“Go, get thee down, for thy people have corrupted themselves,” God said to Moses after burning his laws onto stone. That’s what he found after descending Mt. Sinai. The Israelites he led out of Egypt were parading around a golden calf.
That scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film “The Ten Commandments” came to mind as I read about the gold prospects at Herbert Glacier last weekend. At current prices, the million ounces that Grande Portage Resources Ltd. thinks is under the Herbert is worth $1.3 billion. Although the cost to mine it could approach a billion dollars, the false god is still seductive.
Just as it’s been throughout history, the lure of gold brought miners to Juneau more than a century ago. The Treadwell and AJ mines went on to produce more than 6 million ounces. They’re the reason we became Alaska’s territorial capital.
In fact, the entire Willoughby district out to Egan Drive owes its existence to mining. Because without the several million tons of waste rock from the AJ that was deposited there, it would still be a tidal flat.
How much rock will need to come out of the Herbert claim? Grande Portage estimates there’s seven grams of gold for every ton of rock. Let me give you a visual conversion. If packed into a standard toilet stall, 1 million ounces of gold might reach halfway up to the ceiling. But the rock removed to get it wouldn’t fit into Juneau’s Federal Building unless it was 150 stories tall.
The task to mine the Herbert is well beyond Grande Portage’s capability. Another business will have to supply the heavy equipment and labor do the work. Like it was at the AJ and Treadwell, that company will take the big money out of town. The miners and operators will be left with little more than wages they earn. And the money they spend will trickle its way into the bank accounts of local businesses.
That’s the real story of all goldrushes. There’s just not enough of the precious metal to go around. Only a few of the those tempted to chase the dream ever struck it rich. But as told through popular literature and film, we rarely learn whether the gold delivered its happily-ever-after promise.
One such dreamer is portrayed in Paulo Coelho’s bestselling novel “The Alchemist.” He tells the story of Santiago, a young shepherd boy who travels from Spain to the Egyptian pyramids believing he’s fated to find his treasure there. The journey is full of setbacks and he returns empty handed. But it’s at home Santiago discovers the gold he sought had always been buried under a nearby tree.
“The Alchemist” is a metaphor for Coelho’s lifelong dream of becoming a writer. To get there, the Brazilian author first wandered across three continents and for a short time lost his way to drugs. He followed that decade of distractions with a successful songwriting career. That too failed to extinguish the sense of the fate he first felt as a teenager.
The Soul’s Code is another book about the kind of call felt by Coelho. It was written by James Hillman, one of the most insightful psychologists of our time. His thought-provoking peer into life’s unanswerable questions helped me realize, in my late 40s, that there was a writer hidden inside the introverted persona of an engineer.
The point is, the trappings of materialism are like the golden calf. The easy gratification they promise diverts our attention away from the guiding potential in our subconscious visions.
On a collective level, mining the Herbert gold isn’t any different. Extracting its tiny deposits might bolster our local economy, but it won’t help us fully realize the power of this relatively remote, wild and beautiful place.
It’s why we should recognize that, from a historical perspective, Juneau wasn’t founded on gold. Like every goldrush, it drew the miners to the area by the thousands. But it didn’t become a ghost town like so many others.
This community survived because of the people who stayed after the mines closed. Just as it does for many of us now, something else kept them here. Like the personal call to character and meaning, it needed to be followed more than explained.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire.
