Part 1: A Mostly True Story
Jesse; the Geologist
It took nearly 2 hours to drive the rocky creek-road, which was much more creek than road, from Star Mine to the top of Cottonwood Pass. He stood there among the trees, quaking, like the aspen trees around him, a hand on the side of his truck to steady himself from the assault of the surreal. Summer was surrendering to fall and the weight of the wheel was upon him, knowing what he’d just left behind. No one had followed, and the road was empty in front of him all the way down to Buena Vista. Still, he kept looking back. The late afternoon sun cast the entire valley in shadow, like his soul, soaked in a growing darkness, cleaved with guilt and shame. Blood was surely on his hands and he could never forget where he buried the hatchet.
He was the project manager for a group of investors who were speculating that the price of gold and silver would continue to go up from it’s already historic highs. Their logic was “why not go direct to the source” which seemed like a reasonable way to cut out the middle man, by owning their own gold mine. Jesse was hired to do a feasibility and investment evaluation on what had been one of the highest elevation gold and silver mining operations in the US – only a hundred years ago.
The Star had some viable history and gold was nearly 30 times greater than it had ever been before, while the costs of extraction were only 10 times more. Whether it was true, or otherwise, he’d sold himself, and now others, that there was a fortune under the dilapidated head frame of the Star Mine, just a thousand feet below the summit of Italian Mountain, a perfect location for the monied Europeans. It was all there, history, romance, adventure, a piece of the American dream. And a young man’s vision….and escape.
The previous summer, Jesse had been sitting in a bar called the Wooden Nickle in Crested Butte when he overheard, and then joined, three old-timers who swore the Star mine had an untapped stope, or was it two (?), with more gold (a lot more) in it than had ever been taken out of it during its heyday. They said their fathers had all worked the mine and one of them had been inside during the 30’s when it was being re-assessed for the second time. The old men talked about the logistics, worked out some of the problems and were so sure of the location of the untapped lode that Jesse failed to ask why they themselves hadn’t gone back to when, as younger men, they could have. It was also part of the code, you just didn’t ask that sort of question in the culture of mining. Their story was compelling, filled with the kind of detail that made it credible, referencing enough places and people and reasons for it’s still being there that Jesse found himself intoxicated with the idea, and his fever rose.
It had taken a year for Jesse to return, but the Star was about to shine again. So that’s why he was back, far from everything, with men, money, machinery, and a plan.
Jesse had grown up around mines and mining, he had a degree in geology, loved the outdoors and had a good reputation for knowing the mining districts and history, and he had worked in a number of mines himself. He’d put himself through college by working summers, underground, in the southwest mineral belts of Colorado.
From the moment he’d heard about the Star at the Nickle, he kept it in his imagination. He’d done the research, contacted the owners and spoken to others about the history. One thing after another piled on his dogma until he was washed in the blood of the lamb and he had found his religion, unshakable in the light of other’s doubts and recrimination. He told his boss about it, and then his boss mentioned it to a group of European speculators and within a year, the project had come together. He volunteered himself because it meant he’d be living in the West Elks for the summer, far from all the women and money and office politics that made for a murky brew of toil and trouble back in Boulder. And there was also fishing.
Taylor Park, and the dozens of tributaries that fed into it, were thick with rainbows, brooks, and the occasional browns, particularly near the mouth of the Taylor reservoir. His plan was to do his job during the day and then fish at dusk, for an hour or two, and leave the muck behind while wading the waters of the impassable West Elks. This was the kind of job he was drawn to, but it was also his first big project where he’d be the boss and where he would be the youngest at the impromptu camp. He looked it too. Boyish, beardless, with long, unkempt hair he stuck out from the rest of the crew in age and experience and except for the rocks, shared little else with the others. But he had a swagger, because he knew what he was doing and with the power of the paycheck behind him, he thought he’d be able to handle any situation that arose. He was wrong.
Dave; the Cook
The camp needed a cook. One who could cope without running-water, in-door plumbing, or electricity. A cook who would have to cut his own wood for the oversized stove and oven that occupied nearly the entire kitchen area with a silver polished surface of nearly 45 square feet. It was a cast iron monster, coal-skuttle gray, with wrought iron engraving, huge claw feet, a hood and stack that made it look like an industrial appliance for trolls, or troglodytes where beasts were boiled and eaten in haste. Besides the profligate stove-oven, it was otherwise a bare bones kitchen with elementary tools and crockery, and promised whoever worked there a marriage of heat and wood and water and time, so the number of cooks available for the job was limited to the one who applied, Dave.
He had learned to cook in school, at the esteemed institution for wayward juveniles for the state of Colorado. It turned out, however, that Dave had taken his culinary skills very seriously in reformatory confinement, and food was, perhaps, his singular soft spot on an otherwise cankerous exoskeleton and he assured Jesse that he could make a meal for 10 hungry men at a time and they could expect, like Dave himself, that the food would be above average, and hot, and satisfying, and be on the table 3 times a day.
He hadn’t misrepresented himself, he was, in fact, a spectacular cook and over the summer months had whipped his kitchen into a wood and metallic mess hall and food foundry that would have made any chain gang feel better at the end of a long day. He was a connoisseur convict with a passion for pasta and proud of it.
Dave had been hired through a work release program. He was wire cut, with venous arms and hands. His left arm was hypertrophic “from the cooking” he said. He was well below six feet tall, but you didn’t want to mess with him. Maybe he was 120 lbs, but every ounce was mean, malicious, and dangerous. Like Audey Murphy, only completely different in all the ways that mattered. The knuckles on his hands stuck out like knots on a branch and augmented his gnarled and surly personality. He had tattoos that had tattoos that had tattoos. He carried a large knife on his belt “for my work”, when asked, and wore steel toed boots morning, noon, and night. The coffee he made every morning was stronger than any of the crew had ever had, and no one, not even the larger than life DiCamillo brothers made a comment about the brew.
In a word, he was menacing. A snake without the charmer. But he was also desperate to prove himself, although it was never clear why, or what his incentives were, (a women was mentioned once), so he would catch himself about to lose his shit on someone, or something, and in the middle of an arm and hand raised in molten hot anger, he would stop, turn, and drop whatever he was going to throw, or maul, and walk away. Until he didn’t.
The Crew; as Motely as They Come
The Star Mine had been worked, intermittently since about 1872. It was mostly a silver deposit with the attendant gold that often accompanied the mineral argentite, but when World War II was about to break out in the late 1930s, it was reopened by the Livingston family that had owned it for the previous 40 years, for the copper, lead and zinc, and if the precious metals that accompanied them were removed, so much the better. And in the late 1970s, another gold rush had brought attention to mines like the Star as the price went soaring and investors and speculators came knocking. Colorado was famous for its boom and bust cycles that left ghost towns and places like the Star high and dry when the fickle light of attention wandered elsewhere.
It was 1980 and the Star was rising, again.
The mine was located near timberline, so it could only be operated during the summer months, but on the property there was a building about the size of a small hotel, made from hand-hewn logs that measured 8 x 8 and the walls were nearly 100 feet in length, east and west. About half that in the north and south directions. Every timber had been fitted into place so precisely that even time and her sister elements (earth, wind, fire) had found it futile to try and pry it apart. The doors were still airtight, the few windows there were had a double shutter arrangement that required tools and patience to coax them open.
When Jesse, who was the first to arrive at the site, tried to access the building, he found the dead bolts frozen, inaccessible, and forbidding so he spent the first night in his truck, waiting for the crew to help him with the task. There was only one door accessible to them, the kitchen door, because the main door on the opposite end of the building was still half buried in snow and it opened outward. That too would be a crew thing. The south facing kitchen door was free of all other encumbrances except the locks and shutters, but Jesse was sure the crew could figure out how to get in without destroying the integrity of the aperture.
The rest of the 2 story building stood complete and whole, with a tin roof someone had installed in the last decade to do battle with the the embarrassment of snowfall during winter. For miles, it was the only building, and few people knew of its existence. Hidden year around by nature’s curtains of trees and snow, the cabin hibernated peacefully between the vacillations of precious metal pricing and the itinerant forces of war and peace. Jesse was told the last use of the cabin had been about 10 years before his arrival so ice and rust had built up around the locks, for which he had keys, but a blow torch and solvents were going to have to be involved.
From the kitchen steps, roughly a hundred yards away, a 50 foot high head frame of the mine made in the same way as the cabin, stood on its six wooden legs and another hundred yards from there, was the main adit, dumps, and excavation works. The site had been laid out for convenience and efficiency, the scenery be damned. It was constructed by the original Swedish immigrant prospectors who clearly knew something about log cabins and construction, but not much about mining, (if the old men at the Nickle were to be believed). They had built their fortress to survive snow, wind, ice, and vandalism so when they would return in the spring the edifice would still be there. 100 hundred years later, Dave, the crew, and the geologists, were proof of their handy work and craftsmanship. The latter were now beneficiaries of the former and would be working, sleeping and eating in their Swiss chalet stoking their collective dreams across the span of time, bound by a golden chain.
The crew was hired as a packaged deal by Jesse’s boss back in Boulder. They came from a family of miners where mining and milling was the ancestral business and had been for decades, even centuries if you counted their predecessors from the Dolomites in Italy. The DiCamillo brothers were well known within the microscopic world of free-lance operators. There were 4 of them and they all looked alike. Round, strong, swarthy Italian men who years ago had lost their shapes in the darkness of the underground and now, in their late 40s and early 50s bore the scars of a rough-necks’ life.
Each of the DiCamillos was a specialist, Bob handled the jack-hammers, Marco did explosives, setting charges while the others sat in the safe-stopes, or cut-outs, and ate meatball sandwiches that each of their respective wives had sent them out into the underworld with. Lou had all the mechanical duties. If it broke (and it always broke) Lou was the go-to guy. Vinny was the youngest, at 42, the most rotund, resourceful, and a pneumatics and hydraulics genius.
They stayed in their lanes. They moved four abreast wherever they went. The DeCamillos were close, d’familia, and reticent to the rest of the world except for general instructions but, otherwise, they were there to mine, and muck, and move ‘these rocks from here to there’ and ‘make hole’, an existential irony of sorts which always made Jesse smile when he heard them talking about it.
And they could eat, like large, hard working men who had just come out of the underworld. Exiting as if they’d been trapped for days, like water buffaloes from a pen, they broke out of the darkness patting and belting themselves free of mud and dust with one thing on their mind. Food. Meaty, gob-smacking eaters of animals and pastry and great consumers of potatoes, onions, pasta and coffee. More coffee than a small coastal village consumes in an entire winter. The fire never went out in Dave’s stove and oven. The DiCamillos’ appetite had enslaved Dave to the titanic enamel covered appliance. The kiln was constantly stoked to keep the crew content and fed. All was well and proceeding as planned, and then when it didn’t, hell’s door opened wide, bit, and swallowed hard.
The Drunken Russians
The Star mine was remote. A helicopter could land about 3 miles to the south; but there was no helicopter. Otherwise, you had to hike or four-wheel up Swedes Creek which tore itself apart to get to Taylor Park. It battered and rammed its way through the steep thickets of pine and aspen, devouring rocks and left trees hanging in its wake. Rarely was the water anything other than white in its cataclysmic rush to level ground miles below. From the pre-war work done during the late 30s and early1940s, the original mine road had devolved into the main waterway. The DiCamillos called it “one fucked up road, man”.
Sometime during the various re-openings, the miners had transgressed two natural drainages and as a result, pirated and inadvertently redirected that water to flow along the route until only a few stranded pieces of the original mine road were left. And some of those pieces were hung above the creek like floating bridges to nowhere, so driving was glacially slow and uncomfortable for the first/last 4 miles. Dave had to drive it twice a month for supplies which were 3 1/2 hours away, and it was on one of the early supply runs that Jesse asked him to pick up the rest of the team.
Jesse’s boss had brought in two more geologists who neither he, nor his boss, had ever met. The investors from Europe felt they needed a different perspective to add to the mix of Americans and they must have scoured the bargain basement to find the two Russians they chose to bring in. Dave was going to pick them up in Delta at the bus station after he’d finished his supply run, which meant that one of the geologists was going to have to ride in the back of the truck.
They were Russian. They looked Russian, whatever that meant, and Dave picked them out of the bus population pretty quickly. Just as quickly, Dave and the Russians recognized they didn’t share a common language. One didn’t speak Russian and the others knew only a few words of English, one of which was vodka. Dave knew that word too, but had kept it out of his mouth for a while. But he complied, and through sign language and the obvious alcoholic signs of body and soul spoken amongst them, he picked up a bottle of vodka and cigarettes. When he returned with the booty, both Russians made it clear they needed more of each vice if the supply runs were 2 weeks apart. Dave’s ire began to rise and a poisonous spittle gathered in his craw as he walked back into the liquor store. The Russians had given him $100, which he spent entirely, including a gratuity for himself, and he slowly burned as he made his way back to the truck. The two middle aged geologists had already broken into the supply of drink and smoke and Dave was pissed. It was 10 in the morning. He may have been a hired hand, but he was no one’s errand boy. Strike one.
This is the end of Part 1. See the rest of the story at electrikbikeorkestra.com
