A brutal name, full of want unfulfilled. A horrible name for a place made for mining gold. ‘On this hill, you will not find anything, but poverty.’ Someone must have said it. That would have been in the 1850s. I wouldn’t know, I was only eleven in the 1960s.

I tagged along on someone’s quest. I had to. He was my father. Every summer he sought the unfished stream teeming with rainbow trout. Sometimes it was a small lake. It was always three or four hours away in the Northern California Sierras. In particular Plumas and Sierra counties.

My father picked the spot, my mother made it our home, I helped unload the car. It was always shades of dark green in the pines. Shadows in the ferns, bark and needles on the ground. All that was needed was a level place for the tent, we brought everything else.

The constant pounding of logging trucks on the dirt road into Poverty Hill had left a thick layer of fine dust. It was almost like powder, it made a soft crunching sound when you walked on it, and filled the cracks in my father’s face with fine brown outlines.

I stayed off the road, preferring the trails. Someone made these to go to somewhere, it was always exciting to find out where. After the tent was up, I went for a walk. The path twisted a little through a stand of young pines, with the sun mostly blocked.

Then, almost like a door opening, there was full sunlight, and a landscape that I had never seen before. It was so starkly different that I had a hard time making sense of it.

White stones, tons of white stones, most of them the size of a man’s fist. Bleached by the sun because the trees were absent. They lay in low piles several football fields long. In the middle was a pond that nearly glowed an emerald color, unnaturally. Not a trace of soil or dust.

The path ended there, I could walk on the stones, but with some difficulty. I went to the edge of the pond. There was a faint metallic smell, copper but not copper. There was no plant growth, no movement of creatures, bug or fish. It was still greenish water.

I turned to go back to the camp and report. My father would be disappointed, but maybe he could explain to me what I saw.

He was troubled by the pond, and warned me not to drink, or even wade in it. That was not necessary but I was fascinated by the rest of the story. The ponds were made by damming the creek, once the pond was large enough, the men built a floating barge with a huge water cannon, a steam engine to give the cannon power, then a sluicing system to separate the gold from the hillside. It was a mine turned inside out, all on a floating barge. The pond moved down the creek, the muddy earth moved down the creek. The bones of the earth, the piles of white stones were left behind.

I’m not sure how my father knew this, and perhaps it wasn’t completely accurate. It was at least a better explanation of the blasted landscape. I was thinking aliens.

Another longer walk with my father revealed two more ponds, two healthy ponds with plants, bugs, and fish. It wasn’t disappointing after all.

Heading down the valley we came upon several abandoned buildings, one still locked up, the others empty but open. They had typical log foundations and lower walls, but the upper part of the walls and roof were framed in lumber. They were old, maybe a hundred years. That seemed very old to me.

One building may have been a kitchen, it was more out in the open and my father told me that the kitchen had fire. It was better to place that fire away from buildings that were important. Kitchens often burned up.

The buildings were not on the accessible dirt road, but I could see where there was still a trace of the early road, now covered in pine needles and shrubs. It would only be a matter of time before more people would find them.

We got back to a meal my mother had prepared combining the campfire and the two-burner stove. Another mystery I could not fathom.

The early evening was used for cleaning up, and storing the food safely. We rarely had bear issues because we camped in areas that were rarely camped in. The bears liked the steady campgrounds of forgetful campers.

Later, we sat by the fire and listened to the wind in the tops of the trees. We slept in folding beach lounge chairs made comfortable with air mattresses, warmed by big, plaid-lined sleeping bags from Montgomery Ward’s. There was even room left over in the tent to stand up and stretch.

After a few hours sleep, I woke up. It was silent in the tent and that was unusual. I had learned to fall asleep quickly to avoid my father’s snoring. Sleeping on his back in the lounge chairs aided the amount and volume of his snore. But it was quiet. Was he awake? Was he even there?

I moved to raise up a little in order to see. ‘Shhh…’ a low whisper came from that general area. Then I heard something outside. A close howl.

It was one long howl that was answered by another not far off. Then more howled, the sound came from all directions, surrounding us. My mother slept, my father and I listened.

It was probably coyotes, although I don’t know if I knew the difference between coyotes and wolves. The sound was not comforting, it was mournful. It wasn’t baying at the moon, it was crying out for the lost. The dark of the tent, the lonely sounds outside, the blasted landscape…

It was several hours before I heard the sound of snoring that gave me the confidence to go to sleep. In the morning we briefly talked about the coyotes over breakfast, my mother didn’t like the idea of little wolves prowling about. My father said his familiar refrain, ‘Oh, Billie…’ stretching out the last part of the name.

I didn’t like the little wolves either. I knew they were hunting. Smaller game than wolves would have hunted, but they were still hunting. We have had many pet dogs, and I have playfully opened their jaws to discover teeth. Looking back they looked more like Tyrannosaurus teeth than pet teeth. Coyotes had the same teeth.

I began the day thinking about mini dinosaurs stalking our tent. I went for another long walk. I was entering another stand of very tall, slender pines. Some had been damaged by the lack of water or bark beetles. In any case, they were dead but still standing.

I heard a sharp crack from above. Looking up, I saw an eight-foot top of a pine snap off, and fall to the ground. Not like a gentle leaf, more like a hurled spear. It impaled the ground not ten feet in front of me. I’m sure this has happened before, but I had never seen it, and haven’t seen it since.

It became my walking staff, later in life it became my cane, my walking stick. I still have it today, more than sixty years later.

We stayed there for four nights. The coyotes were there for two nights. My mother did not sleep one of those nights. My father caught dinner every night. I looked at old wood and tried to see the men in their work clothes. We returned a few times the next year.

As an adult I traveled the mountains to some of the places in my youth. I went to Poverty Hill. The buildings were gone, burned, and hauled away. The ponds were still there. The poisoned pond was fenced off with cyclone and barbed wire. I spent the night. The coyotes were still there, and the bears had discovered the campers. 

It was not a safe space. I left in the middle of the night. It wasn’t frightening, it was just too sad.