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It’s Raining Gold We didn’t move here for the gold. We moved here for the green craggy foothills and their raging white rivers. We didn’t move here to hunt down and carve out another vein from the Mother Lode. We moved here to join the community at Mother Truckers, the hippy health food store tucked beneath the pines where mother share and profit from the bounties of their gardens. But each day we drive out our driveway, we are reminded that 150 years ago, humans in this area had different aspirations. The mountain across our little pleasant valley is gone. Only a cliff of raw red clay remains. One hundred fifty years later, a few brave ponderosa pines are just starting to climb up the sheer bank, again screening Mother’s flesh with a comfortable, breathing green skin. But in the county, the scars and still open wounds from those hydraulic mining days remain omnipresent. The little towns, now transformed into tourist meccas, are adorned with several huge water cannons, statued in age, reminders of the power that rolled into this area and washed it away to get to the riches hidden deep within. Last year, a hole opened in a local family’s home and literally swallowed one of its occupants into the treacherous tunnels and human-exploded caves that continue to undermine our future with our still unresolved past. Around the bend from our house is a plaque commemorating the nation’s first long-distance telephone line. It was installed and used to break the nation’s first environmental law. Apparently, the farmers downriver from the miners won a political reprieve stating that it was now considered wrong to wash mountains into rivers wherein they would silt up thousands of people’s water supplies and subsequently pollute them with mercurial sludge. The miners, however, were determined to extract their due and simply posted a guard at the top of the canyon to watch for the environmental inspector’s buggy coming down the only road From his post, the guard ran to that first phone and called a warning to the other major mine further up the canyon. All water cannons were silent by the time the horse clomped around the last bend. A few weeks ago, my daughter Iris and I took a hike to one of the major diggins, now transformed into a state park. We drove through fresh smelling forests of pines that opened to an artificially enlarged canyon. Gouged out cliffs met us up, down and sideways for what seemed like miles. We walked upon hill-sized mound after hill-sized mound of bits of quartz rock—white, shiny and barren—the riches from the rock bits pulled out by mercury baths. All dirt had long ago been sent to the silted riverbeds below and Mother’s useless bones were thrown into gigantic heaps for posterity. It’s nearly enough to break my heart. But 150 years later, Mother’s continuous miracle is in full bloom. In tufts and uneven rows, these white and grey hills are starting to burst forth into green.Since the landscape is still more than half bare bones, there’s plenty of space to watch each phase of the gradual healing: a patch of a few dozen blades of grass huddled together in a small south-facing depression, a tall gathering of last spring’s wildflowers in a deeper hollow filled in by last decade’s mini lawn patches, a row of buckbrush sheltering them from above where wildflowers used to bloom. And now, where a manzanita has been studiously, stubbornly growing and shedding leaves and birthing berries, a scrub jay comes to squawk and eat and hopefully drop a recycled ghost pine seed. Life gathers life. Life feeds life. Life fills in death, even in desperately desolate surroundings. Beneath each little green oasis I find a perfect circle of brown Motherly flesh. Each bush rains its leftovers and makes a pool of rich brown earth at its feet. It’s raining gold in the Sierra Nevadas, the richness of life slowly filling in where greed had so ruthlessly stripped it bare. And the birds are singing in triumph. mariana lives and writes and works for peace, love and understanding in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
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