Live Free and Mine

Ian has a new ambition. He wants, in the worst way, to acquire a pick-axe, or simply a "pick," as he calls it, so that he can begin his new hobby/profession: Mining. More specifically, I think he wants to mine diamonds, and he knows that you can't really mine if you don't have the equipment. Needless to say, he wants to mine in our back yard..

Apparently, the inspiration for the aspiration is the seven dwarfs. The children watched Snow White - The Movie the other night, and that was when the idea came to him. If these happy, diminutive men could march off to work every day and earn a living with nothing more than a pick-axe, so could he. And he's very interested in crystals in general, and diamonds in particular, so he'd like to begin the great American diamond-rush of the 21st century; all he really needs is this pick-axe.

So he takes every opportunity to lobby for a pick. Particularly over the weekend, when I'm home, he wants to get hold of one. He asked where he could get one, and I made the mistake of speculating that one could probably order one online (I think before that, he was interested in getting one from the mall, or some such venue.) So now when I'm home for an extended period of time, as he sees it, there's not time like the present to go online in search of a pick-axe.

And being twisted, somewhat indulgent, and a bit curious on such a far-out piece of merchandise, as I am, we looked at EBay yesterday, and discovered that, indeed, there are very many pick-axes to be had for a modest bid. Even better, they're classic - wonderfully hideous, brown-going-on-gray, jagged, pointy, scary heavy-metal excavating tools, many from World War II military gear, bringing to mind John-Henry-meets-Paul-Bunyon somewhere in West Virginia or Gold-Rush-era California. I managed to visit a jarring little ghost town in called Bodie, California, near Yosemite, and these nasty creatures look like they'd fit right in, in one of the old wooden shacks in that town.

Needless to say, Ian was thrilled.

Then came the hard part. First I warned him, with my middle-aged skepticism, about the perceived unlikelihood of our finding diamonds in our back yard. He wanted to know how people determine where to go mining, and I mentioned that a background in geology is probably very helpful in making an intelligent guess. So when he followed up on that, I explained, as best a history major can, what geology is. I also warned him that I would have no idea how to go about mining (even if we knew where to mine). I think, for the most part, he figures that you pick away at the back yard, and the cave that you eventually find underneath it, until find diamonds.

But Amy is much more of a killjoy than me. She actually told him that he can't have a pick-axe, apparently because he's seven. He wanted to know when he can have one, and she cited the legal pick-axe owning age in our state, of 16. He pointed out that that is a very long way away, which I would agree with.

But he's not giving up. When he woke up and came downstairs this morning, the very first words on his lips, in lieu of something frivolous like "Good morning," were the following:

"Daddy, do you think you could help me with the pick, if we got it?"

(November 21, 2010)