‘So how do you know you are getting one tenth of their gold?’ I persisted.
‘I don’t,’ he answered emphatically. ‘I take on trust what they give me.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I don’t tell the IRS anything and they don’t either, you understand?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘It’s a mutually beneficial conspiracy of trust.’
‘Exactly,’ he said, complimenting me on my understanding with a knowing wink.
A drive up into the hills at this time of the year confirmed to me just how fast summer was progressing. From a distance, the carpets of white mountain avens looked like the last remnants of snow, but as you looked closer you could see the pink blush of small clumps of moss campion and the deep purple of lupins, or an Alaskan breed of wild azalea. I mentioned to my companion the changing colours and how I understood what brought so many artists to Fairbanks. ‘Yeah, too damn many of them if you ask me. The place is coming down with artists, liberals and leftover hippies!’
Big John drove on to the mines and with macho redneck ebullience castigated anything that even smelled liberal or left wing. I listened and smiled quietly to myself. There wasn’t a word coming out of his mouth that he or I believed.
‘How did you make all your money?’ I asked.
‘Luck,’ he answered. ‘Like everybody else who made a little bankroll for themselves – luck, hard work and a lot of nervous energy.’
Big John’s bankroll was far from small, and he knew I knew it. When Big John realized you were not going to fall for his tall tales or that you saw through his redneck persona, he spoke openly. Apparently he made his money at the beginning of the oil boom. Having obtained the contract to supply the oil fields in the far north with everything from pencil sharpeners to giant propellers, he worked an eighteen-hour day organizing fleets of trucks on the haul roads and flotillas of Dakota freight planes flying from the lower 48 with heavy precision-engineered parts. ‘It was madness. I was ordering men and machines about like I was conducting the Second World War. Christ, I was only twenty-three at the time and before I was twenty-eight I had more millions in my bank account than I knew what to do with.’
I was waiting for him to add some fantastic elaboration, but he didn’t need to – the truth was fantastical enough. After the oil boom had settled and the pipeline was up and running, he looked around for something to do with his money. He had had a lot of fun with it in the meantime but was tired of fun. Because of luck and boredom, he bought up large mining companies that had ceased functioning. The price of gold on the world market was too erratic and the cost of extraction too high for the large companies to continue. Big John bought them not really knowing what they comprised. He laughed at the idea that he had become the largest private landowner in the state without knowing it. ‘Hell, I’m still trying to work out what the company owns, and where it is. Apparently, I now possess the fullest, most detailed and complete history of mining in America since I bought the company and all its records. The Smithsonian thinks I should donate it to them. But I keep telling them I had to pay a lot of money for them and if they are that valuable to them they should do likewise. And if they don’t, well, it’s kind of nice to own a chunk of history.’ I remembered his machine shop in Fairbanks and how all the long-outdated machines were kept clean and in working order. I believed his sentiments about the value of owning history.
I was just about to ask him another question when he announced that we were on the site of one of the mines he had leased. I could see nothing but mile upon mile of heaped rock and earth, as if a huge urban motorway was under construction. Everywhere as far as the eye could see there were piles of spoil and ugly man-made lakes that had been created when the earth was scooped up in search of gold. John told me that the miners are supposed to return the land to its original state. ‘But no-one ever sees, and no-one ever makes them,’ he said. I had not expected one mine to cover such a vast tract of land, but my companion explained that the permafrost was too difficult to dig through and too cold and dangerous to work for long periods. ‘In Alaska, you just gotta scratch the surface to find gold,’ he announced, pointing to the giant digger trucks hauling away hundreds of tons of the land surface to be washed by a huge machine called a dredge. After that, the waste or spoil was carted off to be dumped wherever was handy. It only took three men to work seven million dollars’ worth of earth-breaking machinery, and there were dozens and dozens of such mines. ‘Well,’ I thought to myself, ‘you don’t have to go to the moon to see lunar landscapes.’
We drove around for some twenty minutes as John explained to me how the operation worked. It was simple enough, and probably the one thing that had changed since Jack London’s days was the number of men, giant trucks and earthmovers. I asked him if anyone mined underground. He said that only a few big corporations could afford the technology and machinery to make it profitable. I thought of the three men working this mine with their seven million dollars’ worth of equipment. How could they ever afford to pay off the bank loan for such equipment? ‘Well,’ offered John, ‘the bank has no trouble lending it, so these guys must have no trouble paying it back.’ And with no more explanation than that he said there was one guy operating underground, in one of the abandoned mines that had belonged to the company he had bought. One or two men could still make a living in these old mines, but few men stuck it out for very long. It was very hard physical work in extremes of cold that are so profoundly invasive that part of you had to be already dead to stay there.
John addressed the man who was working the underground shaft only as Mark, an ex-Vietnam veteran who had arrived in Alaska a few years after his demob. Mark brought his AK 47, or something equivalent, with him from his homestead in the woods to the mine.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘It’s a free country up here. A man can do what he wants. Anyway, with a man like Mark you don’t ask too many questions.’
‘Why?’ I persisted, imagining some psychotic backwoodsman or John Bircher, seeing the enemy behind every tree and shooting at imaginary ghosts.
‘You’ll see,’ John said. ‘Mark isn’t much given to talking. He’s kinda choosy about what he says and who he says it to. But he’s the best goddamned miner in this part of Alaska.’
I ventured some more questions about the man but all John could tell me was that he had been living alone in the woods for twenty-eight years or more and only ventured into Fairbanks for essential supplies. The rest of the time either John or other miners working a few miles away collected whatever he needed for him.
‘But if he is so good a miner and he has been living out in the bush for so long, what does he do with all the gold?’
The question was obvious enough, and I should have known the enigmatic answer John would give.
‘Don’t know, and don’t ask,’ he said.
So we drove on, with me feeling edgy. I wondered how I might approach this recluse. John seemed to read my thinking. ‘You and him might have something in common, and I won’t be surprised if you get more out of him in twenty minutes than anybody else has in twenty years!’
Mark’s mining camp was a small, cramped affair with some items of heavy machinery heaving out black exhaust fumes and a pile of rusting metal parts, the hulks of several small trucks and several freshly deposited mounds of earth and rock. ‘Might be a few dollars in that lot,’ John said by way of a greeting as he slid out from the truck, gesturing for me to remain. Mark said nothing as his eyes wandered from John to me. I didn’t want to engage his glance and stared about me, feigning complete indifference. John and Mark moved towards the cabin and talked for a few minutes. Once again Mark’s face turned in my direction, but this time his eyes remained on me. I nodded my head and waved. Mark didn’t return the gesture. Instead, John signalled for me to join them. I did so, slowly, as if I was approaching a wounded animal whose reactions I could only guess at.
John made the preliminary introduction and I held out my hand to Mark. He took it and nodded a sil
ent acknowledgement. Then he looked at John again and asked, ‘Coffee?’
‘Sure thing,’ said John as he and I followed Mark towards his shed.
‘Only got two cups,’ Mark said quietly.
John, however, always carried a flask and a mug big enough to hold a pint of coffee with ease. He retrieved it from his truck, along with a half-finished quarter bottle of whiskey which he poured into the three cups once Mark had filled them with coffee. I thought it was a promising gesture and that perhaps John was right. Maybe Mark would be amenable to talking to a stranger. I already knew the taboo topics for miners and sensed a few others Mark might acutely shy away from.
The three of us exchanged some idle chitchat about the past winter and the amount of game in the hills. Mark was selfsufficient when it came to a meat supply, and out in the wilderness where he lived no-one was going to argue whether he took a moose or any other game out of season. I asked Mark banal questions about working in extreme conditions and living for so many years out in the bush alone. His answers were courteous and sometimes monosyllabic. He had the most intriguing blue eyes, neither steely nor soft, but they had a light in them that forced you to look into his face. In a man who wanted to give little away it made the exchange difficult.
Out of the blue, he asked, ‘You been in Alaska long?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘but it’s my second visit.’
‘Ever been down a mine?’
‘No,’ I answered again, realizing that he was happier asking the questions.
Big John, reading some signal I couldn’t, made some excuse about going to check his cell phone and walked back to his truck. Mark and I walked to the entrance to his underground shaft. He handed me a bulky torch. ‘It’s a long way down and very dark down there,’ he said. ‘You okay with that?’ At first I wasn’t sure if he was suggesting that perhaps he should come with me. But there was something in the way he said it that made me realize that Big John had maybe informed him of my own history in Lebanon.
‘Been in worse places, I think,’ I said, emphasizing the last two words.
Mark nodded and walked back towards his shed. He was a lean, angular man. Everything about his movement was slow and precise. It was difficult to tell his age, apart from the fact that he was a Vietnam veteran. He handled his body easily and there was no fat on it. I certainly hadn’t seen any whiskey veins in his face or any debauched look about him.
So I was left to my own devices, and I entered the gaping mouth of the shaft pleased that he had given me permission to enter his world but unsure of where it might take me. Less than twenty feet into this frozen artery into the earth, silence walks through you and hermetically seals you off from the world you have just left behind. I searched the ice-encased walls with my big flat-faced torch. I could see a tweedy mixture of rock, earth, pebble and, unbelievably, the twinkling white crusts of seashells. Everything was clear as crystal against the bright beam of the torch. Then, suddenly, the beam picked up a fury of white charging towards me. I couldn’t see what it was. My breath left me and I fell in defensive fear against the entrance wall. Some irrational part of me thought I had disturbed some monster whose breath was roaring past me. Then it was gone in an instant. I turned to look at the sky-blue opening that framed the entrance to the mine. Several ptarmigan were skittering into the sky, furious at my presence.
I continued on down the mine, every part of me tingling with adrenalin. I imagined I could hear my heart beating back at me like an echo from the pitch dark in front of me. But the absolute chill of the place soon numbed my nervous reaction, and paradoxically at the same time comforted me. The permafrost held the hollow together harder than several layers of tempered steel. Then, panic. What if there was some sudden glacial shift along the ancient fault line the mine had penetrated? Such shifts occur daily in Alaska but are of little significance and register infinitesimally on the surface. But I was way below and the ceiling could collapse, or, worse, the walls and floor could be crushed together and I would be fossilized here like something out of a Hammer horror film!
I kept going, down into the ice-numbing, petrifying dark. Just one glint of gold would make this endurable, I told myself. But I saw nothing, only the beam getting brighter as the dark got darker. I had had enough. If there was air down here, I wasn’t breathing it. Something greater than fear was smothering me.
I returned to the surface and walked back to where Mark and Big John stood examining the petrol generator that powered light into the mine. I tried to imitate the deliberate gait of Mark. ‘How anybody reckons that hell’s a hot place is beyond me,’ I said, with macho suaveness. Neither man reacted, beyond acknowledging my presence. ‘Jesus, Mark,’ I continued, ‘you must have lead-lined bones to work down there, or maybe you have a centrally heated diving suit somewhere?’ My jokes passed over their heads.
‘There’s more coffee over there, but the whiskey’s all gone,’ John said.
I nodded, but I was sure there was nothing that could ease the coldness in my bones.
After a few minutes, both men joined me.
‘How do you do it, Mark, year in and year out? There’s got to be more than gold down there.’
‘Well, there weren’t no topless ladies either, that’s for sure,’ John chimed in. Maybe he was anxious I was about to break the taboo.
Mark smiled, ever so slightly. ‘You get used to it after a while and then it doesn’t feel cold any more. Sometimes it can be colder up here than down the mine.’
Somehow Mark seemed to soften when he spoke about the mine. It was as if the mine was a place of refuge. We continued our conversation with more animation now. Mark asked me naive questions about Beirut and Belfast, which was only to be expected from a man who had had his own fair share of violence and had lived so far from human habitation that few enough fragments of world affairs interested him or even reached him. The afternoon soon brought itself to an end, and John and I headed back towards Fairbanks.
‘Well, he seemed to take to you,’ John ventured.
‘Yes,’ I returned, and smiled. ‘I suppose you can’t make up for a quarter of a century of solitary living in one afternoon. Do you reckon something bad happened to him in Vietnam?’
‘Other miners around here say so, though nobody quite rightly knows exactly what, and if he hasn’t said in twenty years he isn’t intending to.’
Big John was right, but a part of me felt that whatever it was that troubled Mark he took it with him into the dark cold of the mine and left it there. He seemed happy and at peace with his unspoken obsession. I wondered if John had much regular contact with the man, and asked him. He then launched into a story that threw all my observations up in the air.
Some time ago John had been ‘mooching around’ up in the hills and had called on some of the miners working his leases. Several of them mentioned that they had not seen Mark for almost a year. Miners keep pretty much to themselves, but independents like Mark usually run out of something or need a machine part eventually so they call at the other mines for help. The favour is returned whenever it is required. So the disappearance of Mark worried John. The man lived so far out in the bush that if anything serious had happened to him no-one would have known.
John decided to pay him a visit, but found no sign of him at his mine. He knew where his cabin was but had only been there once, many years before. So he drove as far as his 4 × 4 would take him, then started walking to the cabin. Big John knew that the man he was going to check up on didn’t appreciate unwanted visitors so he kept shouting at the top of his voice as he approached the man’s home. He emphasized that he did not want to be mistaken for a bear or a moose, and that Mark’s reclusive nature plus his semi-automatic rifle wouldn’t be too concerned to discriminate either way. ‘All the way up to his cabin I kept hollering and shouting and got no response. I had a mind more than once to turn back. Being out alone in the bush has a way of making you jumpy. This guy had been living half his life out there and there were enough storie
s and rumours about him and dozens of other “crazies” to make me want to turn back every time I put a foot forward. I was so scared I didn’t want to shout too loud in case he had gone off his head and decided I was the enemy coming to kill him.’
I smiled at this point, but John was having none of it.
‘I’ll tell you, man, I wasn’t smiling. I’m not what you would call a small man and the trees up here are hardly thick enough to hide a brush pole behind. So if he started shooting I was dead meat for sure.’
It was obvious that John was serious so I listened more intently.
‘The nearer I got to the cabin the more I told myself to turn back, and when I reached it I must have stood there for ten minutes or more calling out to him. But there was no answer. I didn’t know what to do. I thought, “What if I go and knock on his door and he’s inside in some weird paranoid state?” He could come flying out of that cabin firing on all cylinders and it would be bye bye, John. He could dump my body for the birds and the bears to pick at and that would be the end of me. I would never be found. And even if I was, who would know or could prove anything?’
‘Okay, John,’ I said, utterly intrigued. ‘You’re here now, so what happened?’
‘Well, as I got near the cabin door I could hear loud music playing. It was dance music, like a waltz or something. If he is alive, no wonder he can’t hear me, and if he’s not in there, then I’m clearing out of here faster than if a big Kodiak was running after me. So I went up to his door making as much noise as I could and stood there, waiting to see if it would open. I must have stood for a couple of minutes more listening to this loud waltz music, then, as I was about to bang the door with a big lump of timber I had picked up, it suddenly swung open.’