Dorian Amos - The Good Life Gets Better: Panning for Gold

Copyright Dorian Amos 2006

All rights reserved. Apart from brief extracts for the purpose of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the permission of the publisher.

Dorian Amos has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

The Good Life Gets Better

1st Edition

August 2006

Published by Eye Books Ltd

Eye Books

29 Barrow Street

Much Wenlock

Shropshire

TF13 6EN

Tel: +44 (0) 845 450 8870

website: www.eye-books.com

Set in Garamond and Frutiger

ISBN: 9781903070499

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print and Design

Its seven years since Bridget, my wife, and I decided that there has to be more to life than this. I was a cartoonist and Bridget a psychiatric nurse, and we gave up everything we had ever worked for and immigrated to the Canadian wilderness for a bit of adventure. After making the decision to change our life, it took about five months to sell everything we owned before we said our goodbyes to friends and family and finally headed off into the endless dark woods of a different continent.

We were nervous but not scared, looking back; we were more naive than knowledgeable, but then, that is how it should be. We had little money, no legal right to be in Canada, no equipment, a short-legged dog called Boris and a rusty old Nissan truck. We also had enthusiasm and belief in what we were doing because we were tired of our mundane lives and really believed that there was more to life than what we had we just had to go and find it, whatever it was.

I still remember the words of wisdom people gave us when they heard of our plans: Youre too old to do that sort of thing, its time you got a mortgage and settled down; What are you going to do? You cant just build a place in paradise then sit in it for the rest of your life - youll get bored!; Id love to just give up everything and swan off into the wilderness but I have responsibilities; and my favorite - The grass is always greener. Its amazing how much free advice the chap who sits at the end of the bar can give you. If we had listened to all that advice we would have been scared, and our enthusiasm would have been diluted with other peoples realities and fears. We had enough fears of our own; after all, you cant just give up your life and walk into the wilderness without a little anxiety. Where would we stay? Would we meet anyone out there? How big are the bears? What should we take? What would we do? The list of questions was endless and in the end we woke up and stopped asking them because in trying to answer them we were talking ourselves out of it. We didnt care that the grass is always greener. It is always bloody greener, always has been always will be. Thats why theres a stupid catchphrase about it. But what the stupid catchphrase does not address is why are you looking over the hedge in the first place? If you are thinking of better pasture its because you have outgrown the one youre in, you are asking questions and are no longer following the herd, you actually want to leave for the greener grass and that was the difference between us and the chap at the end of the bar. We left and found snow on it. It wasnt greener it was different, as we knew it would be, because we dreamt of a golden land full of challenges, freedom and wilderness, we did not dream of greener grass. We found what we were looking for and we absolutely love it. As for getting bored, Id try it, but we still have not had a chance to sit down. As for giving up our responsibilities, we did, easily, and found true ones each other. And as for being too old to do this sort of thing and getting a mortgage what a load of bollocks!

We left and felt free. We were unwashed and homeless for a year while we searched the backwoods for a place we could call home. And we finally found it after a canoe trip through 500 miles of wilderness into the far North. We found the Yukon. We found the City of Gold - Dawson City. We found the Klondike. And there we found the endless, remote wilderness. We built a cabin, struggled through -40C winters, survived rotting ice, killed our meat, built our fires and gave birth to a son whom we named Jack.

And now, seven years on

Sixty-Eight Rich Men on the Steamer Portland.

STACKS OF YELLOW METAL!

Seattle Post, 9:00 a.m. edition, July 17th, 1897

The Klondike Gold Rush began instantly and dramatically when the Portland sailed into Seattle harbour from St Michaels, Alaska, her hold full of the first gold out of Klondike and sixty-eight weather-beaten Yukon miners who were rich not only with gold but with life. Their arrival brought near hysteria to North America and Europe. Absolutely nothing in this world stirs quite so much emotion in the whole of humanity as GOLD. It has been the downfall of nations and the making of empires. It causes people to kill, steal and con, it makes some men sane and strips the sanity out of others. It has in the past, and to this day still does, lead ordinary men on wonderful, ridiculous adventures in far-off corners of the globe.

Living in the Klondike we hear many stories of these adventures. One is of Antoine from Dawson City, a true Yukoner through and through, tall, loud and crazy, living life at his pace and in his own direction, as free as the wind in the spruce in his exciting search for the Yukons gold. And he found it, lots of it. The colours he was finding were plentiful and full of riches and promise but they killed him.

In the dark of winter and blinded by the glitter of gold, he cut a hole in the thick ice of the Yukon River downstream from Dawson and went diving 20 feet to the riverbed on the bend of the river. It was there that he found and collected the gold caught in the riffles of the ancient bedrock. The theory behind his expedition was reasonable for two factors. One, the Yukon River is so silty during the summer, due to hundreds of rivers and creeks draining into it, that its impossible to see through the water, rendering it impossible to prospect. It is estimated that a dump-truck load of silt travels a fixed point every second during the height of the summer. In winter everything but the deepest water is frozen. Water levels drop and the river becomes clear.

Reason two, where Antoine was digging was downstream from the Klondike River in which billions of dollars of gold had been found. Naturally, huge amounts of gold are going to be washed into the Yukon River and get caught in the riffles of the bedrock at the first downstream bend.

It was a wonderful, inventive idea. But it was also crazy and ridiculous. Antoine was so blinded by gold fever that he totally overlooked one thing - the Yukon River All went really well for about two weeks. He had been diving on a rope through a hole in the ice which was kept open by his mates sitting in a heated wall tent. Then one cold, windy day about an hour and a half before Antoines air supply ran out his mates felt a tug on the rope to say he was surfacing. They gently coiled the rope as he came up from bedrock, then it went tight and all motion abruptly stopped. They waited anxiously. Minutes later three tugs of trouble jerked the line in their hands. His signal only told the poor fellows in the tent that he was in great danger. They waited and waited, the rope tight, the only sound the crackle of the wood stove. Antoine had become trapped in 10 feet of slush ice below the main ice. Time passed in the tent agonizingly slowly as his mates stared into the dark river, watching the line their friend was attached to twitch and shake, their cracked and weather-beaten hands gripping it tightly, waiting for the signal to pull, while all the time knowing that time was running out.