Ms. Got Rocks (14 page)

C
hapter 14

T
he day was going along as she planned, moving one boulder, stone, and rock from the face of the active dredging area to the side. Always remembering not to put the rubble behind her where she would have to move that same rock out of her way tomorrow.

This was the most boring and most essential part of production gold dredging, having a plan for moving rubble and then actually moving rubble. Rocky did it, but it was as close to digging a ditch with her hands from here to China as she ever wished to get.

Rocky was actually thinking about lunch, nothing like pitching rocks, even underwater, to give a woman an appetite.

Over the noise of the dredge bubbling and the hookah gurgling and the sound of the river moving over the rocks, Rocky thought she could hear Lovie barking.

In the past few days Lovie had discovered lodge pole squirrels and she was getting hoarse from barking at them. The squirrel game is run away from her and then run right back. The game began anew to the delight of all.

Rocky was sure that was what the dog was barking about. If it was that jerk Callaghan sneaking around again, Phoebe would begin to bark and take him down.

Rocky told herself that she would listen until she got this one boulder moved and then she would surface and take a look.

Rocky was still thinking about lunch, settled on having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and saving the salad for dinner. She was barely putting any force on that one foot across boulder and the damn thing seemed to want to roll away from her.

“Wait, that boulder isn’t moving, I am,”

She looked over her shoulder and  all the tie downs and anchor lines were trailing free from the dredge frame, free in the river current. The only thing attaching Rocky to the dredge was her air hose and lifeline rope. She was being slowly dragged away from the rock face, out into the main river current. As soon as the dredge moved out into the main current of the river, the dredge on pontoons and Rocky would not be moving slowly at all.

Rocky was in grave danger of being caught up in the trailing lines and not being able to surface as the current rolled her around and downriver to the rapids before the bridge abutments.

Rocky could feel the current pulling her faster, away from the riverbank. Suddenly the lines holding her to the dredge snapped tight as the dredge was whipped into the main current and the eighteen foot long dredge spun away. Her body was the only anchor.

She slammed her pickaxe into the river bottom, hoping that it and her body would hold against the current. The current was strong enough that the dredge had now turned around and was spinning to the left and the pickaxe was whipped out of the soft mud of the bottom.

The snap into the main current had wrapped one of the trailing ropes loosely onto her arm and twirled her in the current while she watched the line tighten around her arm.

“No, this is not going to happen,” she thought. “I am not in trouble.” Rocky grew up in this river and underwater half the time at that. She grabbed the line around her arm, and forced it loose and watched as it floated away from her into the quickening current.

She had the hookah mouthpiece firmly clamped in her teeth; there was plenty of gas in the dredging motor pumping air into the hookah. The only danger was panicking and becoming tangled into those ropes before she could get herself onto the dredge body, or being slammed into the huge rocks that protect the rapids before the river reached the bridge. If she cannot get herself out of this before getting to the bridge, then and only then was she in big deep trouble.

Rocky wanted to force herself down to the river bottom rather than up. As the eight inch heavy brass dredge nozzle swung by her, she grabbed it and it helped take her down to the deepening river bottom, where the current was not as strong.

She took two deep drags on the air hookah to calm herself.

She said around her mouthpiece, “I’m all right.”

Unclasping the heavy divers’ weight belt, she rolled into a cannonball position on the bottom. While kicking off from the bottom, the heavy belt dropped off her, clipping her right knee.

She rapidly shot toward the surface throwing the brass dredge hose nozzle away from her body as she ascended. The heavy nozzle could not swing around and hit her from that position.

On the way to the surface, the big corrugated dredge hose passed right in front of her following its attached nozzle. Rocky grabbed it and clutched it to her chest. She could climb that hose to the surface, it would easily hold her. The brass nozzle that was bumping along on the river bottom and her weight would keep the hose from bouncing back and hitting her as well.

After ripping off her wet suit booties with one hand she could use her bare feet and hands to climb. Moving up the twenty feet of dredge hose was a lot easier than she thought it would be, and within moments she was hanging across the sun baked hot pontoon on the sparkling surface of the American River.

As much as she wanted to lie there, there was still the problem of getting the dredge out of the mainstream of the river.

Rocky felt something really warm down in her wet suit. She was peeing on herself. The wetness on her face, was not entirely river water, as she watched the dredge scuttle toward this monster of a rock. She would be kissing the dredge goodbye, if it hit that twenty-foot tall boulder straight on.

“Oh God, hold on,” she yelled to nobody when the pontoons entered a whirlpool and the dredge and Rocky were spinning again, and whipping toward the boulder. There was no way to miss it.

Seconds later Rocky was slammed into the face of that granite rock. She was determined to hang on to it no matter what. The dredge was ripped out from under her and flung away.

Seconds ago, Rocky was crying, then she couldn’t help but laugh to herself, because she was clinging to this huge rock like that cat with the suction feet clinging to the car window years ago.

Very brief moments later, Rocky’s lifeline tightened and the dredge whipped into the main current. Rocky was snatched from the face of the rock and onto the surrounding rocks and then dragged back into the river whirlpool.

Opening her eyes, Rocky had enough awareness to spot her hookah mouthpiece floating away in the current. It was attached to her wet suit with a two-foot line. Rocky struggled to grab the hookah and stuff it back into her mouth.  She blew hard into it to clear the river water from it.

The water looked shallower here. That meant the dredge must be right in the rapids and Rocky’s body was being rolled over the rocks in the four-foot deep water. If she could get her feet under her she could stand up and maybe hold against the current.

Rocky was not fighting to stand now; she was fighting to keep from being wound again in her own lifeline as she was rolled down this stony portion of the riverbed.

The current and the dredge were slowing, the water deepening again. Rocky was thrown into the limbs of an underwater snag tree. The dredge was still moving with the current and pulling her lifeline. Rocky was wedged into the tree snag, like an anchor.

Rocky knew there was something broken in her chest. She could breathe shallowly, but a deep breath hurt badly. Blocking out the pain was not easy, she was in a battle with the tree snag and she would win over it and the pain. She was pretty sure she would win.

Grabbing her lifeline and pulling it toward her getting some slack she tied it around the closest stub of a branch right next to her head. She now had eighteen inches of free line to work with. She pushed and pulled with her arms against the current to get her legs between the trunk of her body and the truck of the tree.

She doubled over while reaching down forcing her left leg with both hands into the tucked position. Giving herself seconds to think, Rocky realized what she should have done, and what she needed to do immediately to get herself to the surface.

Both her legs and arms were free of the tree and she pushed against the trunk. That worked, she climbed hand over hand up the tree stump. When she was at the top, and the current was battering her head, she moved both her legs up again between the truck and her body. She reached down on her left leg and pulled her dive knife out of the scabbard and did what she should have done first when she was back on the pontoon. Taking several deep breaths, Rocky cut the lifeline and her hookah hoses and kicked off the stub tree for the surface.

Nothing felt as great right then as that huge granite rock. She grabbed it and clung to the sun hot rock face with the river crashing against it and her toes.

Breathing caused a terrible pain in her side. All of her limbs hurt, but worked. She could lift her right foot and move it over toward her right and explore with her toes for a foot hold. She found a tiny crease in the rock; she brought her foot back to the safe little ledge. Moving her right hand in that direction, she found the little crease that ran up to her hand level. Rocky was going to have to move up to the top of the rock, and then she did not know what the heck she would do, but on top was much safer than right there, she thought.

Little by little she carefully moved up and to the right around to what would be the backside of the rock away from the river.

On reaching the shady side, she rested and looked up for a handhold to the top. There was nothing looking good right here. She would need to move further around the side of the rock facing toward the bridge. Rocky looked down, she knew she shouldn’t have, but she did.

The rock was sitting on a dry black sand beach a mere three-foot drop to the ground. She must have been moving down instead of up. Rocky dropped to the beach and a stabbing pain bulleted through her entire body. She dropped flat out on the hot sand in the ripped up wet suit, and attempted to breathe but not deeply as that hurt too much.

Rocky gathered herself together. She painfully got up and slowly walked and crawled up the river to where it ran past the cabin, there she swam across.

The dogs were waiting for her on the other side, dancing with delight that she was through with work for the day. But, she was not finished.

Sitting on the bottom step of the porch, Rocky stripped off her shredded wet suit pants and top. Naked, she staggered up the steps and pulled on the first jeans in the drawer and a tank top, which was an agony to get over her head.

Rocky had probably broken something inside, but she did not have time right then to find out. She needed to hurry. The dredge must get tied off from where ever it was on the river, and Rocky must find out why all the lines let go at the same time.

Shoving her nicked and bleeding bare feet into her work boots, she shut the dogs in the cabin.

Rocky walked slowly and not quite upright to the truck. Her plan was to drive downriver looking for the dredge. Throwing every piece of line she owned into the truck bed, Rocky started the engine and looked over at the river. She would somehow winch the dredge back to shore.

The American flag that was flying from the dredge could barely be seen, bobbing and waving in the tiny summer breeze. It was down by the bridge, but Rocky could not see any more of her equipment from the meadow.

She was going down there to rig a line to that dredge and tie it off onto the truck. Rocky could see that might be a two-person job, she would give Devlin a call and see if he could help with the job when he got off work.

The old winch on the front of the truck, had not been started since Rocky had the truck. She was sure it was heavy enough to pull the dredge out of anything, but when did it last run and would it even work was the question.

Admonishing herself too late that she had not checked out this essential piece of safety equipment for operating a production gold mining business she continued driving downriver.

“That was plain sheer dumb,” Rocky told herself. “The first of a long string of plain, sheer dumb things you’ve done since you've got here.”

The ride down the rutted driveway in the rattletrap truck was as close to agony in her chest and leg as she had ever been.

When the truck was directly across from the dredge, Rocky could assess what she needed to do. The dredge had wedged itself between the bridge buttress and a gravel bar. Rocky thought it looked to be a fairly straightforward task to winch it out after she four wheeled down the bank.

Then walking back up to the bridge wasn't painfree. Peering down at the dredge from the bridge, it was sitting forlornly stuck, the flag fluttering bravely in the breeze, Rocky thought she could actually winch it up onto the trailer and then pull it up onto the road.

"Getting the line onto it and tied down is going to be the pisser and every variation of hell." Rocky,pep talking herself, stood watching the water funneling between the abutment and the gravel bar. It looked too deep to wade into and the current running too swift to swim over to it. Standing on the bridge looking down at the roiling water Rocky was sure she was going to get wet again.

First things first, would be to drive the truck even further down the bank as close to the waterline as she could. Then, worry about getting the line tied off to the dredge.

Fortunately, the dredge looked securely wedged into its spot and was not about to go floating away while Rocky unloaded the equipment.

Looking over what equipment was in the back of the pickup, most of it was still what her Father hauled around. Rocky had never more than cursorily glanced at the stuff, other than planning someday to clean out the back of the truck.