California Buffalo

Janet Towle

I usually spend my free time at the diggings out behind Dutch Flat, our tiny Sierra Nevada town. We have a rickety three-story hotel that’s perpetually going out of business, a general store, a post office, and a big bell to ring in case of fire. More importantly, up behind the general store, dusty red-orange hills lie abandoned and ravaged – blasted open by hydraulic mining decades ago and left with their gritty insides bare to the sun. In some spots the scars have been covered by buckbrush and manzanita. In other places, the wounds look fresh.
It’s March, and though the ski resorts up in the high country are still open, most of the snow around Dutch Flat has already melted. I spend most of my time working at our town’s gas station, but I have today off, and it’s the first sunny day we’ve had in a month. Not that it’s warm. My cousin Larkin and I do what we usually do when we’re bored and the weather’s good, a tradition we’ve had ever since we graduated last year: we drive out to the diggings in his dad’s old pickup truck to drink beer, shoot at the cans with Larkin’s guns, and pan for gold. Today we’re panning.
“Paul,” Larkin says as he kneels in the rusty dirt by the water’s edge and rips up a clump of weeds, “if you could live anywhere, where would it be?”
“Probably Russia,” I say, pulling up my own dripping tangle of plants, roots, and dirt.
“Why?”
“Everyone’s sick of snow over there. It’s not some big novelty. They don’t have San Francisco yuppies with matching goggles zooming around half the year.”
Larkin and I slap our wads of dirt into our pans. I take some extra time to pick out the stems and the biggest pieces of the veiny roots. The water is icy.
“You’re pretty bitter, dude,” Larkin says. He has a piece of dead grass sticking out of his mouth. I think about his rifle and his pickup truck and his damn piece of grass and wonder, for the fifty-thousandth time, why he has a girlfriend and I don’t.
“I’d live here in California, but like, two hundred years ago. I’d hunt buffalo and sell the skins.”
“There weren’t any buffalo in California.”
“How do you know?”
I don’t, so I don’t answer. I’m swirling my pan carefully. There’s some black sand mixed in with the silt, and a few shiny flecks, but it’s clear this isn’t going to be a good haul. My knees are cold, wet, and aching already. They’re pressed into the mud at the creek side. I’ve never been able to pan in a squat, like Larkin always does, even though I hate going back into town with muddy knees.
“Kind of cold weather for this,” Larkin says.
“Wasn’t it your idea?”
Larkin has a jam jar wedged into the ground beside him. I watch him out of the corner of my eye as he pours the remainder of the sandy water in his pan into the jar. As the water settles there, I see several bright yellow flakes swirling behind the glass. Larkin stretches a handkerchief over the top of the jar, then turns it over and strains the water out. He shows me the handkerchief when he’s done.
“Not bad,” I say, and I dump my pan’s contents back into the creek.
“Not much, really,” Larkin says, though I can tell he’s proud. He saves the gold bullion up for months, then sells it online. I don’t think it’s worth it. It’s only a couple of bucks at a time. I mean, I save my bullion sometimes, I guess. But it’s pointless.
As I scoop up some more mud my knuckles start to ache. So I pause for a moment, and I notice the sky is an ominous grey. A breeze is starting up. “Well, shit. That didn’t last long, did it?”
Larkin seems satisfied with his day’s work. “I tell you what. There’s more beer and a perfectly good radio in the truck.”
So we get up and start walking, Larkin in the lead. The slope’s pretty steep. We’re picking our way along slowly on the damp pine needles. I almost slip on a patch of dirty slush. Larkin’s hat bobs ahead of me, and when he walks he swings the arm with his gold pan in it.
Snowflakes start to drift down between the oaks and the pines. Their path’s pretty clear, since the oaks don’t even have their leaves back yet. The wind’s cold against the wet knees of my jeans, and my old beat-up jacket isn’t doing its job very well.
“Are you sure you know the way? I don’t remember walking this far.”
“Shut up, fatass,” Larkin shoots back. “You need to get out from behind that counter more often.”
I’m so distracted by this snow I’m getting disoriented. The snow is starting to stick already – in some places the ground is already totally white. I look back up to make sure Larkin’s still in front of me, and I almost trip. There’s so much snow that it’s getting hard to lift my sneakers up.
“I don’t know why you like California so much,” I call to Larkin through the wind and the swirling flakes. “She’s a fickle bitch.”
Larkin doesn’t reply.
I realize my mistake. “Fickle,” I start to shout, inhaling some snowflakes, “means–”
“I know what fickle is,” Larkin snaps.
I wipe the snow off my face to avoid replying, though he isn’t even looking at me. Larkin always got terrible grades. He barely graduated. I let it drop.
I’m starting to have trouble seeing. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Larkin and a tree trunk if he wasn’t moving. I don’t want to complain before he does. After all, we’ve lived here all our lives, we’re both really used to snow. All the same, I’m nauseous. Involuntarily I start to think about the cliffs in the diggings – the places where the miners aimed the hydraulic blasters at hillsides and bled the earth away into sluice-boxes, leaving eighty degree slopes of clay, rocks, and roots behind. I can’t stay silent anymore. One of us has to confront our circumstances.
“Hey, Larkin?”
“Yeah?”
“What should we do?”
There’s a long pause. I start to grow desperate, hearing nothing but the roaring of the wind in my frozen ears, and can’t keep myself from goading him. “Well?”
“What do you mean?” He pauses again. “What could we be doing differently?”
He has a point. There aren’t usually (there aren’t ever) blizzards at 4000′ elevation, but I had heard it was good to keep moving. Might as well keep going. The truck can’t be too far off now. I try to keep my mind centered on that thought, but it doesn’t work. The snow’s getting too deep.
“This is kind of freaking me out, man, I have to say,” I mutter, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.
“Dude, are you okay?”
“Did anybody see this coming? Aren’t there warnings about things like this?”
Larkin’s voice is faint and uncomfortable. “There’s a bad economy right now. The president’s fucking everything up. I don’t think you can blame yourself too much.”
“I’m not blaming myself!” I yell, trying not to sound too hysterical. “What are you talking about? How would you survive two hundred years ago? Wrap yourself in buffalo skins and hope it all goes away? What are we supposed to do?”
Larkin puts a heavy hand on my shoulder and it startles me – I hadn’t known he was standing that close. “Dude, it’s not so bad. You’ve got your parents, you’ve got your job, you get days off, and, thank God, beer doesn’t cost as much as a tank of gas. Just stick it out and stop worrying.”
I’m standing at the edge of the trees, and the truck is two hundred yards ahead of us. It’s cold, but most of the sky is blue. Except for the knees of my jeans, I’m dry, and my ears are tingling but certainly not frozen. I look back behind us at the hill we walked down. We left a path through the old grey oak leaves and pine needles on the ground.
I want to stand and think for a moment, but Larkin is staring at me, and I realize that I need to keep moving and talking for the sake of my pride. All I understand – and it’s not much – is that I have to try to act normally and gloss this over.
“Yeah, so, there’s beer in the truck, you said?”
Larkin’s forehead wrinkles. “Uh…sure. I guess.” His tone alludes to my strangeness but I ignore him.
“Well, then,” I say, as if nothing happened, and I give him a friendly shove and walk past him toward the truck.
I grew up with snow – shoveling it, trudging through it, scraping it off windshields. I know I wasn’t imagining things. If I don’t know what caused this, how am I supposed to escape it? What am I supposed to be doing? Larkin’s still behind me but I know instinctively he’s still carrying his jam jar and his handkerchief – as if they matter.