A Best Laid Scheme of Lead and Men
Though I’ve been forbidden from doing it by my kinfolk, I am going to explain how the James family came to land in New Idria, California, in 1982.
It all has to do with my brother, Oliver Perry James.
In 1976 we lived in downtown San José, known by some curmudgeons as the Armpit of the San Francisco Bay Area.
About ten of us (we had five boarders) lived in an old Queen Anne style Victorian that was later razed and became the parking lot for the Children’s Discovery Museum. After that, my family lived in another old Queen Anne, this time underneath the 280 Freeway on Second Street. The omnipresent traffic above sounded like the crashing of ocean waves. We thought of rush hour as the coming and going of the seaside tides.
My name is Georgia James. I was a mariachi violinist playing every night until 2 a.m., or sometimes 6 a.m., depending on how blotto and lavish the clients were. The few people who know about this past life of mine like to remind me that I was the first Anglo female in North America to become a full-fledged professional mariachi, and it makes me think back to those halcyon days of having to beat my male compañeros over the head with either a cheap bow or a profane tongue lashing when they behaved badly macho toward me. I was immersed in the music and the culture, but my overall quest was to make lots of money. I didn’t, but I always had a little cold hard cash on me. I earned my living that way for some nineteen years, playing six days a week for nightclub radio shows, weddings, parties, Americanized Mexican restaurants – we would play anywhere for any occasion. The best gigs were with a renowned ballet folklorico, called Los Lupeños de San José. We were their “house band,” so to speak. Because of this talented group of dancers, I was able to travel throughout the American southwest and Mexico, on tour with my mariachi, performing for enthusiastic audiences. It sure beat trying to make money playing classical music, which would really mean teaching petulant upscale children what they could care less about.
It was a charmed life, mixed with bouts of Hell.
My older sister by three years, Monette, is a free spirit, played cello, and when she got out of high school she, too, wanted to make as much money as she could. She went to work in a pre-boom Silicon Valley computer components maker, at the time when the contraptions were big huge clunkers as big as a walk-in closet (the kind big huge rich people use). Monette looks like Natalie Wood, and back in the late sixties she liked to hang around with raggedy hippie types — and this was when people in our quaint town of snooty Los Gatos didn’t even know what one was. When we first moved to San José she took classes at San José State, but ended up making oodles of money in her start-up cottage industry: writing black market term papers.
“If it weren’t for women, men would be in the strawberry patches,” Mo would say from time to time.
My younger sister by one year, Melissa, worked as a maid in hotels and wrestled with a cash register at Woolworth’s, where the Fairmont Hotel now sits. Since we were toddlers, and even now, people always assumed Mel and I were twins, but Mel is the beauty. She has a noble Grecian nose, criminally large eyes, and sometimes looks the way Joan Crawford did in her early black and white film noirs, before the harsh eyebrow and scary lip thing of the actress’ PepsiCo days. Mel later attended the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo to be a merchant marine sea navigator, but opted to chuck that for a degree in ornamental horticulture from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. She is a mathematical whiz kid, like everyone else in the family save me, and a botanical genius.
She is also a virtuoso on the tambourine.
My brother, my senior by four years, is an inventor. When we were teenagers every girl in town continually hounded him. We are all half a century old at this point. Oliver is a brilliant mathematician and a natural-born engineer, like our father was, and likes to do complex math problems in his head, just for fun. Imagine that. He invented the self-wringing mop, among other indispensable things. He and a great friend, Jim Kirigin, invented the planet tracker before The Smithsonian came out with their version. Thieving assholes.
My mother, Jane, is Sicilian Italian. My father, Phineas Skinner, was Welsh/Scottish. Yes, and it’s true. It’s like sticking two sticks of dynamite together, braiding the fuses into one, lighting it like a demented arsonist, or maybe a blast-happy miner, and yelling, “Whoopee!”
My mother, Jane, is the glue that holds us all together throughout the course of our lives — when we were babies, brats, teens and troublemakers, and adult troublemakers. She has worked relentlessly all her life. For ten years she commuted four hours a day on Highway 101 from San José to San Francisco, where she also held the glue together for a ground-breaking program called The Children-Parent Program, which gave poor and screwed up new parents with screwed up children the resources to cope with having kids. She was made for that job. Her bosses wanted to canonize her.
Jane taught us all the foibles of politics. Every time Jane and I heard a news report about some greedy Republican scheme backfiring, or about one of them screaming over family values and then getting caught peering under bathroom doors in airports, she would say deadpanned, “How about that.”
My family lived in the concrete wonderland of San José for fifteen years.
One day Oliver found an ad in the San José Mercury News that offered two hundred and forty-one acres of California land for a price “too good to be true.” Looking back, with such a description one would have thought we would have perceived an insurmountable drawback that came with the land. Nonetheless, Oliver, my mother Jane and a few investing friends rustled up the dough and bought the remote property. Oliver was particularly lured by the land’s famous Franciscan Shelf sandstone rock formations. He also was intrigued by its precarious location, directly on top of both the San Andreas and Calaveras fault lines. He theorizes these fault lines will act as a rocking cradle and protect us from great destruction when The Big One hits California, as we all know it will.
Oliver was always coming up with great ideas. On Vine Street in San José (the home that was leveled so that little kids could stick their index fingers into the ends of straw Chinese finger traps) he invented the intellectual follow-up to the Pet Rock. It was called The Miniature Personalized Radioactive Waste Container. These were small, one-inch tall containers made of pure lead, made to scale to the government’s larger radioactive waste container drums and wrapped with a snazzy orange and yellow “radioactive waste” warning label. As long as the lead top fit snug, one could actually store a radioactive isotope in the thing. Just the ticket in the event of a nuclear holocaust! A must-have item, in case the nation’s head madman or politician (though I’ve yet to understand the difference) pushes the proverbial red button. It came with a How-To booklet in storing your isotope, which I helped write.
I remember fondly how we converted our garage into a makeshift Pet Isotope Waste Container factory, and we made all the boarders work continually, pouring molten lead into miniature container molds. I must admit: we didn’t pay much attention to OSHA workplace safety rules making those lead containers.
It went over like the proverbial lead balloon. Oh, people loved the anti-nuke conversation pieces. But retailers were reluctant to stock such a “controversial” item, as they would sheepishly call it.
The San José Mercury News did a story (and I mean an hysterically exaggerated and sensationalized story) on Oliver and our company, which we called Last Blast Endeavors. They said Oliver was “a black humorist laughing all the way to the bank.” What erroneous cornballs!
But New Idria held greater hopes for us. Oliver wanted to prove a theory he formulated after reading an essay by Isaac Asimov about the effects of potassium-40, an element that is ultimately deadly for all life forms, and one found in all organic matter. It appears that potassium-40 is what makes all life start to die the moment after it peaks in its prime: for humans this is when they hit about 27; for fruit flies it’s about their twelfth hour. Oliver figured if he could get rid of potassium-40 in everything he ate and drank, and then combined that with ridding his life of cosmic rays (the hot junk that is constantly bombarding us from that gas ball called the Sun) he could halt the aging process. Possibly even reverse it!
What better way to do that than by boring tunnels into the sandstone mountainsides of the New Idrian landscape? His plan was to shelter himself inside the tunnels of the geologically famous Franciscan Shelf strata, becoming completely nocturnal. That would be a cinch since he already was a night owl. During the day the sandstone would shield him with two hundred feet of insulation that would effectively block the UV rays. He would grow food hydroponically, in little water tubes inside the tunnels which would be strung throughout with fluorescent lamps, to avoid consuming any potassium-40 from food grown in the regular but tainted soil all around him.
In 1981 Oliver pitched his scheme to the county Board of Supervisors, since he needed the county’s permission to perform this grand experiment. With his unusually large forehead and intense gaze under dark lashes, his fascinating theory presented deadpanned, I have no doubt the board was intrigued.
They approved it, too. How about that?
Yes, of course we knew about the orange acid mine drainage from the defunct New Idria Mercury Mine watershed, flowing like a gooey river of rotten melted pumpkins right through the middle of the land. What we didn’t know was that the water was deadlier than potassium-40. The water contains methylmercury, and as mentioned, it’s one of the most lethal substances on earth, with the ability to accumulate in any living system. Getting it out of your body is much, much harder than, say, cleaning up a massive oil spill. Mercury poisoning makes one lose the ability to think and talk, as it attacks the nervous system. It makes you bump into walls, makes you look like you need a drink badly because your hands tremble, makes you avoid people like the plague, it attacks the nervous system and bones, makes you spit out a rotten tooth once a month, makes you laugh uproariously at unfunny things, and it makes you salivate uncontrollably like a dog with rabies. Then it makes you die.
Well, we had to get a new gig, quite fast too. It didn’t make sense to try to reverse the aging process with clean, sandstone tunnel living when our only source of water was more of a killer than the elements we were trying to avoid. We went into the benitoite mining business instead. Benitoite is the rarest gemstone on earth and its color varies from light cornflower blue to cobalt-violet blue. It is the official California state gemstone and comes from only one spot on the globe: a four-acre plot of dirt atop San Benito Mountain, some fifteen long wending miles south and an hour from our box canyon. Oliver staked a benitoite placer mining claim in a half-mile stretch of the San Benito River, beneath the main gem mine.
We placed a mini-billboard at the entrance to the top-level driveway that reads: “Whimsy Mining Company et al: Benitoite and other California Minerals. Rock Shop Straight Ahead and to the Left. (Ten percent discount to all card-carrying registered Libertarians.)”
The driveway to the rock shop is the entrance to my home, on my side of the road next to the San Carlos Creek.
So for a family living we mine what should be regarded by everyone in the solar system as the most precious gemstone on Earth, but that doesn’t mean we’re rich. In fact, we can’t afford to keep any for ourselves. It puts some food on the table, a little gas in our junk heaps and keeps the lights on. I supplement this little income with another little income as a full-time reporter for Hollister’s weekly newspaper, The Benito Bugle-ette.
So there you have it.
San Carlos Creek Update: Our new sales pitch for selling bottled orange San Carlos Creek water to infrequent but eager tourists is this: “It doesn’t have any potassium-40.”
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