Thursday, April 22, 2010
For everyone that keeps asking, YES, plans are underway for another summer of gold prospecting. We'll head down California way. We are planning to be down that way for almost 3 months. We are already assembling equipment and working on the lists of supplies. Since I am going to be working here in Sutherlin, Oregon for the next 2 months, I want to get a head start with getting ready for this trip. We are planning some lengthy wilderness backpacking trips & campouts. It will be great to get to the backcountry and away from civilization once again. We learned a lot on our trip last summer and know a few things that we want to add to our gear and supplies. There's lots of great new prospecting equipment and tools these days so I am in the process of doing research for this next gold prospecting expedition.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" --Henry David Thoreau
I know there are those who think we are foolish to be going off, on yet another gold adventure, at our age. Remember, "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever." I leave all of you with a few wise words from Steve Jobs ~ see article below.
Do What You Love: Time Is Too Short To Do Anything Else
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, delivered a truly inspirational commencement address to some 5,000 Stanford University graduates. Without further adieu, his message:
"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The First Story is About Connecting the Dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.
Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: 'We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?' They said: 'Of course.' My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.
Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My Second Story is About Love and Loss.
I was lucky--I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation--the Macintosh--a year earlier, and I had just turned 30.
And then I got fired.
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down--that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.
I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me--I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
Fired From Apple
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My Third Story is About Death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: 'If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.'
It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Diagnosed With Cancer
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer.
I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.
My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.
I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.
And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma--which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.
It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.' It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much."
The Stanford (University) Report June 14, 2005
"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The First Story is About Connecting the Dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.
Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: 'We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?' They said: 'Of course.' My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.
Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My Second Story is About Love and Loss.
I was lucky--I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation--the Macintosh--a year earlier, and I had just turned 30.
And then I got fired.
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down--that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.
I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me--I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
Fired From Apple
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My Third Story is About Death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: 'If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.'
It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Diagnosed With Cancer
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer.
I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.
My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.
I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.
And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma--which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.
It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.' It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much."
The Stanford (University) Report June 14, 2005
Dreams of Gold - Fall 1981
On the morning of January 24, 1848, a laborer spotted some shiny glitter in the mill race. He was working for James Marshall in Coloma, CA at a saw mill where they were cutting lumber for the settlement around Sutter’s Fort called Sacramento. He dutifully carried the golden pieces to his boss who then excitedly carried them down to his boss, Captain Sutter. They began to test the small nugget by pounding on it and cutting on it. They soon realized that it was indeed gold. It took the remainder of that year for the news of the gold discovery to reach around the world.
The next year, 1849 saw the largest migration of people in history. The world literally rushed in. Towns in California became deserted overnite as people sold or merely abandoned their stores and farms and headed for the gold fields. People on the east coast trekked overland or sailed around the tip of South America to reach the El Dorado. They packed what they could and left families and friends behind, many never to return. Men pulled two wheeled carts, pushed wheelbarrows and walked two thousand miles across deserts and mountains. The more prosperous could afford horse or oxen drawn wagons. Many died along the way. Families were decimated by disease and hardship. Some turned back but most kept coming.
When they finally arrived in the gold fields of California, they discovered that the gold wasn’t just lying about to be picked up. It required hard labor to move the rocks and gravel. If the gold was hard to come by, the necessary supplies were even more scarce. When they were available, they were extremely expensive. Most of the miners barely kept even and after a few months or at most a year or two, gave up the dream and either turned to a job or returned home in defeat. This whole experience was referred to as "Having been to see the elephant."
The mountains of Northern California are magical, even to the occasional traveler. Steeped in rich history, the river canyons literally echo with the cries of the 49ers, the crazily wonderful body of men and women who rushed to California to make their fortune. Evidence of their herculean efforts abound and one cannot help but get caught up in a feverish energy that pervades your spirit. The first time I experienced the North Fork of the American River was in April of 1978. It had been a wet spring and I was there with my friend, Jim, for the annual trout opener. Like most openings, the water was too high for fishing but hey, we were there to party.
Every little gully was filled with roaring rivulets plunging down the verdant hillsides, creating miniature Yosemites around each corner of the road. Wild flowers cascaded over the rocks tangled with ferns. The rich smell of fresh earth and the pungent odor of pine mingled to fill my senses. The road, nearly non-existent on the map, was a one lane rock strewn trail that meandered down into the canyon for 8 miles. The steep sides dropped vertically for what looked like thousands of feet although 80 to 100 feet was probably closer to the truth. The deeper into the canyon we went, the more magical it became. At the bottom of the canyon was the confluence of the North Fork with Shirttail Creek and an old, rickety suspension bridge that shook and swayed as we crossed. I was an amateur historian of the gold rush so when Jim told me about the gold that was plentiful in Shirttail Creek, my ears perked up like a dog on point.
I had dabbled in a little gold dredging with my Uncle Morris when I first got out of the Navy. A gold dredge is a motorized, floating suction device very much like an underwater vacuum that sucks up rocks, gravel and hopefully gold and transports it up to the surface where it is then classified across a set of riffles. You need underwater breathing equipment as well as a wet suit to keep you warm. Since gold is significantly heavier than rock, it settles out immediately and the rocks and sand are carried off, back into the river. I immediately began planning a few gold diving trips to Shirttail Creek. As events occurred, it wasn’t to be for another two years.
I’d like to say that when I walked away from my career of 20 years in 1981 and headed for the mountains of Northern California, I knew what I was doing. To be honest, I didn’t have a clue. They say that God looks out for fools and children. I must have fit one of those categories because I certainly needed all the help I could get. It wasn’t that I was going toward anything, it was more of a running away. Running away from life. Oh, I had some wild fantasies about living on the river, mining for gold and becoming my own man so to speak. But those daydreams had no connection to reality. Little did I suspect how closely my reality would come to fit my dreams.
At the time, I was a 40 year old computer programming burnout at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California. Although I had worked my way up from a lowly technician to a computer programmer and was making fairly decent money, I had become disillusioned by working at a "job". In particular, the work that I was doing seemed empty and meaningless. I had been married for almost 20 years but just like my job, the marriage was a burnout too. The year, 1980 was the lowest of the low for me. The divorce rode on my shoulders like a set of gargoyles, leering down at my pathetic efforts to make the most of a bad situation. I wandered through my job in a trance for most of that year. My friends wanted to know how long I had to live since I looked like death warmed over. Like a drowning man, I clutched at anything that seemed less dark than the corners of my mind. One of those lighter images came in the form of Charlotte, a fellow burnout on the van pool that took us to and from our jobs. Like me, she had recently divorced and was looking for life’s alternatives, not sure what they even looked like. We traded our stories and our dreams and, in the process, fell in love. That, as they say was the beginning of the rest of my life.
One of Charlotte’s dreams was to live in the woods or in the country at least. Using each other’s dreams to validate the other, we came up with a "plan". So now we had a set of fools or children on the loose. We would quit our jobs and go live on the river in a tent. Sounded like the simple life to us. I cashed out my retirement and off we went, happy go lucky and all. Our first home as husband and wife was a tent, an awning with a cupboard and campstove and a makeshift outhouse in the bushes on the bank of Shirttail Creek.
The next year, 1849 saw the largest migration of people in history. The world literally rushed in. Towns in California became deserted overnite as people sold or merely abandoned their stores and farms and headed for the gold fields. People on the east coast trekked overland or sailed around the tip of South America to reach the El Dorado. They packed what they could and left families and friends behind, many never to return. Men pulled two wheeled carts, pushed wheelbarrows and walked two thousand miles across deserts and mountains. The more prosperous could afford horse or oxen drawn wagons. Many died along the way. Families were decimated by disease and hardship. Some turned back but most kept coming.
When they finally arrived in the gold fields of California, they discovered that the gold wasn’t just lying about to be picked up. It required hard labor to move the rocks and gravel. If the gold was hard to come by, the necessary supplies were even more scarce. When they were available, they were extremely expensive. Most of the miners barely kept even and after a few months or at most a year or two, gave up the dream and either turned to a job or returned home in defeat. This whole experience was referred to as "Having been to see the elephant."
The mountains of Northern California are magical, even to the occasional traveler. Steeped in rich history, the river canyons literally echo with the cries of the 49ers, the crazily wonderful body of men and women who rushed to California to make their fortune. Evidence of their herculean efforts abound and one cannot help but get caught up in a feverish energy that pervades your spirit. The first time I experienced the North Fork of the American River was in April of 1978. It had been a wet spring and I was there with my friend, Jim, for the annual trout opener. Like most openings, the water was too high for fishing but hey, we were there to party.
Every little gully was filled with roaring rivulets plunging down the verdant hillsides, creating miniature Yosemites around each corner of the road. Wild flowers cascaded over the rocks tangled with ferns. The rich smell of fresh earth and the pungent odor of pine mingled to fill my senses. The road, nearly non-existent on the map, was a one lane rock strewn trail that meandered down into the canyon for 8 miles. The steep sides dropped vertically for what looked like thousands of feet although 80 to 100 feet was probably closer to the truth. The deeper into the canyon we went, the more magical it became. At the bottom of the canyon was the confluence of the North Fork with Shirttail Creek and an old, rickety suspension bridge that shook and swayed as we crossed. I was an amateur historian of the gold rush so when Jim told me about the gold that was plentiful in Shirttail Creek, my ears perked up like a dog on point.
I had dabbled in a little gold dredging with my Uncle Morris when I first got out of the Navy. A gold dredge is a motorized, floating suction device very much like an underwater vacuum that sucks up rocks, gravel and hopefully gold and transports it up to the surface where it is then classified across a set of riffles. You need underwater breathing equipment as well as a wet suit to keep you warm. Since gold is significantly heavier than rock, it settles out immediately and the rocks and sand are carried off, back into the river. I immediately began planning a few gold diving trips to Shirttail Creek. As events occurred, it wasn’t to be for another two years.
I’d like to say that when I walked away from my career of 20 years in 1981 and headed for the mountains of Northern California, I knew what I was doing. To be honest, I didn’t have a clue. They say that God looks out for fools and children. I must have fit one of those categories because I certainly needed all the help I could get. It wasn’t that I was going toward anything, it was more of a running away. Running away from life. Oh, I had some wild fantasies about living on the river, mining for gold and becoming my own man so to speak. But those daydreams had no connection to reality. Little did I suspect how closely my reality would come to fit my dreams.
At the time, I was a 40 year old computer programming burnout at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California. Although I had worked my way up from a lowly technician to a computer programmer and was making fairly decent money, I had become disillusioned by working at a "job". In particular, the work that I was doing seemed empty and meaningless. I had been married for almost 20 years but just like my job, the marriage was a burnout too. The year, 1980 was the lowest of the low for me. The divorce rode on my shoulders like a set of gargoyles, leering down at my pathetic efforts to make the most of a bad situation. I wandered through my job in a trance for most of that year. My friends wanted to know how long I had to live since I looked like death warmed over. Like a drowning man, I clutched at anything that seemed less dark than the corners of my mind. One of those lighter images came in the form of Charlotte, a fellow burnout on the van pool that took us to and from our jobs. Like me, she had recently divorced and was looking for life’s alternatives, not sure what they even looked like. We traded our stories and our dreams and, in the process, fell in love. That, as they say was the beginning of the rest of my life.
One of Charlotte’s dreams was to live in the woods or in the country at least. Using each other’s dreams to validate the other, we came up with a "plan". So now we had a set of fools or children on the loose. We would quit our jobs and go live on the river in a tent. Sounded like the simple life to us. I cashed out my retirement and off we went, happy go lucky and all. Our first home as husband and wife was a tent, an awning with a cupboard and campstove and a makeshift outhouse in the bushes on the bank of Shirttail Creek.
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