by Jack Vance
My mother went to work. She took several jobs, of varying degrees of dignity, and I must say that in retrospect I admire her tremendously. She was always good-humored, good-natured, she lost neither her spirits nor her temper, as many other ladies in her circumstances might have done. I also went to work, as a farmhand at the nearby Burroughs Bros. Dairy, though the pay was not very good.
We moved to a rented house in Oakley. During fruit season, I picked apricots at 20¢ an hour, and later cherries—at 1¢ a pound!
So the summer passed. In the autumn, my uncle telephoned me from San Francisco. This was Charles Holbrook, from whom I derive my middle name, a man I liked very much—almost as much as I detested my aunt. He could best be described as having been a promoter, concerned mainly with oil and mining prospects. His income fluctuated according to circumstances; sometimes he was very prosperous, sometimes down on his luck. During the ‘20s, his fortunes were at the flood, and he always kept $50,000 in the bank, which he regarded as a sheet anchor. Every morning, he came down to breakfast and turned to the stock reports, where he had been following the fortunes of a stock called “Black Sulfur”. Every day he’d utter some comment, such as, “Up again! I should have gotten into this before.” And the next day he would again cry out, “Ah! Black Sulfur! It’s going to hit a new high.” This went on.
In 1929 the great crash occurred. When my uncle read the stock pages, he shook his head sadly, and told my aunt, “Luckily, I didn’t have any dealings with Black Sulfur—it’s gone down to practically zero. But that doesn’t affect us too much; we still have our nest egg, the $50,000, and before long, we’ll be back on our feet, since I’ve got some new prospects.”
At this my aunt looked at him with a sick expression. She said, “Charlie, I’ve got something to confess.”
“Oh?” said my uncle. “What’s that?”
“Well, I became so engaged by your talk of Black Sulfur that I took that $50,000 and invested it in Black Sulfur stock.”
My uncle uttered a terrible cry, and nearly fell out of his chair.
One day, my uncle telephoned me to the effect that certain of his associates had taken a lease on an old hydraulic mine that had been closed down for a lack of water. This was the True Grit Mine, located just east of Camptonville, a little town deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They hoped to bring it back into operation.
The first stage of the program was to bring water from various sources around the mountains to the mine, where it would be projected under pressure against the gold-bearing sediments. The resultant slurry would flow over riffles, where the gold would be collected.
In charge of the project was Roy Laylander, who was something short of middle age, thin and sinewy, with sparse long hair and a suspicious disposition. No one liked him very much. Also on hand was a bulldozer operator, a cook, and a labor force, which consisted of my brother Louis, Laylander’s son Paul, Henry Morrison, who was about my age, and me.
I must also mention Charlie Donnelly, who was not part of the working crew, but who for several years had lived alone at the True Grit Mine functioning as caretaker. Charlie must have been about sixty years old. Previously, he had worked in San Francisco as a cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he had become almost a celebrity. His work was vastly amusing until his reliance upon a liquid consisting largely of ethanol brought an end to his career. My uncle and some of his other friends established Charlie at the mine as a caretaker, and there, perhaps due to his isolation, he dried out.
I became fond of Charlie. He was a wonderfully funny man, and commanded an inexhaustible repertory of poems, limericks, impersonations and other material, most of it naughty, some not so naughty—for instance, that epic ballad known as “Ivan Skavinsky Skavar”. One of his productions simulated what would seem to be a stage show or circus act; each segment ended with the command “Willie, turn the crank!”
I also learned from Charlie the song “The Big Black Bull Come Down From The Mountains”, and a rollicking composition known as “Christopher Colombo.” This is decidedly naughty, in parts at least, but I can’t resist the temptation to include a few of the verses. I hope no one will be offended.
The work starts off with a description of Colombo:
He knew the world was round-O
His balls hung to the ground-O
That fornicatin’, family-breakin’
Rattle-ass scamp Colombo!
The next verses tell how he goes to the queen of Spain to ask for ships and cargo, and then sets off across the Atlantic, until his men, due to lack of female companionship, almost become frantic. At last, after forty days and forty nights, he sights an island. He approaches, drops anchor, and then—
Upon the shore there stood a whore;
They stripped off shirts and collars.
In twenty minutes by the clock
She’d made a thousand dollars.
Those were the days of no clap cure;
The doctors were not many.
The only doc that he could find
Was a sad old quack named Benny.
Colombo strode up to the doc,
His smile serene and placid;
The goddamn’ doc burned off his cock
With hydrochloric acid!
Enough of Charlie Donnelly and his witticisms. Louis, Paul, Henry and I worked clearing manzanita, digging ditches, building wooden troughs, all intended to bring water down to the mine.
On our first payday, I became aware of an inequity which I found irritating. I learned that while Henry and I were being paid $2.50 a day, Laylander’s son Paul and my brother Louis were being paid $5 a day. I complained to Laylander and told him that Henry and I were producing as much work as was Paul. Laylander responded in a cold voice that he had assessed the situation, and that the pay scale would remain as it was.
Henry and I were displeased. We surmised that Laylander had spoken to Paul, because now Paul was working like crazy, running when he could have walked, sweat pouring off his face.
A day or so later, Henry and I were working in the forest cleaning out a ditch. We were discussing the current circumstances; neither of us was happy. I cried out, “I don’t blame Paul, but that Laylander is a real son of a bitch!” About this time I chanced to look over my shoulder, and there, about ten feet away, stood Laylander himself. He looked me over a minute or two, then turned and walked away.
Weeks passed, and nothing much happened, but a sinister pressure seemed to hang in the air. My birthday was coming up, and I decided to take a weekend off in order to celebrate with my family. On Friday evening I drove south. The usual festivities occurred; I spent a pleasant weekend. Sunday afternoon, I was preparing to drive north again when I received a telephone call. Laylander was on the line, and he notified me that my employment had been terminated. I was out of a job.
My mother, with David and Patricia, still occupied the rented house on the outskirts of Oakley. I stayed there for a short period, trying without success to find employment. We were living through the very depths of the Depression, and jobs were as scarce as hen’s teeth. Finally, in desperation, I went to stay with my aunt in San Francisco, and there, through the influence of one of my grandfather’s friends, I was offered a job at the Olympic Club.
There was no prestige attached to this job. I wore a monkey suit, and functioned as a bellhop and elevator operator. The pay was low and working conditions were wretched. Nevertheless, I clung to this job for about a year, a time I now recall as perhaps the most abysmal of my entire life.
I was living with my aunt at her house on Filbert Street. In my spare time, I had already started to write. I wrote some poetry, and some rudimentary science fiction stories.
At one of my aunt’s dinner parties, she entertained Stanton Coblentz, editor of the Wings Quarterly magazine, which was devoted to poetry. Coblentz also wrote science fiction stories which were published in various magazines of the time. My aunt insisted that I show him my productions, but Coblentz did not thin
k very highly either of my poetry or my stories.
My aunt wanted me to work around the house during my off-hours. But I had far better things to do with my time than wash woodwork. I quarreled with my aunt and moved out to a rooming-house across the city operated by my grandfather’s old cook, where the atmosphere was much easier, although I missed playing cribbage with my uncle during the evenings.
During this period I became ever more indoctrinated into that wonderful music known as jazz, and here I do not refer to that field known as “new jazz” which, in my opinion, bears the same relationship to the true jazz as the Cubists bear to Botticelli.
The first record I ever bought was Duke Ellington’s Daybreak Express, which I still regard as a masterpiece. At an overstocked outlet on Market Street named “Zack”, I found records being sold for 5¢ apiece, and I picked up a number of records which subsequently would become collectors’ items. On the radio, a weekly program known as The Camel Caravan was broadcast every Thursday night, featuring the great Casa Loma Orchestra, which to this day, in my opinion, has never been excelled.
My salary from the Olympic Club was by no means large, but I managed to send a few dollars every month to my mother. I also invested in a 1924 Harley Davidson motorcycle, which I used to ride over the hills to Oakley on my day off to be with my family. One day it broke down; I don’t know exactly how, but I was forced to leave it in Oakley and return to San Francisco by bus. When I returned two weeks later, I found that my sister’s boyfriend Frank had cannibalized my vehicle, and I was forced to take it back to San Francisco in a basket. A few days later I took this corpse of a Harley to a dealer and turned it in for an Indian, lighter and less powerful than the Harley, but which turned out to be quite dependable.
All my life I have been motivated by challenges. When I see a challenge, I feel he impulse to overcome it. This is a very deep unconscious thing, probably common to most people but not always pronounced. Perhaps, in my own case, it is the need to answer the question to oneself: Are you capable of doing this thing, are you brave enough to meet this challenge?
Around 1935, while I was still working my dreadful job at the Olympic Club, the Bay Bridge was being built between San Francisco and Oakland. The first two towers of the bridge were up. One night, I went out onto the bridge and walked up the cable, high up over the water, to the top of the first tower. It was a thrilling experience. I was perfectly safe; there were handholds on each side of the cable. At the top, I got ready to swoop down and climb up to the top of the second tower. Then I heard, ahead of me, the voices of workmen. I retreated, went back home and to bed, feeling full of some sort of triumph that I had accomplished this silly, reckless, foolish feat. Yet here I reveal part of my character. Perhaps it was an inner feeling of weakness that I was trying to compensate for.
I continued to work at the Olympic Club until the manager, in a spasm of cost-cutting, reduced the labor force, and I was released.
My uncle Charles Holbrook, or Charlie, during his prosperous days had involved himself in mining deals, oil leases, and other such ventures. Charlie was a goodhearted fellow, easygoing, generous. Among his associates was Buck Finley, who had contacts everywhere, especially with Western-Knapp, a firm involved in the construction of mining mills and the like.
Through my uncle’s connections with Buck Finley and Western-Knapp, I was hired to work with a surveyor as his rodman. We were sent off to survey a tract of land in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The surveyor’s name was Joe Resnick. He was about forty years old, intelligent and efficient. He would set up his transit at some convenient spot while I would struggle up and down the hillside through the manzanita, carrying stakes and graduated rods. The manzanita, if anyone is interested, is a crotchety shrub growing as high as six feet tall. The stem bends and twists; branches thrust out in all directions. The wood is extremely hard, the dark red core surrounded by a white layer. If some enterprising botanist were to manipulate the manzanita’s genes inducing the stem to grow straight and tall, with a diameter of at least six inches, the result would be the most beautiful hardwood in the world.
When the survey was completed I returned to San Francisco, where I learned that Western-Knapp was starting a new job at Copperopolis, the town in the Gold Country I have previously mentioned. Through the agency of Buck Finley I went to work at Copperopolis.
There were no lodging facilities at Copperopolis, so the crew took up residence in the Calaveras Hotel at Angels Camp, a town about twelve miles east of Copperopolis. The hotel was a rambling old two-story affair, built during the nineteenth century, and rather resembled the hotels shown in wild-west movies. The amenities were at best adequate, but the rates were correspondingly moderate. When I was first shown into my room, I found that the bed had a remarkable sag in the middle. I was about to ask for another room, but I tried the bed and, to my astonishment, found it quite comfortable, and so I made no complaints.
The superintendent of the job was a middle-aged engineer named Eric Freitag, who was tough and gruff but, in the main, easy to get along with. One Sunday morning I sat in the hotel lobby reading a newspaper. The door opened and Freitag appeared, and with him his son and daughter. The boy was about eighteen, the girl about sixteen. The girl’s name, so I learned later, was Dorothy. She was dark-haired, rather slim, very graceful. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life, and I fell in love with her instantly. She looked around the lobby but I don’t think she noticed me. Presently they left the lobby, and I wondered if I would ever see her again.
One Saturday evening two or three weeks later, a man about thirty-five years old wearing boots, khakis and a brown jacket registered at the hotel. His name was Kelsey. Later in the evening, I entered into a conversation with him. I learned that held a degree in geology, but now occupied himself prospecting the Gold Country, exploring sites which had not been adequately developed and had been abandoned, but which, so he explained, with new management and adequate capital might yet prove profitable. The next day, Sunday, he planned to visit such a site, which by some odd coincidence was near the town Kelseyville. He invited me to accompany him on this expedition, and I accepted.
Sunday morning, therefore, we set off, and about 10:30 arrived at the site in which Kelsey was interested. This was situated in a valley surrounded by low hills and consisted of a pasture of forty or fifty acres on which was an old farmhouse, in ruin, and an area which apparently at one time had been a pond or a small lake, but which was now an expanse of dried mud. At the center of this mud was a construction resting on a barge. There was a hopper at one end of this barge and riffles down either side. Kelsey explained that the barge, which he called a “doodlebug”, was no longer in operation owing to lack of water, even though gold was everywhere accessible. To demonstrate, Kelsey brought up a pan, into which he shoveled a quantity of dirt dug at random from the pasture. He took the pan and its contents to a nearby creek. After about five minutes of sloshing water through the pan, he showed me what he had achieved: in the bottom of the pan was a quarter-cup of black iron oxide liberally flecked with gold flakes. I was impressed.
We returned to Angels Camp. The next day was Monday and I went to work. In the evening, back at the hotel, I discovered that Kelsey had departed. I never saw him again.
A month or two later the job at Copperopolis ended, and the crew was transferred to a new job just starting up near Battle Mountain, Nevada.
Battle Mountain, so we discovered, was a lonely little community almost lost in the sagebrush about fifty miles north of Winnemucca. The town clearly dated from times long past, when a number of silver mines had been in full operation. The silver lodes had in due course become exhausted, and the town gradually lapsed into somnolence.
Currently, only two establishments which showed any relevance to these olden times survived. The first was the Buckhorn Hotel, where the crew took up residence, and which still retained a few vestiges of Victorian elegance. Second, and a hundred yards
north along the main street, was the Sunset Saloon, a rambling two-story structure which at one time had been painted dark brown. At the front, a door opened into the saloon proper, a dim, rather shabby chamber with a bar at one end and several card tables along with a pinball machine at the other. Around the side of the building another door opened into a large parlor, furnished in a style which can best be described as genteel opulence. There were several sofas, upholstered chairs, a piano, and a great deal of plush velvet which had once been maroon, purple, and dark green, but which now showed signs of wear. Around this parlor a number of ladies sat at their ease. They were of various description, and it would not be gentlemanly to guess at their ages; but all wore costumes which they evidently considered their best and most appealing. Clearly, the parlor was where the citizens of Battle Mountain came and indulged themselves in discreet recreation. In short, and to be succinct, this was the town whorehouse.
Five miles east of town, a branch of the old silver lode had been discovered, and here Western-Knapp was constructing a mining mill. My work was familiar; I dug with pick and shovel, mixed concrete, unloaded trucks, wheeled concrete in the barrow from a mixer to where it would be dumped into the forms. The main novelty was that while Copperopolis had been hot, Battle Mountain was cold.
One of the carpenters, Robby Hicks, was a rather unusual character. He was about thirty-five, tall, lanky, assertive, blond, blue-eyed, sun-tanned, lantern-jawed. During a period of damp weather, Hicks came down with a cold. He dosed himself with pills, syrups, tinctures, herbal tea, nose drops, all to no avail. The cold persisted.
