Russ Remembered
One of my first jobs was as a newspaper reporter. Like almost everyone else who reported for that newspaper I wasn't long out of the crèche. That is to say we were all young, brash, idealistic, ambitious and dumb. One day I was kidding one of the other reporters who was recently married. I asked him if he had any nude pictures of his wife yet. When he said no, I aked: “Do you want some?”
… well, some people can't take
a
joke. I was lucky to get away without having the stuffing
beat out of
me. That was what we in the West like to call a learning
experience. 
Life is full of learning
experiences.
You reach your peak at 16 when you know everything there
is to know
about everything. It's downhill from there because every
day after
you know less and learn more. Some lessons are easy. Some,
like the
life-threatening incident with that muscle-bound reporter,
are hard.
One thing you learn in the
Black Hills is never ask a miner if he's
finding any gold.
Which brings me to Russ.
Russ was really old. Around
here they'd
say he was older than dirt. But for nearly 35 years he
worked a
placer mine up near Mystic. It was (and still is) a tunnel
in a
hillside with a rickety rough wooden door and a huge
padlock. I
don't know how far back that tunnel goes because Russ
never let me
or anyone else, for that matter, inside. If ever asked the
“indelicate” question, Russ would
answer that he never pulled a speck of gold out of that
mine.
Never call a man with a pick a liar.
If you ask a miner if he's getting any gold, it's like asking a newlywed if … (well, I'm not going back there.) Forget the fact that Russ spent all that time and effort digging a hole for no apparent reason. A hobby, I suppose. Everybody needs a hobby. Think of the guy in the Tennessee hills who the feds suspect is a moonshiner. It's not that he needs all that corn meal for making stuff … he just likes to feed wild birds. See. It's a hobby. So it is with gold bugs who never find any gold. They just like digging and panning. The thrill of seeing a first speck of gold in a pan has nothing to do with it.
It's said that gold is the only drug that produces deleterious effects without being ingested. Certainly there's more than a few folks around here who have some sort of fever. Perhaps Russ was one.
We will never know, because Russ passed and one can hope that his fate was more than just a hole in the ground. The figure of this 94-year-old man emerging from his mine with matted beard and hair, all covered in dirt, with buckets of non-gold-bearing ore will be missed in these Hills. You cannot say he was one of a kind. But you can say he was the last of a kind. The lone miner working a pit in solitude. He and all of his kind are missed.
By the way, although Russ
looked every bit of the
part of a grizzled old miner, I'm told that he actually
spent most of
his life as an aircraft engineer at Boeing. Like much in
the Black
Hills, things are not always as they first appear. It's
something you
learn on your 17th birthday.