still have to be loaded and unloaded. And supplies have to be packed by hand to the miners’ specific working places, often hundreds of feet distant, horizontally and/or vertically, from the end of the rail lines. The miner walks to the face with his pie can, the nipper packs everything else.

A box of DuPont dynamite weighs precisely fifty pounds. I jackass so many that, to this day, I judge weights by the muscular memory of what fifty pounds feels like. I pack the drill steels used in the mining machines and boxes of tungsten-tipped screw-on drill bits, and the cast iron pipes used for transporting the water that cools and lubricates the drills, and the awkward rolls of two-inch hose used for conveying the compressed air that powers the drills, and the bulky ventilation tubing that delivers fresh air from outside the mine to underground, and the creosoted ties and iron rails used to extend the train lines, and the timbers used for shoring and for building ore chutes, powder magazines, and other inside structures.

Often, these supplies need be packed up and down over high heaps of loose rocks—the freshly broken ore that piles at the bottom of the stopes (the hollowed-out areas where the actual mining takes place). These loose rocks liken to the talus of a slide area on the outside of a mountain. Often, these supplies must be hauled from one level in the mine to another through man-ways, tight vertical holes that can extend hundreds of feet from top to bottom. Some of the man-ways have small, air-powered hoists that raise and lower a metal box (coffin-shaped) via a cable. Others have only ladders. These wooden ladders sometimes have rungs missing, maybe several in a row—knocked out by nearby dynamite blasts or falling rocks. One learns never to assume as you are descending a ladder that the next rung will be there.

Also, all in a day’s work: passing trains, loaded with ore or supplies, must be dodged. The tunnels are just wide enough in some places for the train, not for you and whatever you’re packing and the train. And ore passes, the vertical passage-ways where trains dump their loads of broken rock, have to be skirted. The ore pass on F level drops 1,000 feet to the main haulage level. You can go around this one, but other holes, dropping mere hundreds of feet, can only be crossed by walking over them on a spanning wooden plank. A twelve-inch board can look pretty narrow in the circumstance. And yes, dynamite blasts have to be avoided. Most blasts occur at the end of shift, when miners detonate the explosives placed in the six-feet-deep holes they had drilled over the previous eight hours. Smaller blasts, mainly to clear ore chutes, keep the place lively throughout the day.

* * *

Lloyd, my assigned work partner, recently quit high school. Hired the same day as me, we rank theoretically the same in this hole in the ground. In reality, he far surpasses me in status because he is local and because his daddy— recently deceased—long worked here. A hard-partying, out-of-control seventeen-year-old, Lloyd often comes to work bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. Then, he is particularly careless. Always, he works without thinking; without, seemingly, making the mental connections between actions and consequences.

Count on Lloyd to let go his end prematurely when we team up to jackass a heavy-as-hell iron rail or an eight-by-eight wooden beam from a flat car to some place in the mine. With my end still in hand, his end’s hitting the rock floor of the tunnel quakes my backbone. We have serious discussions over this.

Lloyd drops things—wrenches, hammers, rocks—when working overhead. One day, the shift boss tells us to transfer a load of drill steels from F level to E level, one hundred feet above. A man-way with a hoist connects the two levels. While a third nipper operates the hoist, I load the drill steels into the box on F level and Lloyd unloads them on E. I hear the rattling overhead as Lloyd empties the metal box of its steels. Then, Oh shit! A drill steel measuring one inch in diameter and six feet in length, and weighing maybe twenty-five pounds, can gain a lot of momentum over a hundred-foot fall. The steel Lloyd drops hits the same railroad tie I stand on—spearing it, splitting it. Its tail end quivers, like the feathered end of an arrow smacking a log, just inches in front of my eyes. As I stand frozen, the third nipper quips, "Hey buddy, you’d needed a whole bottle of aspirin had that kissed your noggin."

* * *

I acquire a room in a miner’s boarding house. I like that a new hire is not expected to pay rent until he receives his first check. The grocery store likewise lets you charge until you are paid. This is the mode of old-time mining camps, Silverton being one of the last. After a month at the boarding house, I find a cozy little apartment in a red brick building with 1907 engraved into its cornerstone. Its steam radiators hiss and clank but do the job as fall’s crazy quilt of colors turns into a winter blanket of white.

I’ll resume my traveling but I’ll stay put the winter. I like Colorado and I like working at the mine. Now acclimated to the altitude, I’m getting back in shape physically. I pack my weight at the mine

I particularly like the miners. They are as honest and upfront as the work they do. Never, as did too many people back East, do they never put up screens or false fronts to hide who they are. Never do you see pretension—not from the bosses, not from the old-hand miners, not from the professional geologists and engineers. Instead, all are simply who they are, their humanness laid bare, to take or to leave. They say what they think too—never any mincing of words, never any hiding behind double negatives, never such overly erudite gibberish as clearly, decidedly, or arguably at the head of an assertion. Not the puffed-up intellectuals of the academic world, they are the salt-of-the-earth professors of real life, of the vital experience I sought when I left the university behind. What a relief to duck my head in the sand—well, under a million tons of rock—and not have to think about the insane politicians of Washington, Moscow, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. Far, far away from the political science I used to teach, I immerse in old-time America.

Silverton may be one of the most isolated places in the country. No radio station can be received; if any sound waves do manage to wiggle through the 13,000- to 14,000-foot mountains, they fail to descend the 4,000 feet into Silverton’s hole. No television reaches here to do its woeful damage. No newspaper exists, other than a local rag—local in the extreme. I have never seen a national newspaper or a national news magazine sold or read in town. Silverton is even more isolated in the winter, when avalanches close the passes. With so little interaction with the outside world, Silverton feels less of today than of the 1890s when it was built and peopled, when half the town was gambling halls and brothels, when Bat Masterson—for a while—rode herd as city marshal.

The people of Silverton entertain, as did all people in days of yore, by storytelling. In the mine, during lunch breaks or at other lax moments, or in town, in the Miners Bar or Catherine’s Cafe, you can listen to the masters of the art. No playwright in New York better uses pace, voice, analogy, or the pregnant pause. In its subject matter, Mark Twain’s Roughing It—with its yarns of gold fever, hardy men, and loose women—might come closest. I expect that Samuel Clemens, when a young man in the mining camps of Californian and Nevada, listened to hard-rock miners just like these.

* * *

Most everyone has a nickname. The miners take them in stride, with humor, without a sensitive man whimpering. In this working man’s world, Richard, Robert, and William would be unacceptably high horse—names for the kings of England. They might be Dick, Bob, and Bill. More likely, they’d answer to even less formal handles. I work with Smiley, who always is, and the Raver, who always is, and Speedy, who never is. I work with place names: Tennessee, Okie, Swede, and Yugo. We have our edibles: Bun, Pork Chop, and Turnip Seed. We have physical attributes: Curly, a bald man; Six-Pack, a short and stubby fellow; Timberline, a tall man; High Pockets, another tall man, with notably long legs; Pogo, a thin crescent shaped man with a kangarooing Adam’s apple; and Vapor Lock, a stammering old codger who wheezes and whistles with his every start to talk. And we have Feather Lip, a new fellow with an oversized moustache. That is me.

* * *

The people in this mine are incredibly tough—men as men used to be. One day, I meet a miner who has just broken the index finger on his right hand. Smitty says he did not want to bother the shift boss or the foreman to take him out of the mine—a special train trip—for such a trifling thing. Instead, declaring, I’ll see the Doc after work, he tapes his off-angled finger to the one adjacent and resumes his drilling.

The most amazing story of old-fashioned grit I know is that of Tommy McGuire.

Tommy is an old-time tramp miner, a fine gentleman, and.a friend. Tramp miners are the vagabonds of the mining world. Moving from mining camp to mining camp throughout the West, seldom staying at any one for more than a couple of paychecks, they are often the most colorful of the hard-rock miners. The Sunnyside Mine has both home guards—miners born and raised in town—and tramps who come and go. Tommy tramped into town, as per usual of his breed, with no notion of staying. But then he met Loretta, a local gal, very pretty—if a little round—and very much his junior. And he did something in his older age he would have never imagined in his younger: he married and settled down. Loretta, with elderly parents to take care of, insisted on his staying put.

Marriage, however, does not hinder Tommy’s daily tramp to the tavern. He likes his end-of-shift repast, sitting down with a cold one after a day of drilling rock. His whole life a miner, he favors the interior end of the bar, where, away from the bright sunshine streaming through the windows, the light falls dim. I join him when I can, when the adjacent stool sits empty. There, with but a little nudging, Tommy reminisces about the mining camps he’s tramped, from Bisbee to Coeur d’Alene, he likes to say. I relish his stories of the old West. Unmatched by John Wayne, John Ford, by all of Hollywood, they are the real thing. Tommy tells, too, of Mexico: of working the Sierra Madre, of packing out rich silver ore by burro, of confrontations with banditos and revolucionarios. Emanating from the deep of his throat, Tommy’s voice sounds of pure gravel, his words like rocks tumbling down a glacial stream. Occasionally, he uses his Spanish, dipping into that language for just the right phrase or expression. Tommy, with the miners’ trait of holding his head slightly askew as he talks, spins his tales from the corner of his eye.

Suddenly, Tommy changes. I, and his other friends, detect some other mood. He no longer wants to talk, to tell jokes or stories—nothing. Then he stops coming to the bar at all. His drinking buddies don’t understand.

Finally, we hear that Tommy has cancer, that it is terminal, that he only recently found out. He’d only gotten married a month or two ago. We hear that he just wants to stay home with Loretta, whom he loves so. And that he frets about her future— that, having been a life-long tramp, he has neither savings nor life insurance to take care of her. And—and—he thinks she might be pregnant.

Next, Tommy is found dead at the mine, crushed beneath a pile of huge boulders. He had a pry bar in his hands. Tommy, with his miner’s eye, had spotted the loose rocks overhead in one of the tunnels—rocks just barely holding there, rocks called widow-makers for a reason—and had the nerve to stand beneath them and pry them down with the bar onto himself. The guys who found him disposed of the bar, as Tommy reckoned they would. All knew him, and that an accidental death in the mine sets up a widow for life with workman’s compensation.

* * *

Famous in Colorado history, the Sunnyside ore body has been mined, without intermission, since its discovery in the 1890s. Currently, it ranks as the third largest gold producer in the country. Although not purely a gold mine, gold is by far its most valuable product.

The gold at the Sunnyside is native, that is, it comes as a metal itself. In nature, few metals come as a pure, or almost pure, metallic element: sometimes silver, sometimes copper, almost always gold and platinum. Most native gold carries a portion of native silver within. Sunnyside gold assays at about eighty-two percent gold and eighteen percent silver. Native gold is malleable: it will bend or flatten when hit with a hammer. Non-metallic minerals crush. Generally, the gold comes in minute particles—too small, in fact, to observe with the naked eye. In aggregation, these tiny particles may appear in the quartz host as a dull yellow smudge.

However, Sunnyside gold does come at times in considerably larger particles: in wires, in leaves, and in chunks as big as match heads. The working places in the mine all have numbers. 2040 is one of the richest working stopes in the mine. I see miners there, after cracking chunks of ore with their sledges, having to pull the pieces apart because so much gold metal binds them together. Imagine—on a different scale—breaking and trying to pull apart a chunk of concrete with rebar inside.

Miners sometimes high grade the best ore. Considering it a rightful bonus for their hard and dangerous work, they take it out of the mine in their pie cans. A few miners sell their high grade to make money under the table, but most want only a souvenir of where they work; something to put on the dresser or mantel, something to show their visiting relatives. The amount of rock taken is extremely small relative to the tons of ore mined daily. The mine operators make only token efforts to curtail the high grading—trying to stop it entirely would be too disruptive to the overall operation; a small price to pay for a contented work force.

An old tradition in gold mining is to carry a pocket piece—a small, showy specimen, ideally personally found. The rubbing of the cloth of the pocket keeps the buttery yellow gold in brilliant shine. Expect to see Silverton miners showing and comparing their little gold talismans at the Miners Bar, each shined further with a good tale of where and how found.

*******

End note one: Probably all the working folks of this now bygone era—loggers in the Northwest, fishermen in Alaska, cowboys in Wyoming, farmers in North Dakota, steel mill workers in Pittsburgh—were cut of the same gritty fiber as the hard-rock miners of western Colorado. Still, as I know these people, they are incredible. To appreciate their physical prowess, as well as their ingenuity, consider all the mines in the Silverton area, and in the West in general, constructed on mountaintops, cliff faces, and other of the most difficult to access places imaginable; that heavy rails, boilers for steam power, air compressors, timbers, and all else was somehow hauled up to them—many with no possible mule access—and skillfully emplaced.

End note two: The company’s policy regarding high grading changed drastically after I left. Their attempts to curb it—fences, guards, etc.—were expensive failures. The underlying cause of high grading at the Sunnyside Mine was the universally held perception within the community that the company itself was only high grading—that it had no interest in the place whatsoever other than the taking. High grading has probably always existed, humans being what they are. But, on the basis of the written histories of prior mines in the area, there is reason to believe that it took place far less in mines that were locally owned and where there was a high community regard for the ownership.

Rhodochrosite

I collected crystals as a boy in North Carolina. Searching in abandoned granite quarries, road cuts, and farmers’ fields, I found crystals of quartz, feldspar, and pyrite. I even wrote a sixth-grade paper about my future vocation as a geologist. My interest in minerals went dormant after the family moved to gray and sedimentary western Pennsylvania. When I eventually went to the university, I studied, not geology, but the social sciences. But the draw of a long-buried interest, when it resurrects, can be absolutely amazing. It probably hit my very first day underground, maybe as I picked up rocks spilled from an ore train, or maybe as I looked at the incredible colors and patterns of the freshly blasted tunnel walls. From the beginning of my employment at the Sunnyside, I picked up rocks, to appreciate their beauty and to learn all I could about them. Appreciating my interest, the mine geologists took time to identify and explain.

The Sunnyside’s ore body was full of cavities or vugs—open holes in the otherwise solid rock. Often, crystals lined the walls of these vugs. Six-sided quartz crystals, either clear or milky, occurred most commonly, but other crystallized minerals occurred too. The Sunnyside Mine was famous for its rhodochrosite, a pink-to-red manganese carbonate that formed at times in exquisite crystals. Collectors worldwide sought these. Sometimes, the crystallized minerals occurred in combinations—for example, green fluorite and red rhodochrosite on top of silvery galena, on top of water-clear quartz. While most cavities were no larger than a tangerine or a grapefruit, some came big enough to put your head into. Imagine looking around and viewing, with the bright illumination of your mine light, such a sparkly, multicolored universe—maybe one opened just that day and completely virgin to the eyes of the world. I began collecting the crystals I found, taking them home in my lunch box. The mine operators did not care—the crystals, bereft of metallic value, were considered waste rock. I thought it incredible that these rare, delicate, and wondrous creations—these flowers of darkness, these Mona Lisas of nature’s hand—were given no status at all, were condemned in fact to ride with the whole of the mine’s output to the ore crusher, to be turned into mill tailings, to be reduced to dust.

I collected the crystals because I loved them. I spent hours looking at them, showing them to my friends and to anyone else showing the slightest interest. I had no idea that a market existed for them. But, soon enough, I discovered rock shops. They were plentiful then in the West. Silverton had two. Soon enough too, I heard of the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. In 1973, I decided to go and see what it was about. The Tucson Show was then, as it remains today, the world’s largest mineral show. Putting things together, I came to realize that the crystals, found at off-times in the mine, had real value and that buyers existed all over the West, the country I longed to see.

The mine was casual in regard to the comings and goings of its workforce; guys regularly quit and came back. I started following suit, quitting the first time in the summer of 1972. I bought an old VW van to get me around. I sold the crystals I found mainly to rock shops. Next, I started buying crystals from other miners for resale. It became a minor miner business, something I did between work stints at the mine, a way to wed my passion for minerals to my addiction to exploring the country. Although never traveling with a specific itinerary, my routes from Silverton always included stops at other storied mining camps—the names alone a song of the old West—Bisbee, Butte, Creede, Bishop, Grass Valley, Cripple Creek, Leadville, Deadwood, Coeur d’Alene. Local miners always had crystals to show, trade, or sell. Every mine has its own unique mineralogy, so the crystals were always different. I came to know—to be able to sight identify—many mineral species as a result of my interest and these travels.

* * *

It did not take long before my journeys from Silverton extended to Mexico. Again, I visited historic mining districts. No different from their American counterparts, the local miners liked telling me about their mine and its geology, and hearing in turn about the mines of Colorado. The fact that I, too, worked and sweated in a hole in the ground established an instant connection, a bond, a trust. I was privileged, thereby, with a benefit far more encompassing than simply seeing the minerals they happened to have on a table or a shelf. Invited into their homes—to eat meals with them; to be introduced to their kids, wives, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors—I had an entree into their lives and their culture. I highly valued this time spent with the workaday people of Mexico. Located far from tourist destinations—the mining towns were the real Mexico I wanted to see.

Guanajuato, in the central plateau, became a favorite. One of the first cities of old Spanish Mexico, its donkey-cart streets spoke romantically of sixteenth-century Spain. Its mines were famous for silver. I bought specimens of rare silver minerals as well as amethyst and calcite crystals and sold them on my return. Batopilas, at the bottom of the Copper Canyon, made another great silver destination. I first visited there in 1972. No roads existed within the canyon at that time. Then, with little physically or culturally in the town that Pancho Villa would not recognize, Batopilas was—like Silverton, like many other favorite places visited in subsequent travels—living history. As in the American West, minerals—my interest in minerals—provided a means of seeing the country. I went to Batopilas three times in the early seventies. An account of my third venture follows.

Over the Rim

The pilot asks, Can you see anything?

The woman answers, "No. Nada."

I travel with two friends: Lee, a mechanic at the mine in Silverton, and Terry, an artist from Arizona. Lee has never been to the Copper Canyon and wants to see it; Terry wants to paint its indigenous people: the Tarahumara. (A fine and well-known portrait artist, Terry has painted native people throughout old Mexico. We’ve traveled together before—a painting expedition to Seri villages on the Sonoran coast of the Sea of Cortez.) I return to the Barranca del Cobre simply because I love the place, and perhaps, to buy a few silver specimens in Batopilas, a favorite old mining town in the barranca’s lower reaches.

We take the train from Cuidad Chihuahua to Creel, the standard entry point for the Copper Canyon. It has been said that the barranca country’s most notable characteristic is its inaccessibility. The canyon is approximately a mile deep, about like the Grand Canyon. No public transportation system exists to get you there. There is, however, a seasonal road and a truck that carries mail and sundries from top to bottom once a week. The truck, I know from the past, will take riders for a fee. The three of us ride in back. The road descends over a thousand bumps. We hold to whatever we can to not be thrown out

Finally, the truck pulls into La Bufa, the first village encountered on barranca’s floor. Perched on a ledge above the Batopilas River, it consists of ten or so ramshackle adobe houses. Ed Bishop, an American ex-pat, lives in one. I met Ed on a previous trip and want to visit him again. After visiting Ed, the three of us plan to walk the fifteen kilometers to Batopilas, our ultimate destination.

Ed, not as spry as he used to be, has a Tarahumara man helping him with chores around the house. Presently building a chicken coop, the Tarahumara man is young, muscular, and strikingly handsome—the more so as he dresses bare but for his native breechclout and headband. Terry—the artist—immediately wants to paint his portrait. The Adonis agrees to sit—indeed, enjoys the notion that someone is willing to pay him to sit. Since a rain has just commenced, and since it appears to be more than just a passing shower, the three of us heartily accept Ed’s invitation to stay a few days, Terry’s estimate of the time he’ll need to complete a painting.

The rain notches up to a drenching downpour. Staying inside, we watch the artist at work. With bold strokes and magic, Terry slowly puts the Indian on canvas.

I know little about Ed, having talked to him only minutes my last time through. As we while away the hours inside his tiny, and now crowded, abode, he reveals some of his personal history. He flew bombers in WWII, was shot down over Cologne, had a harrowing escape via the French underground. Afterward, and for thirty years, he flew commercial aircraft, working at one time or another for all the big airline companies. He reveals without embarrassment that he lost his last job, as well as most before that, because of an alcohol problem. I can talk about it now, he says, because it’s history; because I’m on the wagon, not a drop for five years. He says, Life up there—he nods to the north—was too fast for me … booze, divorces, car wrecks, jail time. Then, looking off into space, Life was always too fast for me. Born that way, I guess. Finally, in a different voice, That’s why I’m here: this little nowhere in Mexico. They’ll bury me here.

The rain ceases, as if on cue, as Terry puts away his palette and brushes. Cramped inside for seventy-odd hours of straight downpour, the three of us welcome the opportunity to get back outside. It feels good to stretch our legs, to walk the riverside road to Batopilas.

I’ve gone this way twice before. I went