All About Dynamite Dave - by Meredith Greene

Chapter 2: Dave’s Place

The place that Dave called home was not impressive to the adult eye, but to Jimmy and I, it was a magical spot; more interesting and fun than an amusement park, and without any waiting in line. About a minute’s walk down the road, from the top of our driveway, was the entrance to Dave’s place; from the road you walked up a steep driveway that was littered with embedded chunks of quartz and gaping potholes. The driveway’s ascent crescendoed about a half a minute’s walk up, and the ground leveled off completely into a small, dusty clearing, fenced in by tall pines and a few oaks.

The first thing you saw was the mine, off to the left of the clearing; the black, stone studded entrance was stuck onto the side of the mountain, as if Wile E. Coyote had painted it there, with the traditional timber supports, or ‘shorings’ showing. The opening of the mine was a good ten feet high and nearly eight feet wide. The thick, wooden shorings held up a steel lattice across the top of the mine’s ceiling, which was reinforced with ‘chicken wire’ fencing. It was there, we were told, to prevent rocks or dirt clumps from falling on one’s head from the earthen ceiling of the mine. Apparently, this had occurred when Dave first began working in the mine, but the particulars of that story were never talked about. It would, however, explain the several long, white scars on the top of Dave’s head, visible only when he removed his hat, which was a rare occurrence.

The shored part of the mine went into the mountain a good two hundred feet; when one walked into the entrance, the way became narrower and sloped downward at a slight angle. The tunnel could be lit by lanterns here and there, which weren’t often lit; Dave and Jenny preferred flashlights, or the helmets with the miner’s lamp attached to the front. About twenty feet into the mine, the shaft opened up into a large, high cavern; there the dry ground ended for the next 50 feet. A natural spring of unknown origin had filled this part of the mine a long time ago, long before Dave had become owner of it; even he didn’t know how deep it was. The water looked completely black, there being no sunlight to reach into it’s dark depths; it was spooky to think what may be down there. Jerk sometimes plunged into the water and swam across, when it was very hot outside.

“I wouldn’t swim in it.”, Dave said to us once, on a visit. He would always eye the water when crossing. “There’s probably a good many miners down there, in a cold sleep. Wouldn’t want to feel one of them grab hold of me.”
I thought this point was a logical one and never ventured to put so much as a toe in that obsidian -shaded water.
As much as Dave didn’t like the water, he managed to glean from it a poetic inroad into his wife’s good opinion; he dubbed the water ‘Lake Jenny’, ‘because it’s waters are as black as her beautiful hair.’; it was his attempt at poetry. I thought it a good verse, for a miner, and Jenny was sure to smile proudly every time the lake was called by it’s new name.

To get his equipment across the ‘lake’, Dave had constructed a rope-ferry. The ferry itself was thick and flat, made almost entirely of junk he’d collected from various places: part of a fiberglass sailboat, large, compressed Styrofoam blocks with the words ‘IDL, INC’ stamped into the sides, various lengths of lumber, rope, empty bleach bottles and a neon-blue cargo net. The whole thing was screwed, glued, nailed and stapled together and, to my knowledge, has never come apart. The ferry was about 10 feet square and stuck out of the water about a foot and a half, even with three people on it. It had two railings on opposite sides to hold onto and a guide for the rope on the side. One would pull on the bottom rope to go forward, the top one to go back towards the entrance of the mine. Once past Lake Jenny, the main cavern rose, then tilted down steeply, forming the main tunnel, which went on for about 40 feet. When it leveled out, the tunnel branched off into three smaller shafts. The two on the left Dave didn’t venture into; he told us that cave-ins happened there a lot, too many to even put up shoring in, as the rocks falling would tear down any structure before he’d have a change to make it strong enough. Looking far into them, one could see several hundred rocks of various sizes piled on the floor of the shafts; they looked as if they had never been moved from where they’d fallen. Every once in awhile, you’d hear a sharp crack as one of the rocks from the ceiling or wall fell down in those tunnels, landing on it’s fellow rocks below.

The largest tunnel to the right was ‘shored up’ all the way down; Dave would carry a long sick with him whenever he walked in the mine, to push rocks off the overhead lattice as they clunked onto it. They’d fall harmlessly to the side in piles, which would later be picked up and taken outside. He had my brother and I wear miner’s helmets always, when inside the mine, but no rocks ever broke through the fortified shorings.

The atmosphere was always cool inside the mine, but the air smelled like slowly decaying stone. The best place to sit was just outside the mine, under a huge, spreading, black-oak, off to the left of the mine’s entrance. There, the cool air from the mine mixed with the warm, fresh air and created a little draft. It was a pleasant place to talk, or just sit quietly and listen to the wind in the trees.

Dave had chosen to park his ‘house’ under the oak, way back in the dark shade. Looking at the trailer, it was obvious they’d lived there awhile; piles of dead leaves and acorns littered the top of the trailer in a series of attractive heaps. All around the sides and front of the trailer was a pine-wood porch, with wooden lattice down the sides and front, to hide the trailer’s wheels. A hole was cut in one side of the lattice for Jerk to access his ‘home’, the underside of the porch. Dave and Jenny always had their camp chairs out in front; the porch itself being taken up with piles of mining equipment, ropes and boxes of canned goods. Jenny had managed to hide most of this by placing two long window-boxes in front of the stacks, on either side of the steps, right under the porch railings; violets and creeping rock-roses spilled out the front of these and cascaded beautifully down the front of the lattice.

“My one touch of class.”, Jenny told me, when I pointed out the bright pink blooms.

Besides the mine, there were other objects of interest to peruse: two large and complicated sluicing machines, a rock crusher, which looked like a small cement mixer, a frog-filled stream that flowed across the far side of the clearing, several old, deteriorating flat-bed trucks and cars, that looked as if they had been attacked by metal-eating ants, a make-shift shooting gallery; and a little ways up the hillside, looking down majestically on the clearing, was ‘Bertha’.
Somewhere, Dave had seen Bertha in an auction; ‘she’ was a very large cement mixer, light grey and perfectly functioning. I think at one point Dave had wanted to put cement on the floor and sides of the mine, as well as up his drive-way, but had abandoned the project for lack of help, or desire. He’d driven it slowly up the hill , parked it up on a leveled-out ledge and left it there; it had been there for three years when my family moved to the area.

There is not much you can do with a giant cement mixer, except sit on it. Bertha possessed an excellent set of shocks; they curled like giant anacondas over the rusting wheels and gave the bulk of the mixing chamber a pleasant spring. If one managed to climb carefully to the top of the chamber, you could sit up there and view the entire valley, all the way down past Jerry’s place to the roaring creek, winding its way across the bottom of the gorge. Jimmy and I found this place an excellent spot to eat snacks after school and do reading homework, as the breeze always blew up there; the slight squeaking of the shocks as one sat on the chamber was strangely relaxing.

The shooting ‘gallery’ Dave had made up out of pure boredom, and also of a little necessity. It was located a good forty feet from the trailer. For a while, according to Jenny, Dave’s favorite pastime after meals was to take out one of his revolvers and plug away at a beer can or rock for a few minutes. Finally, Jenny insisted he make a place for shooting further away from the trailer; even after all the years of being married to Dave, she still hadn’t grown used to gunfire so close to her place of dwelling.

To keep a sense of variety in his choice of targets, the contents of the gallery were constantly changing: tacked up on the plywood platform and wooden-crate backing were man-shaped, cardboard cutouts with targets painted on them, along with life-size photographs of Clint Eastwood and Lucille Ball, two mannequins and a series of stuffed animals, mounted on pedestals. My favorite animal was the mountain lion, which sat and glared at you with it’s dark, glass eyes, never moving....but it somehow made you wonder if it might one day, when you weren’t looking. There was a stuffed coyote, three nearly demolished raccoons and a sleek, moth-infested deer. These were all kept from the elements only by a faded, green tarpaulin, stretched over the platform. As far as I knew, Dave was a fairly accurate shot, but would not practice when we were around; I figured it was because he just knew my father would be upset by us being around guns too much.

Dave’s mining techniques were the most interesting, as they required very little physical labor. There was a large pile of small rocks, dirt and debris right outside the mine’s entrance, off to the right. The rock was mostly quartz and shale; the dirt was a rich red-brown. This considerable mound came from diggings inside the mine, and was dubbed the ‘hopeful pile’. Taking a large scoop of this pile, Dave would walk over to a series of screens, set up at a slight angle on pier blocks; the screens were of varying mesh-sizes, to trap out the larger rocks. All he had to do was dump the rock debris onto the screen, and stir it a little with the shovel. When the debris was filtered into the wide, metal pans below, Dave would drag out the pan and dump the contents into the next screen. Eventually, he’d have a small pile of fine dirt and tiny stones in the last pan.

Carrying these carefully across the yard, he’d dump them into a metal box on the ground between the twin camp chairs. Jenny would then enter the mining picture; she’d bring out what looked like a pie plate on three legs, with a long electrical cord trailing from it. She would also bring out a large milk-jug of water; sitting down in her blue chair, Jenny would set up the legged pie plate, which in reality was a panning machine. The plate part was slanted upwards, and the legs were pushed out further like and easel, to keep the machine steady. Thus situated, Jenny would be able to sit and pan for gold; she’d take a small amount of the fine debris and place it in a thin stream around the edges of the plate, where the sides of it met the bottom.

All along the bottom of the plate were low ridges, going around in a spiral to the middle, where a small circle was formed; turned on, the plate would turn, slowly, looking like it was wobbling slightly. But that was the idea, it would shift the rocks slowly, moving the heavier matter to the middle, like the black sand, iron shavings and hopefully, little pieces of gold. Jenny watched the progress of the dirt with a sharp eye, adding water from the jug in little streams, every few minutes. She held a pair of tweezers in her hand and a little glass vial filled with water, ready to pick up a piece of gold as it shone dully out of the dirty water and tiny rocks.

While his wife was thus occupied, Dave would be taking the rocks from the tops and sides of the screens, piling them in a battered wheel-barrow, and carting them down a short incline to the rock-crusher. He hadn’t even broken a sweat by this time. The trailer had electricity hooked up to it, but Dave preferred to use a generator to run the crusher and sluicing machines. I think he just liked the noise; he’d stand by the rock crusher as the small chamber turned around and around with the rock inside, sipping a beer and seemingly listening to the deafening racket. When it ‘sounded right’ Dave would turn off the crusher and hook up the generator to the first sluicing machine, conveniently located within a few feet of the crusher.

The sluicing machine itself was basically a tall, metal box, which encased a motor and a water reservoir; from this box a long, 15-foot ramp came down, about four feet off the ground, extending down until it ran into a small, flat pan on the ground. When the reservoir was filled and the motor started, small streams of water would begin pouring down from the top of the box, down the ramp. The ramp had four inch sides to it, to keep in the water, and it was covered with green felt, and had a thin strip of wood nailed across the ‘floor’ of the ramp, about every two feet. When Dave had enough crushed rock, he’d scoop a good few handfuls onto the top part of the ramp, letting the water run over and through it; the result was the heavier, smaller matter was carried down the ramp to the pan, slowly.

Dave would pick through the little piles that built up at each strip of wood, his tweezers at the ready; however, most of the gold was found in the last section of ramp, or the pan at the end. The sunlight aided him most when searching for that dull yellow speck of precious metal. He would repeat this action about 10 times a day, most often gathering about ten to twelve tiny nuggets of gold, amounting to about 2 oz. Jenny would likely have found an ounce or more when the box next to her was empty.

On the whole, it seemed a very simple way to make a living and a relaxing one as well. When I see people in their office jobs, harassed and craving some fresh air, I remember Dave standing by the noisy rock crusher, and his wife nearby, sitting comfortably in the shade, both busy, but content. To my brother’s and my puzzlement, both my mother and father expressed an extremely negative attitude when we’d ask to go down and visit Dave and Jenny again. Ever since we had been there the first time, we wanted to go down and hunt for gold, or explore the mine. This request was always met with a flat denial. It wasn’t until the appearance of my uncle that we were finally allowed to roam down to ‘the mine’ whenever we had free time.

‘Uncle C’, as we called him, was my mother’s older brother; he was an expert sailboat navigator and made his living sailing other people’s yachts from Hawaii or Tahiti, back to the US. Apparently, when some wealthier-type folks sailed out to the islands, they were often too burnt out with sailing to sail back. Not wanting to sell their boat, they’d pay Uncle C to sail it back for them. It wasn’t a bad living and gave Uncle C the freedom he needed in life. We would see him about once a year and he’d always tell us the best stories of Hawaii and the ocean, teaching us native slang. He was fond of rum and cigarettes, so much so that even if it was pouring down rain, he would be outside under a tree, smoking and drinking from a little silver flask.

My father was not fond of Uncle C. He put up with the short visits as Mom liked her sibling, but would not be as relaxed; Dad would escape to his studio and work most of the time that Uncle C stayed. My mother’s only problem with her brother was that he’d play practical jokes on her, the kind she’d find out about weeks after Uncle C was gone. One time it was her rum that was tampered with; Mom often cooked deserts made with rum, cakes and such, and possessed a bottle of old, fine Jamaica rum. One visit, Uncle had drained the precious bottle and filled it up with water and food coloring. My mom was so mad she stopped taking his phone calls, even after he sent her another bottle as an apology.

Another practical joke, and perhaps his most consequential, was on my younger broter Jimmy during one winter. Our home’s heating 'system' was really just a wood-burning furnace; each mornign someone had to get up before anyone else and make the fire. Jimmy hated making the fire, but he hated doing dishes more; I strongly disliked making the fire and didn’t mind doing the dishes. Hence a bargain was struck and agreed on by the family members: making the fire was Jimmy’s job. My brother didn’t fear going down to the dark and still basement to make the fire, until Uncle C filled him with tales of mountain lions one night. The next morning, of course, our esteemed Uncle was down in the basement, waiting for Jimmy in the shadows.

Shortly after Jimmy had padded reluctantly down the hall stairs to the furnace, the whole house was awakened by a very convincing mountain lion ‘scream’; this was followed by a high-pitched, young-boy scream, and a blur, as Jimmy shot up the basement steps, flying down the hall into his room. Uncle C weakly crawled up the stairs, howling with laughter. My father was extremely upset but let my mother do most of the shouting. Jimmy wouldn’t go down into the basement for weeks after that, and the duty of the morning fire-starting was permanently shifted to my shoulders. This actually proved a blessing in my adult life, as it taught me the art of fire-making, using almost every kind of wood and starter material.

I never had to worry that Uncle C playing ranks of such a nature on me; he and I had a long-standing deal that he would never scare me, allbecause of the ‘sailboat incident’. When I was near five years old, and my brother was just an idea, my mother’s family would to have an annual reunion at a beach house, on Corona Del Mar Beach in Soutehrn California. The beach house was owned by one of my aunt’s friends; my mother’s three sisters and Uncle C would all come, bringing their families in tow. At that time, Uncle C was still in contact with his daughter and wife and would bring them along. Lani, his daughter, was merely two months older than me and we were good friends. The other cousins were either too old to play with us or too young, so she and I hung out togther constantly during the week-long reunions, mostly building sand castles and chasing fish in the shallow water.

Seeing we were being left out of the older cousin’s games, Uncle C decided to take Lani and I sailing, in his old, 15-foot yacht. It badly needed paint and the sails were mended with several small patches of canvass here and there, but he was a good sailor; my mother didn’t see a problem, as long as I wore a life jacket. I did not care for life-jackets even then, they were so bulky and ‘fat’ feeling, but this was a high honor to go sailing with Uncle C; he was revered by the older cousins as the one relative who was ‘fun’.

So, sitting in the bobbing sailboat, I watched the shore get further and further away, feeling like I had a giant, orange sausage strapped around my neck. It was beautiful out on the softly rolling ocean and the wave’s pitch didn’t bother me; I had never been given any reason to fear the water and was enjoying myself. Lani and I tossed bread to the seagulls and watched the larger birds dive-bombing the water, coming up with a struggling fish in their claws.

About an hour out from shore, Uncle C wanted to try his hand at line-fishing, and gave the rudder over to Lani to hold. She was a pretty good sailor, for a six year old, and held it steady enough for awhile. Then, about fifteen minutes later, a large wave came near and she panicked. Meaning to steer away from the wave, Lani pushed the tiller all the way over to the right, forgetting, in her haste, that the rudder goes opposite the way you push. The boat flung itself upside down, dumping us into the sea, with force. I bobbed to the surface, gasping; the capsize was such a shock that I couldn’t say anything. Uncle C dragged Lani and I over to the capsized boat, and instructed us to hold onto the mast. The mast was still attached to the boat, being on a hinge of some sort, for situations like this. We hung on obediently, crying a little and sniffling now and then.

The water was cold and the waves pushed us around, but I still wasn’t afraid of the deep, just a little upset at being thrown into it so unexpectedly. Uncle C was more than a little upset that Lani had pushed the tiller over and he was becoming increasingly irritated at our crying. He sat up on the back of the overturned boat to scout out if any boats were nearby.

“You kids be quiet.”, he snapped at us. “Or I won’t fish you out when the sharks come to bite off your feet.”

If that was a statement meant to quiet us, it had the opposite effect: Lani and I screamed with real terror and kept screaming for a good half hour. I had never been so frightened in my life; at five years old, if a grown up says that sharks are coming to eat your feet, then they are. Uncle C realized he’d made a tactical error and tried to quiet us down, to no effect. I kept looking down into the water as I held onto the mast with a death grip, expecting to see a white jaw and those horrible rows of teeth below me at any moment.

I don’t know if it was our screams or a nearby boat that got the attention of the coast guard, but soon, a large, yellow cutter with huge letters on the side reading ‘Coast Guard’ pulled up next to us. The men on board were all blue-clad, tall and had short hair; they pulled Lani and I out first. We were so scared and exhausted that we could only stammer out:

“He...he..he said... sh..sharks were going to...e..eat..us”

The Coast Guard men operating the cutter looked at Uncle C as if he were the lowest form of scum. My uncle tried to sheepishly explain himself, but gave up and remained quiet while the cutter towed his drenched sailboat back to shore. When the cutter pulled up to a dock about 45 minutes later, not far away from our beach house; my mother recognized Uncle C’s boat, saw the cutter and panicked, whole house ran down the beach to get us.

The lectures and arguments didn’t stop that whole week and Uncle C left early. The biggest result from that experience is that I have an extreme fear of deep water to this day, and I’ll never step foot on a sailboat again. Uncle C, however, promised to never scare me again, both me and Lani. He kept his word, too. After a while even Mom forgave him, saying ‘you can’t really stay mad at family’.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Always having projects at the new house in the woods that needed finishing, my mother would put Uncle C to work when he visited. The first year we lived there was mostly consumed with fixing the house and planting the trees and shrubs. The house had terrible carpet, due to dogs, and an apparent lack of any vacuuming device whatsoever. When we pulled up the carpet, it was discovered that it covered up four more layers of equally terrible carpet. Beneath all the carpet, which was even in the kitchen, was a decidedly ‘retro’ linoleum, which consisted of a light blue back ground, with orange, purple and black spots. Mom took one look at that and called the Pergo people. Soon, we had a nice wood-laminate down on all the floors of the house, since Mom wasn’t into retro decor.

Besides the veranda needing repair and the roof leaking, the main problem was the bottom bedroom, right next to the ‘basement’. My parents wanted this room for theirs, it was cool and very shaded by the veranda; the unique feature of this room was the three-foot-wide hole in the far right wall, just under the window. The previous occupant had kept his dogs locked up in the room, when he wasn’t shooting at passers by, and they’d obviously grown tired of being locked up. The two dogs had actually chewed through the studs and drywall, making a comfortable exit for themselves. Fixing this particular problem was not easy, but Jerry gave us a hand along with some of my parent’s friends; they came up to our place for a ‘work day’, to assist us in various tasks, havening heard our house was in need of repairs.

My parents rented a huge, 40 ft. tow-away dumpster from the local waste management company, to haul away all the garbage, pieces of wall and carpeting we’d pulled out of the house. It ended up getting filled twice, as we discovered that behind the ‘studio’ was a sizeable junk pile; mattresses, old chairs, metal pipes and stacked newspapers. While the menfolk worked on the hole-in-the-wall problem, the girls all donned gloves and hauled trash and unwanted bits of this and that out to the dumpster. It felt wonderful to get all the ‘crap’, as my father referred to it, out of the house and off the property.

The work day done, we were finally able to paint the whole interior off-white, lay the flooring and begin hanging pictures, puttin up shelves and cleaning. My father found a serene corner in the living room for the two-large cabinets that housed his precious record collection. Music meant a great deal to Dad and once the stereo system was hooked up, our property was lightly doused in Hungarian Rhapsodies, Beethoven or the immortal voice of Harry Belefonte. Jimmy and I were put to work painting the outside of the house with a rich brown oil-stain and ended up getting as much of it on ourselves as on the house.

The garden was another matter. Mom had many ideas and plans about planting the delicate flowers and vines that she knew so well from the milder climates, but this soil was rocky, drought prone and unrelenting; reluctantly, she had to switch plant categories to ‘drought resistant’ and ‘hardy’ varieties. This meant rock roses, instead of roses, myrtle in stead of Japanese maple, and irises in place of lilies. But it also meant fragrant lavender and bright blue, flowering rosemary. It was fortunate that Uncle C came by as Mom was doing her main digging, as my father had too many paintings to finish for his growing client list. Uncle C helped us put in the shrubs by the road, design a drainage system, put in water sprinklers and small a raspberry arbor where the junk pile had been.

Taking a break from digging out the basement, Uncle C was out by the road, digging a french drain along the top of the driveway, when Dave drove by. They hadn’t met each other yet and Dave stopped his Jeep to give the stranger on our property a salutation. They hit it off right away; Dave invited Uncle C down to the mine for dinner that night, and it was all roses from there. Dave and Uncle C got along so well that Dave allowed him to camp out on his property whenever he wanted, and help him in the mine. Soon, that became Uncle C’s residence, a little ways up the hill, back among some young oaks; Uncle C built a little platform there and pitched an old army tent with a table nearby. It was the perfect get-away scene for him, the work wasn’t boring and there was good company.
Not too keen on the idea of Uncle C being so close all the time, my parents had to admit it was better than him camping out on their property. Dave didn’t care, he liked Uncle C and needed the extra help anyway. His new guest stayed with Dave and Jenny for almost four years, off and on, but mostly on and thusly Uncle C became an integral part of most of the strange things that happened on our road.