(April, 1983)
A local mining company hires me to plot up old underground mine maps, scrounging for leftovers. I come home every night.
I choke on drill rig diesel fumes as I collect baby poop brown rock chip samples, speckled with ruby, silver and gold, verified by effulgent sunlight between snow squalls charged with lightning. That night, we race down icy hairpin curves in a blizzard to the Carson City hospital 25 miles away. With twenty minutes to spare, my wife delivers our second daughter.
The assays come back ounce and a half gold and forty ounces silver to the ton, high grade ore, thirty feet below the surface, in the middle of the haul road, uphill from the mill. Bulldozers, loaders and Euclid dump trucks wait, fueled and ready. Instead, the Money Man takes away our drill rig and travels to New York City to hustle investors, again.
