Gold fever!
August 24, 2009Jon Brooks 1 Comment »That post from the Gold Prospecting Blog captures the animating spirit driving many a seeker of the yellow metal. And now, it seems, with the more conventional American dream on hold for so many and the price of gold at a 20-plus year peak, a new rush to experience that “Eureka!” moment is on. The Washington Post reports:It’s official. Cabin fever has officially set in. My mind is increasingly wrapped up in thoughts of gold, of mountain streams, rocky canyons and tricky descents into the same. At the Salem Gold Show this weekend one of the vendors dropped 7.5 ozt of fine gold on the floor, and while I felt terrible for them and hoped they could recover it all, part of me spied that jagged crack in the concrete floor under the pile of pretty pretty gold and thought about coming back with some crevicing tools… The mind wanders. There are so many possibilities and so little time in the day. Why isn’t retirement at age 45, or even 40? Who says I can’t make it happen early?
While there is no way to quantify the trend, anecdotally it is clear that the jobless are showing up not only in California but also elsewhere around the country where gold has been found in the past.
“I have been seeing a lot of it this year, with so many people getting laid off or hours cut way back,” said Tim LeGrand, owner of TN Gold & Gems in Coker, Tenn. Permits for prospecting in the nearby Cherokee National Forest, named for the tribe pushed westward after gold was discovered in the early 1800s, have more than doubled since 2007.
The wealth of user-generated Web material would seem to bear this out as a genuine trend. Flickr searches on “gold panning” and “gold prospecting” yield a mother-lode of images depicting people bent over riverbeds and streams, pans in hands. The Gold dredging and prospecting photo pool has drawn dozens of photos from the prospecting life, and YouTube is full of gold-related-if-not-plated videos. This eight-minute bit from “The Gold Fever Show” is hosted by a guy who sounds a little like a young Walter Brennan. For how-tos, check out “Gold panning tricks” and the “Backwash and tap method.” Or eschew process to immerse yourself in the avant-garde silent masterpiece, “Sluicing for Gold,” starring some guy and his equipment. Perhaps it takes a certain kind of optimistic desperation unique to Americans to believe in the potential success of this kind of endeavor—traipsing out the door at 6 a.m. with trusty pick and shovel, gleefully shouting to your spouse, “Honey, all our problems are solved!” while headed out carrying equipment you just bought over the Internet. A quote from the Post story:
“People come out with high hopes and don’t realize the work that is involved until they get into it,” LeGrand said. “Most try a few days and give up. Many struggle on and learn to pan. Very few get enough gold to do them any financial good.”
But in the spirit of that optimism, a snippet from the Gold Buddies Blog:
After the drive I decided to play around with my detector on my Mother’s front lawn and I quickly found two quarters and a nickel. I’m sure there’s lots more there…
Eureka!
September 30th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
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