Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

“Calm down, dude.”

“But why would he dig samples if he didn’t think it was? Hey, you know what? We should go exploring there.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be exploring it all right.”

“We should make an equipment list. Like a flashlight and an axe. And some rope.”

“What are you going to use rope for?”

“You coil it up and put it over your shoulder. So it goes across your chest.”

“And you look totally cool.”

“Yeah. We gotta do it when Rosie’s around so she can see.” After that he gazed out the window for a couple of minutes, then he turned back to me and said quietly, “You think we should get married, Johnny?”

“Can’t, we’re brothers.”

“Me and Rosie, stupid.”

That Stan and Rosie might get married was an idea so bizarre I’d never contemplated it and caught unawares as I was now I couldn’t help but react negatively.

“I don’t know, Stan, Marla and I aren’t married.”

“Yeah, but Johnny,” Stan looked uncomfortable, “you’re you.”

“Okay, even so, do you think it’s a good idea? I mean, Rosie’s a lovely girl but I think she had a pretty rough life in the past. Being married is kind of different than just going out, you have to deal with more of each other’s problems.”

“But Rosie and I don’t have problems. We’re happy.”

“Yeah, but what I’m saying is you might have problems if you got married.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Johnny.”

“Look, Stan, I know you love her, but you live right next door, you see her whenever you want. What’s the difference?”

Stan was silent for a mile or so and I knew I’d made him unhappy.

“But if we did get married you wouldn’t be angry, would you, Johnny?”

“No, I wouldn’t be angry.”

Stan smiled to himself and wriggled comfortably deeper into his seat. And I drove on, wondering just how complicated life could get.

Marla was later than usual and it was dark when she got home from work. She dropped her things over the back of a chair and collapsed on the couch. Her cheeks were flushed from the cool air outside but under the color she looked the same sort of tired she always did nowadays. Stan was in his room watching TV and came out when he heard her arrive. He was bursting to tell her about our buried river but before he could start Marla sighed and launched into an explanation of why she was late.

“They called an unscheduled meeting at the town hall about the road to Tunney Lake. I had to go up and take minutes.” She smiled grimly. “Things don’t look good for Gareth. They took an informal vote; there wasn’t enough of a majority to veto the project, but it could easily end up that way given time. You won’t believe who was there-Jeremy Tripp. He was with that woman who’s been campaigning around town.”

“Vivian Gelhardt.”

“You know her?”

“Gareth used to go out with her. He introduced us awhile ago, before she left him for Tripp.”

“What a shame. Well, they’ve got this petition with a ton of signatures. Tripp said he was going to keep collecting them until he had enough to force the council to abandon the road.”

“Could they really do that?”

“They see that van around town and enough people sign a piece of paper, they can’t just ignore it. Plus a couple of the councilors don’t want to spend the money anyhow.”

Stan, who had been jigging from foot to foot while she spoke, couldn’t contain himself any longer and blurted, “We’ve got a hidden river and it’s full of gold!”

Marla looked confused and I could tell she was trying to figure out if his comment was another behavioral anomaly like his moths. I held my hand up to stop him saying any more and he sat down on a chair facing the couch, grinning at me, waiting for me to explain our discovery to Marla.

“Stan and I found out something today that makes me pretty sure I know why my father bought this land.”

Stan leaned forward excitedly and said, “Because there’s a river full of gold!”

Marla rolled her eyes. “Oh God, Johnny, he was always digging around in one place or another. He never found anything worth more than a couple hundred dollars, you know that.”

“Well, listen to this-Millicent told me he was out here in February trying to get her to put her house on the market. While he was there she showed him a journal her great-great-grandfather or someone had written early in the Gold Rush. I’ve read it too, and this guy came up the Swallow and panned the whole length of Empty Mile. Didn’t find a thing, got pissed off, and moved on up the river. Okay, no big deal. Empty Mile’s called Empty Mile because no one found gold here. Everyone’s always assumed it was because some early party of miners got to the bend before the Rush really got going and mined it clean. Thing is, Millicent’s great-great-grandfather said in his journal that the bend had never been mined before he got to it. There were no piles of dirt, the riverbed wasn’t disturbed, etcetera, etcetera. So the reason there was no gold at Empty Mile couldn’t have been because it was mined out. Now, my father, being interested in gold forever, would have found this an interesting fact, and he would have remembered it, particularly because the rest of the Swallow River was so rich. Then, Chris Reynolds told us, he attended a lecture in March at the Elephant Society-the same subject you and I sat through-about how changes in the landscape, things like landslides and so on, can change the course of a river. I think it was at that point he started speculating about Empty Mile. But the breakthrough came with this.”

I had the aerial photo ready at the side of the couch. I passed it to Marla. She looked at it blankly. “I don’t see anything.”

Stan laughed. “That’s because it’s a secret river.”

Marla looked levelly at me. “A secret river?”

“It’s true. He was all excited about this photo a couple of weeks after I got back to Oakridge. He had it blown up and he hung it on the wall in the living room. It’s part of a Bureau of Land Management survey. He wouldn’t say what the big deal was, but it was obviously important to him. This is the original print. He wrote something on the back.”

Marla turned the photo so she could read my father’s cryptic: The trees are different .

“Today Stan and I took it to the guy my father got it from. He’s a BLM surveyor.”

Marla squinted closely at the front of the photo again. “I still don’t see anything.”

“Look here.”

I traced the pale line through the trees for her and continued it to the river on the other side of the spur.

“You can see the trees don’t grow quite as strongly. The BLM guy said this is the original course of the river. It used to run pretty much straight, see? Then the front of this spur here, which is the cliff that runs down the side of the meadow, collapsed and forced the river into the curve it makes now. The part that got cut off gradually filled in over the years and things started to grow on it. If you go up high enough, though, you can still see it.”

Stan nodded enthusiastically. “See, Marla, a secret river. It’s been like that for hundreds of years and nobody knew ’cause they never went high enough to see it.”

“And Ray thought it was full of gold?” Marla’s voice was droll.

“Well, it makes sense. The gold they found in the Gold Rush had built up over thousands and thousands of years. If just a few hundred years ago a river changed course, the new part of it probably wouldn’t have time to build up much gold at all. Once my father read Millicent’s journal he knew Empty Mile wasn’t empty from having been mined out. And that meant there was a possibility the gold was somewhere else. You heard Chris Reynolds say how rich the Swallow River was. Some people made fortunes, and they were competing with thousands of other men wherever they went on the river. So imagine if you own a whole stretch of it and you’re the only person who gets to mine it. I mean, gold’s like over nine hundred dollars an ounce now. And my father did actually do a bit of testing before he bought the land. I told you about the assayer in Burton, about how he took some samples there. They came from this buried riverbed. Plus it explains why he was so adamant about me not selling the land after he put it in my name. It didn’t have anything to do with something his accountant told him, because Rolf Kortekas told me he never had an accountant.”