Soil

It doesn’t matter to me what people think.  I hear what you say behind my back.  You just keep on doing your thing.  My name is John V. Morton.  I save seeds.

I go on the same rant every time someone asks “Why do you collect seeds?”  Because humans are stupid.  We are bound to f**k things up one day soon.  And if anyone manages to survive, they’ll be able to use the seeds to start over.

In 1915, commercial mining began in the Wrangell Mountains in southeast Alaska.  The remote location and the altitude presented many challenges to the miners.  But there were riches to be had.  By the time the ore thinned out in 1947, many tons of gold, silver, copper, and lead had been removed.  

Henry Mixon was a disgruntled miner who worked for the Kennecott Copper Corporation.  When they fired him in 1919, he decided to give them some competition.  He knew how to dig holes in the side of a mountain.  He knew where he could buy used mining equipment, cheap.  Henry had everything you would need to operate a high altitude mine.

Except for the most important thing.  Good judgement.  For some reason, Henry thought he could strike gold much higher up in the mountains.  It took him two years just to carve a trail and haul the equipment up to an elevation of 9600 feet.  

In order to avoid the need for an elevator, he excavated in a corkscrew pattern, like an oversized spiral staircase.  After five years of digging and blasting in the bitter cold, he ran out of money.  He’d found nothing but rock.  The 3000 foot long, gently sloping, spiral tunnel became known as Mixon’s Folly.  It would be the perfect place for me to keep my seeds.

I didn’t start off in life wanting to operate a seed bank.  I graduated at the top of my welding class at Drake State Technical College.  My instructors told me I could get a job just about anywhere.  But if I really wanted to make money, and didn’t mind cold weather, Alaska was the place to go.

They weren’t telling lies.  I got a job the day I showed up in Anchorage.  By Monday I was in the repair shop at Flat Creek Mine.  An underground gold mining operation near the tiny town of Eagle, Alaska.  

We were out in the middle of nowhere.  But the money was good and the people were friendly.  Since there wasn’t much in the way of distractions, my salary piled up in a savings account.  I started thinking about the business I would open up back home once I had enough money.

But life happens.  Eagle is on the Yukon River and the mine is in the mountains 15 miles west.  The road leading to the mine winds through some steep hills.  The avalanche that hit me on the way to work one February morning changed things.

My truck was a tiny dot compared to the wall of snow that engulfed it.  I was swept off the road and down a slope.  The truck crashed to a halt thirty feet below the road, wedged by the snow up against a row of trees.

I don’t remember much of what happened next.  Mostly just the sound of the helicopter blades as I was evacuated to the hospital in Fairbanks, two hundred miles away.

Aside from a shattered left elbow, a collapsed lung, a nasty concussion, and a shitload of bruises, I survived.  It took a couple of surgeries to put my arm back together.  They gave me a lot of powerful medications to help blunt the pain.  I had some incredible hallucinations.  

All kinds of crazy stuff ran through my mind while I was doped up.  And this is the funny thing.  Of all the weird s**t, one simple image stood out.  

It was nothing more than an old woman, on her knees in a garden.  She held seeds in the palm of one hand.  With the other hand, she carefully placed the seeds in a row of holes in the soil in front of her.  That was it.

I had no idea what it meant, or why it was the most vivid hallucination from that terrible time of pain, immobility, and helplessness.