It’s supposed to be about 10 degrees C in Tonopah, Nevada today. At least, that’s the predicted high.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably not there. I’m not there either: Most likely, like many people — me included — you’re not making a heck of a lot of travel plans just right now while you wait to see how things shake out, especially in the U.S., and what the COVID-19 virus is actually going to wind up bringing.
But it doesn’t mean you can’t go on the road, at least on the page.
There’s a guy in his 80s who runs a long, narrow rock and gem shop on North Main, a craggy, overextended guy — tall enough that his posture is permanently canted forwards, as if constantly bent down to talk to people who always seem to be shorter than him. I’m shorter than him. His face is tanned and all flat planes, as if honed down to its sharpest and most necessary edges. His eyes are unusually bright and set deep on either side of a long, straight nose.
The store opens when he wants to open it, and we’re lucky: we got there on a November day when he’s not actually supposed to be open, but he happened to be around, so the lights were on and the front door was unlocked. He wasn’t expecting customers — it’s more, he says, a summer thing. A television was chattering away in a half-curtained-off back room, where a big table is strewn with random, dusty chunks of rock.
His knees hurt, and he admits to that, but he moves like it’s not only his knees hurting.
The store’s got cut and polished gemstones, turquoise and other precious stones — he does cutting and polishing, too. There’s also a variety of found glass: bottles, plates. Among them, a range of Coke bottles, all with different prices. Why the different prices? I thought it might be about their condition — but no. It’s their location that matters — where the bottles were made, and that’s right on the bottles if you know where to look. He shows me. He’s looking for one from Wells, Nevada — something he’s never seen. There are a few others on his list, and he hopes to find them while he still has time.
It doesn’t mean you can’t go on the road, at least on the page.
The store’s fine and the owner’s better; he starts bartering before his customers even think of it, dropping prices right away, and keeping on going.
But that’s not the only thing that keeps on going.
He’s got a lot of stories, most about the way he still makes a living, long after most people retire. He owns a couple of mostly tapped out mining claims where he rock-hounds for mineral samples when he feels up to it. Sometimes, he has help, but it’s hard to find people who can keep up, even though they’re keeping up with an 80-year-old with occasional balance issues.
He’s got a turquoise claim with its own particular colours. The stone is named after his dog, who led him to the first outcrop. He takes his ATV to most of the places he searches, and it’s not only old mines either.
He prospects old waste dumps for bottles, especially at abandoned or unused military sites. Tells us how, with a partner, he’d been collecting metal from one military waste pit, days later developing a strange rash, an overwhelming lassitude, and an odd pattern of unfamiliar sores.
“Might have been radiation or a chemical or something,” he says. “Never found out what it was. We got better.”
It was a good site, profitable from what they found and hauled out that first time, but they never went back.
He weaves stories about sudden lucky finds, about rare gems spotted when he bent down to tie a boot, about how hard it is to find even company for a day or two so he’s not out searching alone.
And I desperately want to do exactly that, tramp through the heat and dry of Nevada November, poking through tailings piles and old trash middens for treasure.
I tell you all this with a bit of wistfulness, because I really think that the next few months will be very, very different. And that, for a while at least, most of our travel will be online or on paper.
I miss the road already.
Then I think again of that Tonopah rock-hounding octogenarian.
And I remember, he got better.
Here’s hoping for that for as many as possible.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire publications across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky
