There is a particular sound rain makes on a tin roof in the goldfields. It is the sound of summers spent in a caravan by the seaside in the UK, looking out of the window and wishing the summer holidays would act like summer.
Well, I’ve done it again. Rain has stopped play, the umpires have called tea early, and an Englishman is complaining about the weather. Only this time, instead of wasting the school holidays, I’m watching my annual leave disappear down a large wet drain.
Some things never change.
The leave is booked and approved. The accommodation is paid for. The detector is hired and currently sitting in the back of the Prado, no closer to any gold than it was on the shelf. I picked these dates off a calendar months ago, feeling quite clever about it. August. Winter. Cool enough to walk all day, and — I assumed — dry.
You can take the man out of England. Half a world and a good many years later, he will still be stood at a window, looking at a grey sky, sucking his teeth and saying “well, that’s that then” to nobody in particular.
In fairness, I come by it honestly. I grew up around farmers, and in all that time I never met one who was happy with the weather. It was too wet, or too dry, or exactly the right amount at completely the wrong time of year.
My dad used to say there were two things you would never see: a farmer who isn’t moaning about the weather, and a dead donkey.
So far he’s right.
What I know about rain and gold
Two things. That is the entire list.
One. A detector will not work properly on wet salty ground — something to do with conduction. As I understand it the ground itself starts talking back to the coil, and drowns out anything actually worth hearing.
Two. Being bogged in the goldfields is not fun.
Both of those came from Tony, who has been doing this a very long time. I am passing them on exactly as I received them, with no additional expertise applied.
What today has cost me is not gold. Gold was never guaranteed. What it has cost me is time out in the field, which was.
What a washed-out day actually looks like
Nobody writes this bit down, so here it is.
I sat on the veranda with a cup of tea and a laptop and did paperwork. This is not what I pictured when I booked the trip. You spend months planning something like this and you never once picture the admin.
Then I drove around Leonora. Round is the correct word — there is not a great deal of it, and I did most of it twice. The road trains do not slow down for weather, or for me. The puddles have the dimensions of small dams. I dodged both with roughly equal caution.
Lunch at Hoover House, which is where I am staying. It was built as the residence for the manager of the Sons of Gwalia mine, and that manager was a young American engineer called Herbert Hoover, who went on to become President of the United States.
I ate a sandwich in his house and reflected that he was twenty-three when he got the job, that he lasted six months, and that he was on a boat to China before the roof was finished. He designed this place and never properly lived in it.
He was right at the start of something. I am a fair way nearer the other end. We have both, in our own fashion, turned up in Gwalia with a plan.
Then I sulked.
I want to be accurate about that. Not “reflected”. Not “used the time productively to plan”. Sulked, in the full English sense: quietly, with a cup of tea, in a manner calculated to be noticed by absolutely nobody, about something entirely outside my control.
The bit I hadn’t planned for
You cannot buy your way past weather.
I have spent months getting ready. Course booked. Detector hired. Vehicle sorted, battery wired, fridge built, satellite communicator charged, snake kit in the door pocket. I have prepared for a great many things, most of which have not happened.
I had not prepared for the possibility that the correct move, on a given day, is to do nothing at all.
There will be men out here who have been at this for thirty years, who looked at today’s sky, shrugged, and got on with something else without a moment’s grief. That is a skill. It is probably a more useful one than anything I am going to learn about swinging a coil.
I’ll get there.
Not today, obviously. Today is spent, in every sense.
Tony reckons the ground can take five days to dry out.