Anyway, we got busy digging! This place is really just a gigantic field of dirt that is periodically plowed. From the email newsletters I get from them occasionally, it seems that about 10 people report findings of diamonds per month. But who knows how many finds go unreported, really, so we felt confident that we had at least a chance of finding a diamond with so many of us digging.
We weren't digging and sifting for long before Clara found something clear and sparkly - she was confident that she'd found a diamond and the rest of us thought it was probably a bit of quartz. It was pretty small but she was happy as could be - and pretty much done digging.
Hannah enjoyed working with the hoe that Papa had brought. It was like being part of a Three Stooges episode; the way she was swinging the handle around made me wonder when someone was going to get hit in the back of the head by it. She also liked that the soil had a very high clay content and did a lot more playing than digging, really. Another thing she really enjoyed was gathering up the biggest stones that she could find - pretty brown ones. I'm sure they had a name but I can't remember what they were called. We gave her a sandwich bag and told her she could keep whatever fit inside it; she eventually started saving smaller rocks so that she could keep more.
Becky did a bit of digging here and there and seemed to have a good time jumping from plow row to plow row and helping whomever appeared to need her expertise at the moment.
Matthew spent most of his time wandering up and down the plowed row, sitting on my leg, and tripping over his own feet.
After a while of digging and screening, we decided to take a bucket of dirt up to the sluicing station and try our hand at panning.
That's my dad standing next to me.
I'll tell you what - there are some people who take rock hounding very seriously. You should see some of their equipment!! One old man had a handmade harness-thing that fit around the back of his neck so that he could carry a 5-gallon bucket of dirt on each end of a broomstick across his shoulders - pack mule style. He wasn't very talkative, even though he was standing right next to us, but we did hear him tell a little boy from another family that he hadn't found any diamonds that day but that he had found plenty of them "recently." I believe him, too - he was a serious prospector.
Another man, on the other side of us, did eventually open up and talk to us quite a bit and even added a few rocks to Hannah's growing collection as they were ones that he was discarding. He had made a set of screens, about 5 or 6 of them in all different mesh and rim sizes, out of old bicycle rims. They worked really well and I could see an advantage to using a round screen compared to the square ones that we had. He did show us once how to wash and swirl, wash and swirl, and we did try! But we weren't very good at it and he laughed with us about it ... or maybe at us ... or maybe both.
Here you can see bicycle-rim man on the left and pack-mule-bucket man on the right. In between them, Clara and I are sifting through the fine bits of gravel that were left in our smallest-meshed screen. My dad, Papa, is behind us washing more gravel.
I'm glad my mom and dad thought to bring their point and shoot camera! I wanted to take pictures but didn't want to get my camera muddy; I probably would have accidentally dunked it in the sluice tank. Thanks, Mom, for taking these pictures for me!
After a while of this, and the fact that Farm Grandma had somehow gotten stuck with the chore of taking care of Becky and Matthew and occasionally the other girls as their interest waxed and waned in sluicing, we put our most promising and prettiest rocks in a little glass vial to be identified. It was really hot, we were ready for lunch, and we had promised to take the kids swimming.
It turned out that the sparkly rock that Clara had found was a chip of glass. We did find some bits of calcite, a piece of quartz and some jasper. And Hannah came out with a bag full of rocks that she thought were pretty; she was very excited just to have a collection of something. Clara came out with a bag of washed gravel from the sluicing station, but we gave it to Papa to take home and look through once it dried out. And it was promptly forgotten.
This post is long enough - I will add the swimming pictures in the next one.
No comments:
Post a Comment