”Wow, would you look at that. I’ve got three pickers right there!” The other prospectors gather round Bernie McGrath’s green plastic pan to inspect the treasures within. Glinting amid the grey gravel are three sizeable pieces of gold. McGrath swirls the pan, washing the residue out and leaving the heavier gold behind. ”Three beauties,” he exclaims. He picks the pieces up with his fingers, holds them to the light, and places them in a small plastic bottle.
They may not be the legendary prospectors of the middle of the 18th century, figures immortalised by Mark Twain and Jack London, but today’s gold seekers are a no less eclectic bunch, drawn by the lure of the sparkling flakes found in riverbeds in California.
Take Rick Martin. In the week he sells Chrysler cars. Two days a week, however, Martin drives to Oak Flats, just past Camp Williams on the East Fork Road in the San Gabriel mountains.
”For me, retirement programmes suck,” says Martin. ”Back in the 1980s gold was $300 an ounce. Now it’s $687. If you hang on to it and you have a couple of pounds, that’s a nice little retirement programme right there. So far,” he adds, ”I haven’t found much.” This is no ordinary retirement programme. Martin, stripped down to a pair of shorts, is standing waist deep in water, eyeing the riverbed in the hope that he will spot his nest egg.
What remains of the California gold rush is mainly found in the north of the state. Most sites are subject to claim, meaning that they are closed to those who do not have a legal entitlement to them. Others are organised to tempt tourists and weekend prospectors: a spot can be hired for the day, gear has to be bought, and hands-on tours give well-heeled visitors the feel of grit under their nails.
But there are a few spots on public land and anyone who feels the urge can pitch up with as little as a shovel and a plastic pan and set to work. Oak Flats is one such spot. On forestry service land inside the Angeles national park, as long as you pay the daily park fee, you can be there. Oak Flats is 8km up a winding road that follows a creek away from the San Gabriel canyon. Just 56km from downtown Los Angeles, it might as well be another world.
A turn in the road about a kilometre and a half or so beyond the Camp Williams trailer park reveals a motley array of vans, trailers and tents arranged alongside a roadside picnic area. This is where the prospectors live or visit, swapping stories about nuggets and old timers at night, scrambling down the loose rocks to the river below the road during the day.
Along the river, tarpaulins are strewn, sheltering the small generator-powered sluices and pumps favoured by the prospectors. Snaking from the sluices is wide flexible plastic tubing, used to vacuum up the sediment and small stones at the bottom of the river. As the stones pass through the sluice, any gold remains behind, trapped by its weight.
A few figures hunch over the pipes, standing — sometimes floating — in the water, poking the tubes into the riverbed. Occasionally one of the figures will toss a large rock to the river bank. Around them, two children play, their brightly coloured plastic toys standing out against the grey rocks. A shout goes up, and a prospector extracts a pair of rust-encrusted scissors from the river.
”Sometimes it’s almost like archaeology,” says Paul Robinson, who has been camping by the road since September. ”Like in the 1800s there used to be big mining communities here. There was a town called El Dorado a few miles upriver.”
Robinson came to Oak Flats after deciding not to re-enlist in the army. Two-thirds of the prospectors who gather at Oak Flats, he says, are ex-army, attracted by the outdoors life. ”I like the outdoors,” says Robinson. ”Digging for gold is just a bonus. We’ve got bears, racoons, we’ve got everything out here. I came up just to go hiking, but I ran into some prospectors and learned from them. Do you have gold in England?”
The lodestar for the small itinerant community is Bernie McGrath, a 73-year-old, who boasts a fine head of white hair, a wiry frame and few teeth. McGrath has been working his way up and down the canyon for 20 years, operating out of a camper van.
”I moved up here and my intention was to go fishing all the time. But after a while goin’ fishing all day long is a pain in the ass. One morning a guy was up there sniping on rocks. I said what are you doing, because I couldn’t understand what he had there. He says I’m looking for gold. I said looking for gold? I thought that went out with Jesse James. I said have you got any gold and he showed me the bottle. And the bottom and the inside was covered.”
The next day McGrath bought a pan. Within 10 minutes he had covered the bottom of a bottle with gold flakes. That was the beginning of his career as a sniper, a person who prospects for gold using the most primitive means: a pan and a pick.
But McGrath, like most of the people foraging in the riverbed, was after more. ”All my life I’ve searched for serenity and peace of mind. Tried everything for that. When I found this, gee, here I am alone, not a soul around me, big bear standing within arm’s reach. I thought it was as close to heaven as I’d ever get.”
But in McGrath’s heaven, there is temptation. ”Well, [the gold] gets a hold of you,” he says. ”I never look directly at the gold, because the gold is like heroin, it’s like the devil, it beckons you all the time. You get the fever bad, and it can become a terrible addiction. It’s a shame because people can lose their jobs and their families and they never find it.”
McGrath has found gold, several pounds of it. But he is an exception, he claims. ”You don’t get rich here,” he says. ”I never seen anybody, not here.” – Guardian Unlimited Â