It continues. A little at a time, I tap out this story. Maybe someday soon it will be finished, but that day isn't today, so fair warning; this story is not finished, and if you hate cliffhangers, maybe skip this one.
We called it a forest. Really, it was a few hundred trees along the riverbank. Standing at just the right angle you could see clear through them. From the stubble field on one side to the ripening durum across the river. Surrounding the forest for as far as you could see was mile upon mile of sun blasted, wind swept prairie. A forest then, at least in contrast.
By 10 am, the baking heat would be unbearable. The trees might not have been much, but they stood thick enough to provide a little shade.
Bing was riding his Kuwahara. Chrome silver with black accents in liquid smooth powder coat. I had a rust spotted CCM bmx frame adorned with a mish mash of parts pulled from dead bikes. Bing’s bike was the envy of all the local kids, but I prefered my frankenstein bike. It could hit a jump in just the right way. A smooth launch, a little give on the landings. The Kuwahara had footpegs, better hand brakes, and a brand new chain, but it felt a little too unforgiving. Antagonistic. It confronted the ground rather than rolling over it. Also, Bing was always on it.
The sun hadn’t really gotten going yet, so the air was still a little cool. Wet streams drifted to the corners of my eyes as my feet spun the pedals. We didn’t talk, but I could hear Bing breathing hard off to my left.
We hadn’t really discussed it, but we both knew where we were headed. Since late spring we had been building a jump in the forest.
Greg Stevens had swiped a shovel from his garden shed and left it out there last summer. He had some plan for digging a WW1 trench and camping in it. His shovel caper resulted in a pit about two feet deep and four feet across. He couldn’t even lay in it without crunching up his legs. Greg decided not to bring the shovel back since his dad had blamed the neighbor and bought a new one. Now it was our primary jump construction tool, and the trench was our main excavation point.
We would all take turns scooping up some dirt from the trench and adding to the jump. Over a couple of weeks, it had gone from a small, bump crowning the edge of a natural ditch, to a loose kicker a couple feet high.
We had ridden over the Jump dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but only the center had packed down properly. The edges were still loose enough to catch an errant wheel ending your your run really quick. You might spin off to the side, dump the bike right there, or stop dead and go over the handlebars. Honestly it was hard to tell what might happen, except that it would probably be bad. We would bang on the jump with the shovel, or ride over it slowly, but without some rain to really tamp it down, it was just too scary to hit the jump properly, at full speed.
I made it to the edge of the forest where our jump was under construction and locked up my brakes on the loose dirt. I leaned hard, kicking out my back tire, planting my inside foot and sliding to a tripod stop. Bing, right behind me, did the same, but maybe not with quite as much style.
I gave the ramp a quick once over to see if any work had been done on it in the past couple of days. Swimming lessons had prevented me from coming out and working on it, but there were about five of us that regularly came out here, and also knew where the shovel was stashed. All I saw were deep gouges running up the landing slope of the ramp, turning up all the soft soil underneath.
“If they are gonna ride on it, they should at least stomp it down” Bing griped between winded huffs.
I silently agreed and made a sour face. Older kids had been coming out at night with BMXs, and an 80cc dirt bike. The BMX tracks weren’t that noticeable, but the dirt bike had left the ramp in an unusable state. They might as well have run a rototiller over it.
I stepped off my bike and let it fall to the ground in disgust. I had been hoping to take a couple of slow runs, maybe catch a little air, before doing any construction work. Bing shoved out his kickstand and stepped off. He started stamping his hightops into the soft earth while I fumed into the forest to retrieve the shovel.
We kept the shovel up in a tree. It had been Bing’s idea. I would never tell him I thought so, but he could be pretty clever when he tried.
Shovel Tree was a little way past the Party Pit, an open area surrounded by trees. This clearing was regularly used by older kids for the kind illicit late night parties where someone would mess up a ramp, so the shovel had to be hidden far enough from those jerks that it wasn’t likely to be seen. The tree we settled on had lost a branch about 15 feet up it’s trunk. The bony remnant sticking out from the tree was just enough to hang the shovel handle. The lower branches stuck out in such a way that you could really only see the shovel hanging there when you were right underneath it.
To hide or retrieve the thing, required a daring leap from a nearby stump. You climbed up the stump, maybe a little more than waist height from the ground, jumped toward Shovel Tree, and either lifted or hung it all in one continuous motion. You then had the option of trying to hang on to the shovel dragging it with you while avoiding the lower branches, or tossing it over your shoulder and hoping it didn’t slice the back of your neck on the way down. I had seen both methods attempted successfully and unsuccessfully, but I never saw anyone get hurt. At least not badly enough that it would require telling a parent what had happened. I usually opted for the ‘carry the shovel down with you’ method, since that always seemed the least likely to end in a head wound. It might have been a clever way of hiding the shovel, but it was a Bing solution, so that meant a higher than average risk of injury.
I plucked the shovel off of Shovel Tree and started back through the clearing. Bing was standing there nudging his toe against a discarded beer can. He looked up at me.
“Listen man, we don’t have to work on this today. We can head back into town. Find something to do. We cou-”
“No!” I surprised myself with how loud I yelled at him. Surprised him too. As friends do, we bickered, even tore into each other from time to time, but I had crossed a line.
We just sort of stared at each other for a moment, feeling the waves of what was going on wash over us.
Finally, he curled his lip, flatly said “dick” and stomped out of the clearing to go sit in the dirt beside the Kuwahara.
Of course I know now that he had been just as upset as me. Probably more. It was his family that was moving. His life that was getting lifted up and drifted across the country. I would still have my other friends here, where they had always been. I was losing my best friend, but he was losing everyone. Like I said, I know that now. Right then, I just started digging and slapping down dirt. Swinging line drives with the flat of the shovel against the ruined side of our ramp. Our ramp. Mine and Bing’s ramp. Other kids worked on it too, but it was just us two who had started it.
I rammed the shovel down hard into the center of the trench. I was angry at the dirt. I was angry at Bing. I was angry at Bing’s dad for getting a better job. I was angry at me. I was angry at the kids who tore up our ramp. I was angry at the increasingly unbearable heat of the day. I really didn't know what I was angry at. I stabbed the shovel as deeply as could.
The next thing I knew, I was laying belly down beside the hole holding my chin where it had bounced off the shovel handle.
I looked up to see Bing standing over me. My face was probably a mix of bewildered and accusing, but Bing just stared right past me at the hole, eyes like pie plates.
“What in the hell, man?” Bing blurted out, less to me, and more to the shovel, as he reached down to take hold of it. It took a couple of firm yanks to dislodge, and either the shovel, or whatever it had sunk into made a strange rattling, sucking sound. Like a reverse burp.
I stood back up, shoulder to shoulder with Bing, earlier animosities abandoned. Just like that, we had reset, united in our bewilderment.
“What happened?” I probed.
“Umm. Maybe like a crack, or cave or something? Maybe you punched through into a cave?”
Neither of us believed that. Neither of us had ever seen a cave in the middle of a broad, flat, prairie. When Bing had hauled the shovel up bits of powdery wood had come up with it. Old dessicated fibers that had, at one time, been milled lumber. The edges were too clean and regular to be tree roots, or buried deadfall.
“What about the wood?” I was already piecing together a picture in my mind of what I had “punched through” so I floated out questions to see if Bing was thinking along the same lines. I couldn’t bring myself to voice what I was thinking.
“Why would someone bury a wood box by the river?” Bing asked, walking the assumption forward to include not just wood, but a wooden box. He mirrored my tone and I could see dread ripple across his expression, before replacing it with a nervous grin.
“Is this a casket? Did you just jam a shovel into some dead guy’s casket?” Bings smile widened into a full toothed display. “Gross!”
“I don’t know that. We don’t know what it is!” I couldn’t help it. I was grinning now too. “It’s probably just old wood someone tossed out. And buried. On purpose. Beside the river.”
We traded conspiratorial looks, but neither of us budged.
“Go check.”
“You go check.”
“You found it”
“You have the shovel.”
We both took a step forward and arched over the hole. Bing used the tip of the shovel to begin a ginger excavation, careful and tense. Neither of us wanted to uncover anything grizzly, but then again, we absolutely wanted to uncover something grizzly. Or, valuable, amazing.
My heart was beating so hard my hands would shake with each pulse. When light glinted off something metallic a few inches below the soil, My whole body lurched.
“That’s treasure!”
Bing stopped clearing dirt and squinted at me.
“Do you think pirates put it here?” He let sarcasm drip from every word. “Child.”
“Shut up. It’s something shiny. There’s something metal down there. It’s metal in a box”
If Bing had any intention of spending more time making fun of me, his curiosity overcame it.
We crouched down, relatively sure that we weren’t going to be nose to nose with a mummified corpse.
Enough dirt had been cleared away that we could start to make out the shape of what we had found. The sun had been climbing in the sky and was almost directly above us now more clearly revealing the shapes below us. Taking a lower angle, I could make out a rounded metal edge. Maybe a large plate, or disc almost filling a box about two feet square.
Bing reached in, taking hold of the metal, and just as quickly dropped it, recoiling his hand.
“What! What happened?” I demanded.
“Damn it! That’s cold!” he had his finger tips tucked under his armpit and rocked back and forth in wincing pain.
He pulled out his fingers and looked at them. They seemed fine. No visible wounds or bleeding. He shook his hand aggressively in front of his face like a fan made of sausages.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, fine. Damn it, that is ice cold. It feels like burning, but cold, man.”
I wrapped my hand in the belly of my T-shirt and stretched it down to slowly touch the metal. Nothing. It felt hard and maybe a little cool, but nothing like what Bing had experienced.
“It feels normal. Just like metal. Are you messing with me?”
“No. It was like frostbite, man. Still hurts a little.”
I took my hand out of my shirt and tentatively brushed a fingertip across the metal. Then all my fingers. Then the flat of my hand. A little cool, hard, metallic. Certainly not burning cold or frostbite cold.
I reached my fingers down under the edge and grabbed hold. The plate was incredibly thin, like foil, but solid and unyielding. I pressed hard with my fingertips but the metal didn’t bend or crumple. Although paper thin, the edge felt round and smooth, not sharp. I started lifting the circle of metal and found it so light that it didn’t seem to have any substance at all. It took some twisting and wrangling to pull it from the box, since the hole we had cut wasn’t quite large enough.
I set the disk on the ground between us, now fully visible under the full midday sun. We didn’t move. We didn’t breath. The only sounds were leaves twisting in a light breeze, and the distant buzz of insects. It was treasure. It was beautiful and frightening and impossible.
Around the circular rim of the thing was metal, sure enough. A dull silvery metal with lines and markings along its circumference. Like a clock face, but with the minute marks set to irregular periods and angles. Interesting and unusual, but it looked manufactured, something I could wrap my mind around. What sat in the center of the ring was different. It was black. Just black. No reflections, no variation in the surface, no shadows. Light didn’t play off it at all. Encircled by a band of paper thin metal, there on the ground sat nothing. Nothing at all.
We called it a forest. Really, it was a few hundred trees along the riverbank. Standing at just the right angle you could see clear through them. From the stubble field on one side to the ripening durum across the river. Surrounding the forest for as far as you could see was mile upon mile of sun blasted, wind swept prairie. A forest then, at least in contrast.
By 10 am, the baking heat would be unbearable. The trees might not have been much, but they stood thick enough to provide a little shade.
Bing was riding his Kuwahara. Chrome silver with black accents in liquid smooth powder coat. I had a rust spotted CCM bmx frame adorned with a mish mash of parts pulled from dead bikes. Bing’s bike was the envy of all the local kids, but I prefered my frankenstein bike. It could hit a jump in just the right way. A smooth launch, a little give on the landings. The Kuwahara had footpegs, better hand brakes, and a brand new chain, but it felt a little too unforgiving. Antagonistic. It confronted the ground rather than rolling over it. Also, Bing was always on it.
The sun hadn’t really gotten going yet, so the air was still a little cool. Wet streams drifted to the corners of my eyes as my feet spun the pedals. We didn’t talk, but I could hear Bing breathing hard off to my left.
We hadn’t really discussed it, but we both knew where we were headed. Since late spring we had been building a jump in the forest.
Greg Stevens had swiped a shovel from his garden shed and left it out there last summer. He had some plan for digging a WW1 trench and camping in it. His shovel caper resulted in a pit about two feet deep and four feet across. He couldn’t even lay in it without crunching up his legs. Greg decided not to bring the shovel back since his dad had blamed the neighbor and bought a new one. Now it was our primary jump construction tool, and the trench was our main excavation point.
We would all take turns scooping up some dirt from the trench and adding to the jump. Over a couple of weeks, it had gone from a small, bump crowning the edge of a natural ditch, to a loose kicker a couple feet high.
We had ridden over the Jump dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but only the center had packed down properly. The edges were still loose enough to catch an errant wheel ending your your run really quick. You might spin off to the side, dump the bike right there, or stop dead and go over the handlebars. Honestly it was hard to tell what might happen, except that it would probably be bad. We would bang on the jump with the shovel, or ride over it slowly, but without some rain to really tamp it down, it was just too scary to hit the jump properly, at full speed.
I made it to the edge of the forest where our jump was under construction and locked up my brakes on the loose dirt. I leaned hard, kicking out my back tire, planting my inside foot and sliding to a tripod stop. Bing, right behind me, did the same, but maybe not with quite as much style.
I gave the ramp a quick once over to see if any work had been done on it in the past couple of days. Swimming lessons had prevented me from coming out and working on it, but there were about five of us that regularly came out here, and also knew where the shovel was stashed. All I saw were deep gouges running up the landing slope of the ramp, turning up all the soft soil underneath.
“If they are gonna ride on it, they should at least stomp it down” Bing griped between winded huffs.
I silently agreed and made a sour face. Older kids had been coming out at night with BMXs, and an 80cc dirt bike. The BMX tracks weren’t that noticeable, but the dirt bike had left the ramp in an unusable state. They might as well have run a rototiller over it.
I stepped off my bike and let it fall to the ground in disgust. I had been hoping to take a couple of slow runs, maybe catch a little air, before doing any construction work. Bing shoved out his kickstand and stepped off. He started stamping his hightops into the soft earth while I fumed into the forest to retrieve the shovel.
We kept the shovel up in a tree. It had been Bing’s idea. I would never tell him I thought so, but he could be pretty clever when he tried.
Shovel Tree was a little way past the Party Pit, an open area surrounded by trees. This clearing was regularly used by older kids for the kind illicit late night parties where someone would mess up a ramp, so the shovel had to be hidden far enough from those jerks that it wasn’t likely to be seen. The tree we settled on had lost a branch about 15 feet up it’s trunk. The bony remnant sticking out from the tree was just enough to hang the shovel handle. The lower branches stuck out in such a way that you could really only see the shovel hanging there when you were right underneath it.
To hide or retrieve the thing, required a daring leap from a nearby stump. You climbed up the stump, maybe a little more than waist height from the ground, jumped toward Shovel Tree, and either lifted or hung it all in one continuous motion. You then had the option of trying to hang on to the shovel dragging it with you while avoiding the lower branches, or tossing it over your shoulder and hoping it didn’t slice the back of your neck on the way down. I had seen both methods attempted successfully and unsuccessfully, but I never saw anyone get hurt. At least not badly enough that it would require telling a parent what had happened. I usually opted for the ‘carry the shovel down with you’ method, since that always seemed the least likely to end in a head wound. It might have been a clever way of hiding the shovel, but it was a Bing solution, so that meant a higher than average risk of injury.
I plucked the shovel off of Shovel Tree and started back through the clearing. Bing was standing there nudging his toe against a discarded beer can. He looked up at me.
“Listen man, we don’t have to work on this today. We can head back into town. Find something to do. We cou-”
“No!” I surprised myself with how loud I yelled at him. Surprised him too. As friends do, we bickered, even tore into each other from time to time, but I had crossed a line.
We just sort of stared at each other for a moment, feeling the waves of what was going on wash over us.
Finally, he curled his lip, flatly said “dick” and stomped out of the clearing to go sit in the dirt beside the Kuwahara.
Of course I know now that he had been just as upset as me. Probably more. It was his family that was moving. His life that was getting lifted up and drifted across the country. I would still have my other friends here, where they had always been. I was losing my best friend, but he was losing everyone. Like I said, I know that now. Right then, I just started digging and slapping down dirt. Swinging line drives with the flat of the shovel against the ruined side of our ramp. Our ramp. Mine and Bing’s ramp. Other kids worked on it too, but it was just us two who had started it.
I rammed the shovel down hard into the center of the trench. I was angry at the dirt. I was angry at Bing. I was angry at Bing’s dad for getting a better job. I was angry at me. I was angry at the kids who tore up our ramp. I was angry at the increasingly unbearable heat of the day. I really didn't know what I was angry at. I stabbed the shovel as deeply as could.
The next thing I knew, I was laying belly down beside the hole holding my chin where it had bounced off the shovel handle.
I looked up to see Bing standing over me. My face was probably a mix of bewildered and accusing, but Bing just stared right past me at the hole, eyes like pie plates.
“What in the hell, man?” Bing blurted out, less to me, and more to the shovel, as he reached down to take hold of it. It took a couple of firm yanks to dislodge, and either the shovel, or whatever it had sunk into made a strange rattling, sucking sound. Like a reverse burp.
I stood back up, shoulder to shoulder with Bing, earlier animosities abandoned. Just like that, we had reset, united in our bewilderment.
“What happened?” I probed.
“Umm. Maybe like a crack, or cave or something? Maybe you punched through into a cave?”
Neither of us believed that. Neither of us had ever seen a cave in the middle of a broad, flat, prairie. When Bing had hauled the shovel up bits of powdery wood had come up with it. Old dessicated fibers that had, at one time, been milled lumber. The edges were too clean and regular to be tree roots, or buried deadfall.
“What about the wood?” I was already piecing together a picture in my mind of what I had “punched through” so I floated out questions to see if Bing was thinking along the same lines. I couldn’t bring myself to voice what I was thinking.
“Why would someone bury a wood box by the river?” Bing asked, walking the assumption forward to include not just wood, but a wooden box. He mirrored my tone and I could see dread ripple across his expression, before replacing it with a nervous grin.
“Is this a casket? Did you just jam a shovel into some dead guy’s casket?” Bings smile widened into a full toothed display. “Gross!”
“I don’t know that. We don’t know what it is!” I couldn’t help it. I was grinning now too. “It’s probably just old wood someone tossed out. And buried. On purpose. Beside the river.”
We traded conspiratorial looks, but neither of us budged.
“Go check.”
“You go check.”
“You found it”
“You have the shovel.”
We both took a step forward and arched over the hole. Bing used the tip of the shovel to begin a ginger excavation, careful and tense. Neither of us wanted to uncover anything grizzly, but then again, we absolutely wanted to uncover something grizzly. Or, valuable, amazing.
My heart was beating so hard my hands would shake with each pulse. When light glinted off something metallic a few inches below the soil, My whole body lurched.
“That’s treasure!”
Bing stopped clearing dirt and squinted at me.
“Do you think pirates put it here?” He let sarcasm drip from every word. “Child.”
“Shut up. It’s something shiny. There’s something metal down there. It’s metal in a box”
If Bing had any intention of spending more time making fun of me, his curiosity overcame it.
We crouched down, relatively sure that we weren’t going to be nose to nose with a mummified corpse.
Enough dirt had been cleared away that we could start to make out the shape of what we had found. The sun had been climbing in the sky and was almost directly above us now more clearly revealing the shapes below us. Taking a lower angle, I could make out a rounded metal edge. Maybe a large plate, or disc almost filling a box about two feet square.
Bing reached in, taking hold of the metal, and just as quickly dropped it, recoiling his hand.
“What! What happened?” I demanded.
“Damn it! That’s cold!” he had his finger tips tucked under his armpit and rocked back and forth in wincing pain.
He pulled out his fingers and looked at them. They seemed fine. No visible wounds or bleeding. He shook his hand aggressively in front of his face like a fan made of sausages.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, fine. Damn it, that is ice cold. It feels like burning, but cold, man.”
I wrapped my hand in the belly of my T-shirt and stretched it down to slowly touch the metal. Nothing. It felt hard and maybe a little cool, but nothing like what Bing had experienced.
“It feels normal. Just like metal. Are you messing with me?”
“No. It was like frostbite, man. Still hurts a little.”
I took my hand out of my shirt and tentatively brushed a fingertip across the metal. Then all my fingers. Then the flat of my hand. A little cool, hard, metallic. Certainly not burning cold or frostbite cold.
I reached my fingers down under the edge and grabbed hold. The plate was incredibly thin, like foil, but solid and unyielding. I pressed hard with my fingertips but the metal didn’t bend or crumple. Although paper thin, the edge felt round and smooth, not sharp. I started lifting the circle of metal and found it so light that it didn’t seem to have any substance at all. It took some twisting and wrangling to pull it from the box, since the hole we had cut wasn’t quite large enough.
I set the disk on the ground between us, now fully visible under the full midday sun. We didn’t move. We didn’t breath. The only sounds were leaves twisting in a light breeze, and the distant buzz of insects. It was treasure. It was beautiful and frightening and impossible.
Around the circular rim of the thing was metal, sure enough. A dull silvery metal with lines and markings along its circumference. Like a clock face, but with the minute marks set to irregular periods and angles. Interesting and unusual, but it looked manufactured, something I could wrap my mind around. What sat in the center of the ring was different. It was black. Just black. No reflections, no variation in the surface, no shadows. Light didn’t play off it at all. Encircled by a band of paper thin metal, there on the ground sat nothing. Nothing at all.