Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

Stan and Gareth and I spent the next few hours panning. By the end of the afternoon our jar was full. Gareth said he had some mercury at his place and though we were tired from our work all of us wanted to find out how much gold we’d panned. We went up to the cabin and dumped our gear on the stoop. Marla was inside and must have heard us, but she didn’t come out. As we drove away, Gareth in his Jeep, Stan and I in my pickup, I saw her behind the front window, her face haunted and pale, watching Gareth leave.

The lake at that time of day was softly lit by the tiring sun, and the shadows of trees back from the beach had begun their first dark tappings at the edge of the water. The scent of pine was strong as we walked along the path from the parking lot, as though the air, in cooling, was squeezing from itself essences that earlier in the day had been diluted by warmth and sunshine and blue sky.

I could hear David singing before Gareth opened the door of the bungalow, an unhappy drunken yodel against a background of the Eagles blasting from a stereo. Gareth looked at me ruefully.

“The council told us on Friday that the road isn’t happening. Any further action on it has been ‘postponed indefinitely.’ Dad’s pretty fucked up about it.”

We went into the living room and found Gareth’s father sitting in his wheelchair, head thrown back, howling the words to “Hotel California.” He was unshaven and there was an open bottle on the floor beside him. His back was turned to us and Gareth had to grab the handles of his wheelchair and shake it before he realized we were there. The singing stopped abruptly and David reached out toward his son, his hands trembled and there was spilled liquor on the front of his shirt. Gareth bent and hugged him and turned off the stereo. David reached for the bottle but Gareth beat him to it and held it out of reach.

“Party’s over.”

“You’re right about that!”

Stan stepped nervously closer to me. The movement caught David’s eye.

“I’ll tell you something, young fella, life’ll fuck you in the ass as soon as look at you. You remember that. In fact it likes to fuck you in the ass.”

Gareth put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Dad, I told you it’s going to be okay. We’ve got this other thing now, this land at Empty Mile, and you, me, Johnny, and Stan here, we’re all going to be rich. You want to watch us mercury what we got today?”

David closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “No.”

“Okay. I won’t be long. Just try and relax, okay?”

Gareth headed out of the room for the barn. Stan followed him, glad to get away from the frightening drunk man. I was the last out. As I passed David he caught hold of my arm.

“It’s good you and Gareth are friends. He’s always been a good son, a good boy… But people don’t seem to take to him too well. It’s good that you like each other. Especially after your father and all.”

“My father?”

“When he cut him out of that land of yours. Boy, that deal was all Gareth could talk about for weeks. The land and how if they could somehow get it they were going to be rich, rich, rich. And then, boom, your father decides to up and go it alone. I’ve never seen Gareth so upset. Maybe things are turning out okay now, I don’t know, but he almost went crazy back then.”

I wanted to question David more about the relationship between my father and his son, but Gareth stuck his head through the doorway and asked if I was coming or what and I was forced to bite down on the explosion of understanding David’s words had ignited within me and instead put on the face of a man whose only thoughts were of gold and the money it could bring.

Placer gold , gold you can just dig out of a river, comes in particles of various size-sometimes flakes, sometimes grains, sometimes so fine the gold is known as flour gold. The smaller the particles of gold, the more difficult it is, using a pan alone, to fully separate them from the dirt in which they are found. The gold we’d dug out of Empty Mile was what would generally be called fine gold-grains a little smaller than grains of beach sand.

Panning works on the principle of specific gravity-the weight of something compared with the weight of water. Gold has a very high specific gravity and so in a pan of water it sinks to the bottom, allowing lighter material like soil and silica to be washed away. Black sand, though, which is made up of metallic minerals, also has a high specific gravity and tends to collect with the gold, making it difficult to separate the two with water alone. One of the easiest ways to get down to pure gold from concentrates is mercury amalgamation. The chemicals needed can be bought from most prospector stores and the process is simple enough that it was used by miners during the Gold Rush.

When I entered the barn behind the bungalow Gareth had already dumped the contents of our jar into a steel pan and was drying them out over a portable electric hot plate. Stan was standing beside him watching intently, absently stroking the moth bag around his neck. He looked up as I walked in.

“Showtime, Johnny.”

When the concentrates were dry Gareth spread them out on a large sheet of paper. From a drawer in the bench he took a cylinder-shaped magnet, covered it in Saran Wrap, and began dragging one end of it back and forth through the dark powder. Grains of black sand collected against it. Twice Gareth removed the plastic film and replaced it with a new piece.

Using a magnet to remove the magnetic elements of the black sand is a quick and easy first step, but black sand also contains nonmagnetic elements which a magnet can’t pick up.

Gareth tipped the remaining concentrates into a wide glass beaker. He put on clear plastic safety goggles and a pair of heavy rubber gloves, then he reached under the bench and brought up a half gallon ceramic flagon. He motioned Stan to move back.

“You don’t want to get any of this on you.”

Gareth unstoppered the flagon and slowly poured a clear liquid into the glass beaker until the concentrates were covered to a depth of about half an inch. Stan, made a little nervous by the intensity of the situation, looked over at me wide-eyed.

“We’re in a mad scientist movie, Johnny.”

Gareth chuckled as he carefully agitated the beaker. “Nitric acid, dude. Spill it on the floor, it’ll eat a hole to China.”

“Yikes!” Stan moved another step away.

“The grains of gold in here are covered with all sorts of shit-pine oil from the trees, magnesium, iron sulfide… I’m just cleaning them up before we use the mercury.”

Gareth rocked the beaker gently a little while longer then drained the acid into an empty glass bottle and rinsed the concentrates several times with water from a sink in the corner of the barn. He filled a plastic milk jug with water and brought it back with the beaker to the bench.

“Stage two. Mercury, please, nurse.”

He nodded at a stoppered glass container under the bench. Stan handed it to him like it was a bomb. Gareth opened it and poured the shiny liquid metal onto the concentrates in the beaker. Then he poured in water from the milk jug and began swirling the beaker around, using the motion of the water to mix the mercury and the concentrates together.

I’d seen my father go through this process several times and I knew that one of the properties of mercury is that it will absorb gold. The blob of mercury/gold compound that results is called amalgam and can be easily lifted from the remaining non-gold concentrates.

When he was done, Gareth used an old spoon to remove the amalgam from the beaker. Without thinking, Stan and I both moved a little closer. This was magic. This was alchemy. We were now looking at a firm, dull gray lump that would soon release a pure metal we could sell for money.