The Last Pan Off Bonanza Creek

Cleanup

Cleanup is the part of placer mining people picture when they hear the words gold rush.

It is also the slowest, most careful part of the whole season, and the part where you find out whether your summer was worth anything.

You shut the water down. You pull the steel riffles and the black rubber matting under them out of the sluice, section by section, and wash everything that is caught in them into tubs.

That is your concentrate: black sand, fine gravel, and if God is good, gold.

We did it the morning of the twenty-ninth. It was the coldest morning yet, bright and clear, the sun just over the ridge and the frost still white on the gravel cut where the excavator sat with its bucket down.

I wore my orange chest waders and the black long-sleeve work shirt Clay had given me two Christmases ago, and his old green ball cap, faded nearly white at the brim.

I had not worn it since the funeral. That morning it felt right.

Eli carried the concentrate down to the foot of the sluice in a bucket.

Then I knelt beside the sluice in the cold water and took up the black plastic pan Clay had used for twenty years, the one with the chip out of the rim.

Panning down is not hard, but it takes patience. You swirl and dip and tip, swirl and dip and tip, and let the water carry off the lighter sand a little at a time.

Gold is heavy. It goes to the bottom and stays there if you are gentle.

I went slow. Eli stood beside me with the bucket and did not say a word.

I could hear the creek and a squirrel scolding somewhere up in the spruce and our breath, both of us, going in and out in little clouds.

The black sand thinned. And there it was, under the last skin of it. Flakes first, bright and flat, then the small nuggets rolling heavy in the bottom of the pan.

That rusty color, that worn flat shape. Bits of white quartz stuck to two of the larger pieces.

Our gold. I would have known it anywhere. Clay was right about the dark.

“That’s it,” Eli said softly. “That’s ours, isn’t it.”

“That’s ours,” I said.

Then he leaned down close over the pan, and he went very still.

He reached in past my thumb and picked out one small piece, no bigger than a fingernail, and held it up in the low sun.

It was a flat nugget, worn smooth, with one rounded end and a little notch on the side, almost a heart if you squinted.

It was nearly the same shape as the nugget Clay wore on a chain around his neck, the one his father found the year Clay was born.

We had buried Clay with that chain on. It had been the one thing I was sure of, the morning of the funeral.

Eli turned it over in his fingers. His eyes filled up, and he did not try to hide it, and neither did I.

“Mom,” he said. “Look at it.”

That nugget was gold. It belonged in the pan with the rest.

Every gram of that pan was going to Duncan to prove whose ground it came off, and every gram of it was money we needed.

I closed Eli’s hand around it with both of mine, my wet cold fingers around his.

“That one’s yours,” I said. “That one never goes to town.”

He put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap, and then he put his hand flat over the pocket, and kept it there for a while.

I said a short prayer in my head, the only one I could manage. Thank you. That was all.

We panned down the rest. By noon we had a little over nine ounces panned down clean in the bottom of Clay’s black pan, and a smaller vial of fines.

I decided right then I would carry it into town in that pan, just as it was.

It was a good four days on that cut. Clay’s last cut. His test holes had been right.