My 20-foot Adventure
Claude Lambert
ambert
My 20-foot Adventure
A treasure hunt
The Discoveries of Young Gordon in Savannah -1- 5800 words.
Copyright © 2011 Claude Lambert
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-0-9836791-1-0
This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.
My 20-foot Adventure
by Claude Lambert
Contents
1. Dad Defends the Cherokees
2. A False Start: Hunting Slippers
3.Combing the Beach
4.Aunt Bessie's Treasure
5.A 20-foot Adventure
1. Dad Defends the Cherokees
I remember our treasure hunt very well and all the dangers we faced, but I forgot why I wanted it so much. It may have been because Little Ann, in our class, had a grandfather who owned a gold mine. It made us dream of finding gold. The gold mine had been closed for at least one century and there was no gold left in it - nothing worth the effort and expense - but still, it was a title of glory. I think that I was jealous of the fame of Little Ann.
We lived in Savannah, in a small house with a small yard and a view on a small wooded area. Our parents were not rich, but they were not poor either. Our father was a math teacher and our mom was a nurse. She had the 10 PM - 6 AM shift, so there was always somebody at home for us. Our mom used to tell us wisely that we were indeed real rich: “We are rich, she said, when there is food in the house and we have no debt. We do not owe anything to anybody.” Aunt Bessie had a little more money than that, and her house was filled with interesting trinkets. Treasures? Maybe for us, but she had mainly touristic trinkets and a few old-fashioned diamond rings.
My sister Kate and I came home one day very excited and asked our parents to buy us a gold mine. The suggestion was not well received. The gold mines are far from Savannah, in the northern part of Georgia. It is because gold was found there that the Cherokee nation was stripped of its rights and had to leave the state on the sadly known “Trail of Tears.” My mom said that we could go there for a weekend at a place where they teach you to sift the gold from the river just like old times. I was enthusiastic about it. Kate was smarter than me and did not say anything: she could feel that Dad was discontent. After a while, I felt silent too. Mom could see I was disappointed and interceded:
“The Trail of Tears happened well over 150 years ago. The kids would learn some history, I do not see what is wrong with that.”
My father raised his head over his newspaper and replied:
“There is nothing wrong with these old mines and learning about the past. But I wont have my son looking greedily for gold while I can only think of the thousand of deaths on the Trail of Tears, which were caused by the gold fever. I don't want my son and I to be in opposite camps.”
Mom looked at me and raised her eyebrows, a signal that meant: “Well, we lost this one.” My dad was the most righteous man in the world. Everything with him was right or wrong: he was up there with Abraham Lincoln. I still think that he was wrong about gold digging, but he had pegged me right: I was then a little greedy. I still am.
Dad looked at me and removed his glasses, he smiled: “I bet you do not know who were the richest men at the time of the gold rush. The richest men were not the gold diggers, it was the men who sold shovels: they all became very rich.”
I had to laugh. Mom smiled and got out of the kitchen to prepare for the night shift.
“Besides,” said Dad, “there are many things much more expensive and useful than gold.“
“Like what?”
“Like platinum, some gems like diamonds or blue garnets, porcelain teeth, some medicines like the medication for HIV, real saffron.”
Do porcelain teeth cost that much? I decided to do a better job at brushing my teeth. One look at my sister Kate convinced me that she was thinking on the same lines; she was checking the gap between her front teeth. She was losing her baby teeth and she was convinced that her teeth would never grow back. Well, I believed that porcelain teeth were expensive, but I also thought they would be hard to find in the ground. I went back to my project of finding gold.
Mom came back in the kitchen in her pristine uniform and sent us to bed.
2. A False Start: Hunting Slippers
It was Mom who started us on treasure-hunting the following day. We started with the difficult job of finding Dad's slippers. Dad forgot regularly to put his slippers on top of the dresser, out of reach of our dog, Backrub. Backrub was a perfect dog. He loved Dad with a passion, and he stole his slippers as soon as he could catch them. Then, he ran to the garden through his doggie door and from there jumped in the woods behind our yard. The slippers disappeared forever. Mom said that one day it would all be “slippers trees” back there and we would pick up slippers' fruits. Dad complained that his slippers' annual budget was larger than the budget for slippers of the President of the United States. I tried to Google “presidential slippers.” I was astonished to find over twenty million sites. I thought I would be the only person in the world to be interested in presidential slippers. I was wrong. There are sites that criticize Democratic slippers and Republican slippers. They criticize the Presidents for their slippers: the way they wear them, the style of their slippers, the places where they wear them and whether or not they got help to slip them on. It seems to be a very important political topic. There are sites where somebody sells presidential slippers at a high price, historical notes on Jefferson's slippers, Mrs. McKinley slippers, Mrs. Kennedy slippers, photos of all kinds of presidents from all kinds of countries wearing slippers, presidential slippers in museums. It was all mind-boggling. Though I did not find the annual budget of our President for his presidential slippers, the abundance of interest for the subject convinced me that hunting Dad's slippers was an important mission.
We spent a whole Saturday hunting for slippers in the woods, looking for freshly turned earth and dirt mounds. I asked if we could buy a metal detector, like real treasure hunters, but Dad said he did not have any metal slippers. We came home with 7 pence, one pointed old tooth, a small stone that looked like an arrow, a few fire ants bites and one slipper. The slipper was interesting, because it had been there a long time and a young oak tree was growing through it. Mom said it would be a reminder for Dad and placed it in a pot on the windowsill. Backrub had lost interest, at least in that old slipper. Kate asked Dad if the tooth was a porcelain tooth, but Dad said it was unlikely. He said it was probably a raccoon's broken tooth, and he had never seen a raccoon with porcelain teeth. But you never know.
3. Combing the Beach
Happily for us, Mr. Levine heard from his son Johnny about my project to find gold and after church, he came to talk to my dad about it. Mr. Levine was a good friend of Dad, because every year, on the most important Jewish day, Yom Kippur, my dad went to the synagogue instead of going to our Methodist church. Dad used to say that he was praying for forgiveness because of all the crimes committed by Christians against the Jews. That was my dad: the most righteous man in the world!
Mr. Levine brought us a book called Treasure Island by Stevenson. He told me that many pirate stories happened along the Low Country coast, in South Carolina and in Georgia because there are so many islands, inlets, coves and swamps to hide a boat and get some freshwater. And here in Savannah was the favorite bar of Blackbeard-
the-Pirate, so Savannah inherited just as many treasure stories as we have ghost stories.
Mr. Levine also proposed to let us try his metal detector. I asked him if he was a treasure hunter. He laughed.
“I am using it on my construction sites, he said: I can clean the grounds from roofing nails and a lot of trash.” He added that he was collecting old nails. In the old times, nails were made by hand, so every nail was different. Mr. Levine had a workshop where I had been many times: his hobby was to make copies of old furniture. I had never noticed that he used old nails. I promised myself to pay more attention next time and to look for these hand-made nails. “Thank you, “said Dad, maybe we will go to the beach next Saturday and try it. The Levines did not drive on Saturday, so they would not come with us. We promised to go with them for the next holidays.
It was very nice of Dad to take us to the beach, but I had doubts in his ability to help us find a treasure. Dad had a mathematical mind and did not “see” anything. Mom used to make him sit down and close his eyes, and she would ask him: “What am I wearing today?” Dad would be unable to come up with a single item. More extraordinarily, he never knew what he himself was wearing. With his eyes closed and his hands on his knees, he could not tell if he was wearing chinos, blue jeans, or the creased black pants he wore to
