Mesa Trail ch. 3
Draft 3

"What makes a ten-year old girl think she can go out in a boat alone, at night, with only her dog for a sailing mate? Well...muscles. Exactly!"
–Kathi Appelt, from Keeper


How many know that gold's atomic number is 79? That it is thought to have been produced in a supernova nucleosynthesis?  Nuclea-whose this? That it formed as a result of the collision of neutron stars and that because at this time of the heavy bombardment 4 billion years ago of the earth's surface by so many asteroids that this particular type of glittery dust boiled deep down into the earth's crust's planetary core then hardened to form a mantle? Those miners of old, the Gold Rushers at Pike's Peak, or the Rushers out to the west coast at San Fransisco, saw that a nugget dug up not only looked precious but knew other things as well: the mind liked the look and feel of this stuff! ... it looked better than other metals, that was for sure, more pure, and was workable into other objects.  They knew that other civilizations had used this as a base of trade, that the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Romans, so many others, might spend entire decades and centuries scouring the earth for the settlement of veins of the pretty glittery rocks.  Pirates sailed the seven seas so to capture the great locked boxes full of the bullion and that bankers back east would always pay out raw cash in exchange.  Water that gathered at the top of the Flatiron mountains in narrow creases turned to creeks and gravity swished and swashed away the granite and dolomite for so many eons that it might expose the cosmic dust turned 'atomic element number 79' so that flakes might drag down to the bottom of the gulleys, some settling more, but some, some, if the miner was lucky, could be trapped inside a wooden contraption and filtered through a screen and onto a pan for examination. The miner might have indeed bitten the flakes to see if it was the real stuff or quartz of some other element.  He might collect it in a vial and watch it fill up to the cap until he knew that when full it was worth to him a hundred dollars. It looked just like a night in a fancy hotel room with a bottle of his favorite whiskey (yuck!) and good grub.