I stood on the edge, sucked my mouthpiece hard to test for air, straightened my mask and stepped off the side. That first time I dropped into the Stanislaus, even over the engine’s roar, I heard the river splash closed over my head. The icy water flushed through my wetsuit as I jerked around to grab the boulder. Two seconds later, the muddy spring thaw flipped me upside down and ripped away my mask and air hose. Blinded, panicked and desperate for air, I clawed my way up toward the noise. Topside, clinging to my virgin gold dredge’s bright yellow pontoons, I was gasping and spitting out sand. Nobody ever told me I could die out here. I had a lot to learn. After asking a thousand questions around the Italian Bar evening campfire then working twelve hours a day under water, by mid-summer, I knew just enough to stay alive and maybe even to prosper.
Gold seems to have a mind of its own. It doesn’t defy the rules of physics, it’s simply bends them a little. Since it’s so heavy, of course it sinks to the bottom but I never could figure out why it didn’t follow a straight-line. I’ve found dozens of nuggets hiding on the downside of boulders. In order to get there the gold had to travel downstream, turn 90° right or left, then bury itself in the overburden while working inexorably toward bedrock.
With Spring past, the Stanislaus was running shallow and smooth. The gold that rocketed downstream a couple of months earlier was settled and waiting to be found. After looking under every single boulder and through every crevice in the center of the river, I turned 90° toward the Volkswagen-sized rock along the shoreline. The water spun around it creating a vortex with a calm inlet just below. Odd that the most productive places I drift my fish line are often the best places for gold.
I didn’t find anything at the bottom of the little hollow and worked my way vertically to-wards the big rock. With my dental picks, a twelve-inch flat-nose screwdriver and my nozzle I started scraping away at the support for the boulder. That was about the time I noticed the ex-treme angle it was leaning. Toward me! A brighter mind would have walked away. I stayed scraping and pulling at the crushed rock. “How many years has this thing sat here like this?” I wondered. “Is this a recent arrival or is it in the same spot the Fortyniners first found it?” I kept picking away. Since it was egg shaped, I convinced myself it wouldn’t tumble. No doubt it would just slide. If it did, could I move fast enough to just grab on and ride it out toward the center? In the very same instant that I decided there wasn’t enough gold in this entire river worth dying for, I saw a shining explosion of color at the point of my screwdriver. This wasn’t just a clicker to go into my bottle; it was big enough to grab with my fingers, in fact my whole hand. A small piece, bigger than anything I’d ever found before, broke away as I touched it.
Icebergs are 10% visible and 90% under the surface. Maybe this was like an iceberg. I kept digging, scraping away layer after layer from around this shining example of success. Occasion-ally I looked up at the big boulder but I was hooked. The nugget looked huge. If I let this go, it would be like cutting loose a million-dollar trophy fish. Working like an underwater Egyptolo-gist, I dug even deeper. Grain-by-grain, I sucked away the crushed granite until the big nugget started to wiggle ever-so-slightly. I wanted it whole. If I didn’t break it again, its value would increase at least threefold. Finally it dropped loose into my hand. It was so heavy, I doubted it could be sucked up the hose. I certainly wasn’t going to test the hypothesis. I spit out my mouthpiece, and pulled off my gloves with my teeth. With one hand high over my head, I started calling for my brother, Ken. I made him step into the water to carefully take the treasure from me. When I opened my hand to show him I almost screamed. I couldn’t understand what had happened. My huge shining hunk of gold had shrunk. Knowing insanity when he saw it, Ken took it very respectfully and carefully set it up in the gold pan a dozen feet from shore.
As I dropped my weights, I remembered the basic rule of gold merchandising. Use the fat-test bottle you can find and fill it with water. The more water, the more magnification. I must’ve been looking through a whole lake for that nugget to shrink so much on its way top side. That one day was the best gold-producing day I ever had. Maybe Ken was a good luck charm. I didn’t press my luck any further underneath that boulder. We moved down-river the very next morning.