Thinking about it had a forbidden flavor. The respectable, adult side of my head shied away from the idea. An inner voice of responsibility counseled, "No Martin, don't do it -- too close to crossing the line." The animal side, as always, was not so easily dissuaded. In the end lust prevailed. But Lust never can assume command without its partners, Risk and Price, tagging along.

     For years I had been attracted by the tempting bench situated high above the East Fork of the San Gabriel River, a 45-minute drive from my home near Los Angeles. A formidable climb could get me to her base. Did the 20-foot vertical wall of encrusted boulders, cobbles and smooth gravels have secrets hidden within? She sported a 150 yard long alluvial skirt that billowed sharply downward to the river below. The material was promising, seductively so. This stone wench had the kind of rounded curves that can charm so well and tease a weekend prospector into doing foolish things.

     The early morning nippiness of Memorial Day in 2003 found me adjusting and tightening the shoulder straps of my Gold Magic spiral wheel backpack along with some classifiers and digging tools, lunch and two bottles of water. Then I settled the load across 60 year old shoulders and began climbing up to get more intimate with the object of my desires.

     A sharpened Estwing miner's pick dangled from a belt ring on my right side. My left hand gripped a 5-gallon bucket with two empty 2-gallon buckets tucked inside along with some extra lunch items in a bag. It was capped shut with a bucket "seat cover" -- the kind with several little plastic-lidded compartments meant to hold nails or screws and such. A lightweight aluminum Estwing gravel scoop in my right hand, held upside down, served as a walking and steadying cane. My plan was to find a suitable access point to probe the bench's secrets with my main tool, the battery powered spiral wheel.

     It was much tougher getting there than I had anticipated. Plentiful rains had triggered a thick crop of burr-weed succulents in the first stretch up from the river. They oozed a gooey, sticky green sap every time my hiking boots tramped through them. Burrs and nettles soon built up a scratchy layer on top of this sap. I could no longer discern shoe laces; just the buildup of sticky green bundles that looked and felt like big velcro tangles.

     What was becoming a concern, however, was my miscalculation of the grade. Also, the material composing the slope turned out to be a rather loose amalgam of detritus that had been weathering off the old bench for decades. It was unstable, constantly sinking and slipping beneath my weight. I started out when it was barely light. Thus, I expected it to remain cool for a few hours, at least so long as Mr. Sun kept his big bald head on the other side of the cliffs. I thought I could afford to take my time. But already I was tiring.

     After much huffing, grumbles and near tumbles, I nearly was close enough to lay hands on the exposed surface that the bench presented to me. The prospect of confirming, with bare fingers, the promise of secrets tightly held inside the bench's smooth and firmly packed material excited me, but at that particular moment my hands were cramp-wracked from the prolonged gripping of my load. Further gratifications would have to be delayed.

     There was no place to rest my load without risking a slide back down the slope. So using my right arm I began to hack out a level place with the Estwing scoop. Trembling legs informed me none too subtly that the heavy backpack really needed to be off. But before I could deal with the backpack, first my left arm needed to be free of the buckets. But the buckets needed a level space before I could let go. Quaking legs and the beginnings of a back spasm caused me to curse the rising prices of being granted a continued existence -- atrophied muscles, creaky joints, diminished balance and all the rest.

     I allowed a backward glance to confirm what lay in wait for me below. But when I drew my eyes back to the task at hand they refocused on a rounded boulder that began to present itself from beneath the gravel cloak I had been scraping aside. It was about the size of a saddle and shaped rather like a large buttock. Ahh. Life was good again. The price was right. Arm movements intensified with increased vigor.

     Having succeeded in hacking out suitable resting places both for me and my gear, I spent the next hours running dry material through the spiral wheel and periodically conserving the concentrates in the smaller buckets and plastic compartments. While doing so I came under aerial attack. The biting horseflies are mean, hungry bugs that just land, get a good purchase on exposed skin without engaging in any foreplay whatsoever. Then they bite and bite hard, often two at a time and mostly in the ankle area. Sometimes right through stoutly woven stockings. It's not an easy task defending your integrity. Not when you are barely maintaining your balance and trying to penetrate deeper into the openings you've made in the bench.

     The flies seemed to realize the vulnerability of my situation. I used my hat to swat them best I could. By midmorning I had accumulated a small body count of brittle fly corpses on the ground between my ankles. Their allies, the mosquitoes and little face flies, were merely an annoyance. But these tiny critters created many successful diversions flying into my ears, nose and mouth. Between them, several red welts on exposed skin testified to the success of their tactics and the intensity of the battle.

     By late morning rivulets of sweat snaking down my brow had smeared many layers of hazy film over spectacles and reddened my eyes with salt stings. I had finished both bottles of water and the temperature was spiking. It was time to get back down to the cool embrace of the river without spilling any of my load -- a couple of inches of concentrates in each of the smaller buckets, one inserted into the other and both inside the 5-gallon bucket, lightly capped by the "seat top," the plastic holders of which also contained concentrates labeled according to their differing points of origin. This is when a chain of events began to unravel that culminated in the telling of this story.

     After packing up my gear I decided to descend via what seemed a slightly less steep route. Bad decision! But how could I have known that the soil would become so soft? Or was it because I was so much heavier with my load? Or maybe it was really rooted in the continuing, vague sense of guilt I felt for being in a marginally taboo place. True, many other men more than a century before me in this same canyon had courted similar stone sisters for their favors. But I was the one who most recently intruded upon the long sleep of this particular stone goddess. An upward glance sucked at my breath. The looming tonnage of boulder precariously stacked upon boulder angrily glared back down at me -- her twenty foot vertical face seeming to weep from scars left by my recent penetrations.

     It was precisely at that moment when my abstract and pious wallowings of remorse were displaced by imminent realities and the frightened bitters of regret. The mechanics of my situation were deteriorating. Sandy soil steadily escaping from beneath the rock I balanced on was all that kept me from pin-wheeling, arms akimbo, down, down, ever further down that painful hill.

     As that final moment of no return unfolded, I instinctively removed the pick from the belt ring and tossed it, and the scoop, down the slope. I didn't want that sucker sticking me in a kidney, letting the air out of a lung or spiking a tender orifice. Just as I sensed the beginning of a head-over-heels topple, I leaped across a washed out, five-foot traverse and grasped the charred trunk of a manzanita. The previous summer's fires had scorched this hillside, but the sturdy bush was made of tough stuff. It held my weight and checked my growing momentum. I was able to slide the rest of the way down the steepest part of the hill on my butt without flipping and without spilling any of my concentrates.

     But my bad day was just beginning. The dust hadn't settled yet when I began to sense everything around me begin to vibrate. My back was to the vertical wall of undermined rock. I flashed for a micro-moment on death by inundation beneath many tons of rock. What would it feel like to have all my air escape through hundreds of rib fractures in less time than it takes to stomp an empty aluminum beer can? Maybe I'd just be buried alive, giving me time to repent. Or maybe the stones would be merciful and quickly crush the consciousness out of my cranium like a walnut in a nutcracker. It was then that it hit me. An avalanche does not warn with a humming sound. Oh, oh. I was in real big trouble.

     Imagine how I felt when, gaping up the slope, I saw a huge mass, the volume of a Greyhound bus, levitating vertically in midair no more than 50 feet away. Now populate that ample space with a living, buzzing, whizzing mass of bad news, each individual armed with a painful stinger and all of them spaced about six inches apart from each other. Breath left me and muscles wouldn't function except for a distinct puckering at my nether end. I just sat there and waited.

     However, it wasn't my fate to meet my end that way on that particular Memorial Day. As it turned out the bees were angry. Very angry. But for some reason, not at me. I won't forget the frightened look in that mockingbird's eye as he turned to glance at the buzzing swarm that pursued him out of my sight beyond the edge of the cliff.

     Will I be seduced by that pretty stone face again? If anyone had asked me that question just then, as I began to struggle back up on unsteady feet, I most likely would have responded with a single fingered gesture. But, of course, that would have been before I found the little nugget hiding in the black sand concentrates. That changed everything. Funny critters we prospectors are. Even weekend prospectors. Hard for some folks -- most folks -- to comprehend. Even those closest to us.

     Later toward evening my daughter pulled into the driveway as I was unloading the pickup truck. She knows that Dad goes off to the desert for days at a time and that he has this, er, hobby. She, of course, lives in a universe populated by rakish young men, popular music, fast cars and all the rest. But she's been a good sport about it. She knows, in some blonde, abstract way, that prospecting is something DAD REALLY LIKES TO DO. Once, I even talked her into accompanying me for a day at the river. My memory goes back to that occasion. Come with me to revisit that day.

*   *   *   

     It was a big opportunity to share my passion with her, maybe provide some insight into what makes me tick the way I do. I demonstrated, with the gusto of a born again preacher, how all the gizmos work -- the classifiers, the pans, the sluice. I lost myself in a frenzy of activity, silently praying that something other than specks and fines would parlay that otherwise lazy spring day into a lasting impression on someone who is very important to me.

     Almost miraculously a flatish, split-pea size nugget beamed its gilded happy face up out of the flair of my sluice. "Yes!" I exclaimed out loud, right elbow pulling down on an imaginary victory bell cord. Then I whirled around expecting to bask in the adoring approval that surely would be written on Brigette's face. But Brigette wasn't there. My lopsided grin of sheepish triumph sagged as my eyebrows arched questioningly. Where, and how long had she been gone?

     I rubbed an arm across snakes of streaking sweat. Salt stung eyes swung upstream to a splash of blonde hair in quiet repose beyond a screen of river willows. I called out to her over the hiss and gurgle of rushing water. No response. I really wanted her to experience the moment, but somehow the moment was slipping away. I called again a little louder. Still no response. So I walked over and discovered her head encapsulated by a set of headphones. The wire from the headphones stretched down to a Walkman clipped to her hip. She was intensely scribbling something in her diary.

     I extended my palm, holding the little nugget for her to see. She glanced at it, looked up at me, and produced a smile very reminiscent of the smile my mother used to reserve for those days I would reveal to her the toad or the mouse or the snake recently captured. Mercifully, Brigette did not pat me on the head. And I knew then that she never would understand this remote part of the world that I sometimes inhabit.

*   *   *   

     My memory of that moment was jostled back to the present as she got out of her car, walked over to my pickup and politely inquired as to how my day had gone. Silently I drew her to me. I hugged her tighter and I held her for longer than usual. Then I told her I had found a tiny gold nugget of exceptionally deep color that morning. I did not mention anything about the bees or how closely death had shadowed me.

     Brigette sensed that something was different about me on this particular day. Perhaps it was this "something" that women are so good at intuiting which prompted her, for the only time I ever can recall, to ask me why I go prospecting, why I do the things I do. Finally, a serious probing into the central nature of my being at this most awkward of moments. I was overwhelmed by the futility of a serious response.

     So, I just grinned and mumbled something like, "Sweetheart, you wouldn't understand. And sometimes neither do I. Maybe tomorrow or some other time we'll talk about it. But right at this moment, let's just say I am a content and happy guy." And then I grinned and showed her the tiny nugget.

     Blue windows blinked up from my outstretched hand and locked knowingly into mine. "You will be going after more soon?"

     "Yes, soon," I said.