“I’m going back to get rich this time,” he wrote.Īt least, according to Fredette’s Google reviews of a creekside campground and other stops on his journey, that’s what I imagine had happened.įor a while now, whenever I go somewhere new, the first thing I do is check Google Reviews. Stay away from my gold, Fredette thought as he set off to his next destination. And then he’d hop back into his motorhome and keep driving. He’d do some laundry at a nice laundromat in Winnemucca with a friendly attendant. Instead, the next morning Fredette would drive west. If I could just find that vein, he thought, as the last ray of light disappeared behind the mountains. Maybe he could even ditch it, buy a house, and get off the road altogether. What if there really was a long-lost main vein somewhere around here? A motherlode that the gold rush decades had missed? He could live a lot larger than now, that’s for sure, and finally have the money to fix his motorhome’s engine. Maybe these nuggets of gold got him thinking. Yes, it was a very lucky day.įredette had been living in his run-down motorhome for months, trying to fix what he could of the slowly failing vehicle, while saving up to buy parts with his Social Security check. Then, as the light turned golden and began to fade from the canyon while Fredette packed up his gear, he thought, why not, and walked back down to the creek to try his luck panning for gold. It was a lucky day: He caught three big rainbow trout. In 2019, long before I had ever been there, a man named James Fredette drove his mobile home down the gravel road from the highway and went fishing. Somewhere near the center of Nevada, on the western slope of the Toiyabe Range, there’s a little meadow beside a creek running down from the mountains. Will McCarthy | Longreads | January 2023 | 12 minutes (3,313 words) Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |