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Apr. 15th, 2004 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
The vans were dark blue Dodges, and I didn't trust them one little bit.
Two years ago a van load of us had nearly been killed when a tire blew out on the freeway. All three vans in the convoy pulled over, of course, which was lucky. Between them all, we could only scrounge up one good spare and enough pieces to assemble one jack that worked.
Last year, on a field trip I missed, one of them had succumbed to spontaneous combustion. The mineralogy prof had a matted, framed photograph of it on his office wall. Picture the scene: Gray autumnal skies, a rain-shining gravel road through woods glorious in full Fall colors, blue hills on the horizon, and in the foreground, parked at an angle across the road as if placed there for an advertising photograph, another of those dark blue Dodge vans, all doors open, vomiting incredible quantities of orange flame from every window opening.
The bench seats may or may not have met the legal definition of 'upholstered.' The sound system, so-called, was a single-speaker AM-FM radio. But out here in the back end of beyond there were no stations within range.
Which was worse than it sounds, because in the silence Trent (so I will call him) felt called upon to talk. He'd been sawing back and forth on the steering wheel and nattering on about his 'babes,' girlfriends, real or (I suspected) imagined, for the past sixty miles.
I stared out the window at the passing moonscape. Well, no, the Moon wouldn't have rattlesnakes.
On second thought, there weren't any rattlesnakes here either. It was too high above sea level for them. Sagebrush, then. The Moon wouldn't have sagebrush. And on the Moon the faces of the rocky hills protruding from the plain here and there wouldn't have been pockmarked with abandoned gold mines.
"Why do they call it Atlantic City?" somebody asked.
I cleared my throat. "It's just barely east of the Continental Divide. The rivers here still drain east to the Atlantic, but once you get a few miles beyond South Pass they..."
"Yeah, whatever," Trent said. "Cassie. Cassie, now, she was a babe. She used to like to do it in..."
"Here's the town, what's left of it."
"Funny, isn't it? So many who rode this trail were going to California to find gold, and here, along the way, they had to drive right over a gold mine to get there."
"Oh, I don't know, Macho Mitch said, looking out at the gray-brown emptiness beyond the town's neglected graveyard. "If I'd'uv come here back then, I'd'uv taken one look and kept going west myself."
The van skidded to a halt. "Trent! What in hell--"
"I'm going to see what that is. I'm going to see who was so important."
'That' was a marble obilisk, in the center of the little graveyard. Most of the graves were just sunken spots in the ground, where coffins beneath had collapsed. The markers, if any, must have been wooden, because no trace of them remained. But that one grave was marked with a fine marble obilisk and surrounded by a foot-high wrought-iron fence.
Trent got out of the van, leaving the engine running and the door open. He took off his hat-- the only black hat and the only real Stetson in camp-- and flicked some dust from it. He put his hat back on and walked to the obilisk.
He stood there for a long minute, reading the inscription. Then he came back.
"Who was it?"
"Nobody important. Just some kid."
"Oh. Well, the next outcrop should be abotu five miles down the road, then off to the right."
Trent put the van in gear and drove, looking straight ahead through the windshield. He said nothing for a minute. Then he blurted words as if they'd been forced from him.
"He was eleven. He was driving a wagon, and the horses ran away. He was thrown out and the wagon ran over him. He was only freakin' eleven years old."
We drove on. The silence rode with us for hours.
Two years ago a van load of us had nearly been killed when a tire blew out on the freeway. All three vans in the convoy pulled over, of course, which was lucky. Between them all, we could only scrounge up one good spare and enough pieces to assemble one jack that worked.
Last year, on a field trip I missed, one of them had succumbed to spontaneous combustion. The mineralogy prof had a matted, framed photograph of it on his office wall. Picture the scene: Gray autumnal skies, a rain-shining gravel road through woods glorious in full Fall colors, blue hills on the horizon, and in the foreground, parked at an angle across the road as if placed there for an advertising photograph, another of those dark blue Dodge vans, all doors open, vomiting incredible quantities of orange flame from every window opening.
The bench seats may or may not have met the legal definition of 'upholstered.' The sound system, so-called, was a single-speaker AM-FM radio. But out here in the back end of beyond there were no stations within range.
Which was worse than it sounds, because in the silence Trent (so I will call him) felt called upon to talk. He'd been sawing back and forth on the steering wheel and nattering on about his 'babes,' girlfriends, real or (I suspected) imagined, for the past sixty miles.
I stared out the window at the passing moonscape. Well, no, the Moon wouldn't have rattlesnakes.
On second thought, there weren't any rattlesnakes here either. It was too high above sea level for them. Sagebrush, then. The Moon wouldn't have sagebrush. And on the Moon the faces of the rocky hills protruding from the plain here and there wouldn't have been pockmarked with abandoned gold mines.
"Why do they call it Atlantic City?" somebody asked.
I cleared my throat. "It's just barely east of the Continental Divide. The rivers here still drain east to the Atlantic, but once you get a few miles beyond South Pass they..."
"Yeah, whatever," Trent said. "Cassie. Cassie, now, she was a babe. She used to like to do it in..."
"Here's the town, what's left of it."
"Funny, isn't it? So many who rode this trail were going to California to find gold, and here, along the way, they had to drive right over a gold mine to get there."
"Oh, I don't know, Macho Mitch said, looking out at the gray-brown emptiness beyond the town's neglected graveyard. "If I'd'uv come here back then, I'd'uv taken one look and kept going west myself."
The van skidded to a halt. "Trent! What in hell--"
"I'm going to see what that is. I'm going to see who was so important."
'That' was a marble obilisk, in the center of the little graveyard. Most of the graves were just sunken spots in the ground, where coffins beneath had collapsed. The markers, if any, must have been wooden, because no trace of them remained. But that one grave was marked with a fine marble obilisk and surrounded by a foot-high wrought-iron fence.
Trent got out of the van, leaving the engine running and the door open. He took off his hat-- the only black hat and the only real Stetson in camp-- and flicked some dust from it. He put his hat back on and walked to the obilisk.
He stood there for a long minute, reading the inscription. Then he came back.
"Who was it?"
"Nobody important. Just some kid."
"Oh. Well, the next outcrop should be abotu five miles down the road, then off to the right."
Trent put the van in gear and drove, looking straight ahead through the windshield. He said nothing for a minute. Then he blurted words as if they'd been forced from him.
"He was eleven. He was driving a wagon, and the horses ran away. He was thrown out and the wagon ran over him. He was only freakin' eleven years old."
We drove on. The silence rode with us for hours.
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-16 06:23 am (UTC)It all depends on the times, and your perspective.
I believe there really is gold here, and it's usually in the vivid strokes of the storyteller's sword that you wield so well.
*huggles*