The Nugget

Lumpy, with a tiny piece of quartz embedded in its back, the gold nugget is shaped a bit like the state of California, without the deep notch for Nevada. It hangs on a gold chain but is not beautiful like jewelry is supposed to be. It’s too heavy, and the few times I’ve put it on, I felt its burden, afraid the chain would break.

I take it out every so often and wonder what it was like to find such a thing. They say that during the earliest days of the Gold Rush that began in 1848, you didn’t have to know anything about mining to get rich. Nuggets were found beneath eucalyptus leaves and next to rattlesnake skins in dry creek beds. Just walk along and pick them up. But this wasn’t one of those easy-to-find nuggets. It was pulled from a mine owned by my family years later, after the rush had become an industry and the solitary men who panned and sluiced had given up. My nugget is from the Brush Creek gold mine in the Mother Lode of the Sierra Nevada.

My parents gave it to me on my thirteenth birthday, but it was originally meant for someone else, a child who vanished into the woods in 1945. He was their eldest, the boy who would have been the inheritor of family history, lore, and gold nuggets. I received the nugget because my parents wanted me to feel like I was part of that legacy—but every time I look at it, I see a reminder that I didn’t belong.

Mom and Dad’s first child was just a toddler when they moved into a miner’s cottage in Downieville, surrounded by pine forests and soaring mountains. Dickie, whose nickname was Tippy, took walks along the nearby creek with Mom and their English Sheepdog, Heidi. There were crawdads to catch, chipmunks to chase, and the occasional beaver to share a swimming hole. The smells of the Sierra—bay laurel, pine and the wet of the river—can make a small child drunk with possibility.

In a photo from the time, my mother sits on the rough, worn steps of their cottage. Wearing rolled-up jeans and sneakers, she leans against Heidi. Vines climb around the handrail that needs paint almost as much as the steps. Weeds cluster at the bottom of the stairs and it looks as though something has made a burrow under there. It was a long way from their voluminous childhood homes in prime neighborhoods of San Francisco and Berkeley.

August arrived along with Tippy’s third birthday. It would have been hot, with the days growing shorter and the hint of fall as evening temperatures dropped sharply. They likely cooked hot dogs and burgers outside, followed by cake and presents at a picnic table behind the cottage. Life was simple in the woods. I’m guessing they were content.

Just three months later, on November 1, Dad went off to manage the Brush Creek gold mine as usual. He’d taken the job, offered by his father-in-law, after the farm on family land in the Delta had gone bust. My father—who had dropped out of college and had no career—figured money would just keep showing up. It always had before. But my unlucky parents were at the end of an era; California’s agriculture and mining were no longer the drivers of wealth. In a couple of years, Santa Clara Valley, known for prunes and not much else, would become Silicon Valley. And their family fortune would dwindle to nothing.

The morning had begun with a damp chill, the kind that sent the several hundred residents of Downieville digging through their closets, looking for anything plaid and Pendleton. My mother bundled up Tippy in a corduroy coat, jeans, red and blue mittens, and a green knitted cap fastened under the chin saying, Yes you may play out front for a little while. Let’s go! Then something called her back into the cottage, and she left him with Heidi in the front yard.

When she returned the boy and the dog were gone. Shortly afterward, Heidi appeared dripping wet. Mom headed along the little trail through the woods that led to the creek, calling for her son. Nothing but wind whipping through the pine trees and the quiet running of the shallow brook.

She kept looking, retracing her steps along the path they always walked together. She was unsure whether to bother my father at work. It was too awful and strange. She called out again and again into the woods. Finally, she went to the phone. My father rushed home, the police arrived, and within hours hundreds of volunteers were combing the rugged woods where paths along ridges dropped off to rocky ravines as much as a hundred feet below. Within a day of Tippy’s disappearance, 200 troops arrived to help the civilian volunteers. Together they scoured twenty-five square miles of mountain territory. It was the beginning of the rainy season and there’d been snow at the higher elevations. The Yuba River was swollen, the bears were beginning to hibernate but there were still plenty of mountain lions about.

My mother made a plea to the press:

Anyone having any knowledge of my baby, please notify me. That is my only hope.

Newspapers across the country published a description of the boy:

Dickie tum Suden is three years old and 37 1/2 inches tall. He weighs 45 pounds. He has golden blond hair and large blue eyes. He has an overbite and sometimes drools when excited. He sucks his thumb and when tired or frightened he likes to stroke anything soft. He laughs a lot, is friendly, and his usual greeting is “Hi!” He calls himself Tippy tum Suden, loves dogs and uses the word ‘amusing.’ He says of his own dog, Heidi, ‘She is a lovely girl—she is amusing.’ He is polite and speaks often of cows. He likes candy. The sound of a car engine will send him running into the house.

I think of my mother and father in that little cabin, heads bent over the kitchen table, the same one where they’d eaten breakfast that morning. Later that day it would be where the sheriff laid out maps for the searchers. As they wrote a description of their son for the police, I picture them crossing out, adding, making sure the most telling details were there so that someone who had never met Tippy might recognize him. They had little religion, but I bet they prayed.

Ambushed by a news photographer in front of their rustic home, my mother holds back Heidi, ready to lunge and bite. Looking into the camera, Mom and Dad are surprised, angry, and hurt. They seem almost too young to have a child, my mother in bobby socks and saddle shoes, my father’s boyish face framed by his large ears.

When I arrived as an infant within a closed, private adoption, Tippy had been gone for almost eight years. Yet he surrounded the three of us, in the wind of a storm and the dark of the garden. His disappearance became the defining moment of my parents’ marriage. Death by evaporation, leaving nothing but questions.

Not that my parents talked about him. The fact that they didn’t told me I was not allowed to ask about him either. Still, they never stopped wishing for his return. On rainy afternoons I’d find my mother looking at photos of him in her bedroom, claiming she was cleaning her closet. When my father sat in his comfy chair at night, in his buttoned-down shirt and dress shoes, he’d look right past Walter Cronkite, his blue eyes searching.

He was always with us because no one knew what happened to him. Unable to abandon him, Mom and Dad continued to believe he was still alive. I imagined them driving away from their cottage for the last time, after hundreds of searchers had gone home, the FBI silent. I wouldn’t have had the courage to leave, remaining behind to become a strange old woman in that little house in the woods, keeping watch for Tippy.

I grew up within my parents’ sorrow, in the emptiness created by a missing child. It was a space I tried to fill with little performances that would delight them. Pig Latin, ballet classes, and taking the name of Miss Pansy Fountainlove to narrate the adventures of my imaginary friends. I was the antidote for the terrible thing that had happened, the terrible thing that must never happen again. I laughed easily, was determined to be good for them in every way—well-behaved and lots of fun. I would be their magic child, their most wondrous distraction.

At the time, there were no amber alerts. No billboards advertising missing kids or faces on milk cartons. Nor were there forensics that could tie a child to an abuser or murderer and certainly no online footprints to follow. The roads in and out of the area where Tippy disappeared were not closed to traffic. Cars weren’t stopped or searched. It was possible, and profitable, to steal a child, resurface in another state, and sell that child. Was that why my parents had waited seven years to adopt me? And the darker question—had Tippy been abducted and sold to a new family?

On the second day of the search a single red and blue mitten was found snagged on a manzanita bush a quarter of a mile from the cabin. On the third day, a set of child’s footprints was discovered at the base of a steep trail leading up the side of a ridge to a path that joined the highway. Experts argued as to whether the three-year old could have clambered up that trail by himself. They eventually agreed that it was possible but unlikely. The area around the footprints abounded in steep ravines falling away for thirty feet into thickly wooded canyons.

Specially trained tracking dogs were flown in from Utah, but they found nothing. John Black, owner of the Russian shepherd dogs that had located hundreds of missing persons declared,

If that child is in there, dead or alive, I’d shoot those dogs!

Temperatures dropped into the forties at night. The diminishing odds of finding the child alive crept over the searchers but remained unspoken. They continued the hunt. A kitchen was set up at the Brush Creek mine where women of the town provided hot soup, sandwiches, covered dishes, and homemade pie to the volunteers from sunrise to sunset.

Some believed Tippy had followed a different fork in the trail that led to the rushing Yuba River, fallen in and been swept away. They dragged the north fork for ten miles downstream and found nothing.

There was no evidence of animal attack, no blood or signs of struggle. Searchers kept fires burning all night, hoping the lost boy would be attracted to them. Then it snowed.

On November 6, 1945, with growing agreement that no three-year old could have survived six days exposed in the storm-swept area, the search was halted. My father made a statement to the press camped outside their cabin. He announced that after a meeting with family and leaders of the search, all had concluded that no purpose could be served by keeping hundreds of soldiers, forest rangers, peace officers, and civilian volunteers in the hunt.

. . . the search has been efficient in every particular. Seldom . . . have so many skillful, experienced woodsmen and trackers been available . . . the Downieville Ranger District of the Tahoe National Forest under District Ranger Frank B. Delaney . . .The Military Personnel from Camp Beele under command of Major L.J. Abbott . . . The local organizations . . . strained to feed and house . . . people who have come into the area . . . local business have . . . suspended all activity. We are encouraged and heartened by the display of old time whole hearted usefulness and helpfulness that has been without parallel.

– Joseph tum Suden

Reading these words from my father, I’m struck by the sense of community, shared responsibility, and gratitude. The people in Downieville belonged to each other. As an adoptee and inheritor of this tragic legacy, I know all about responsibility and gratitude, but the sense of truly belonging has eluded me.

Officially, neither the FBI nor the local authorities perceived any motive for kidnapping other than ransom. This may have been because the widely publicized Lindbergh case was still in their minds. The Lindbergh boy was taken from a second story room at his home in Hopewell, New Jersey. A total of twelve ransom notes were received before $50,000 was paid. The body of the infant was found two months later. Eventually the kidnapper was caught and electrocuted for the crime.

Without a ransom note, or twelve, there could not have been a kidnapping at my family’s cottage in Downieville.

Yet the word “kidnapper” was never far from my consciousness, even when I was too young to understand what it meant. An unseen tether yoked me to my mother. She liked to be able to see me through the kitchen window, so she’d know I was safe. If I moved out of sight, she’d reel me back in. Long before kindergarten I knew not to talk to strangers. Department stores and parks were dangerous places. My parents took no chances with me. I absorbed their fears so that eventually I worried about me even if they didn’t.

During my teen years, spending the night at a friend’s house or going out to a movie was much more difficult than it needed to be. I could see fear flicker behind my mother’s eyes when I asked for these things. Most of the time she wanted to say yes, but there was something roiling inside that made her pull back. I was sensitive to her worries, but I didn’t like it. Every time she’d say We’ll see, or I’ll think about it, or Don’t you have any homework? I wished she could get over it and be like the other moms who fell asleep at New Brighton Beach while their children swam in the ocean. I thought I wanted a mom like that. It wasn’t until I had my own kids that I felt the same roiling inside. Then I had an inkling of what she’d endured.

I once mentioned to my mother that I might visit Downieville, and she forbade it. By the time I made the trip, my parents had been dead long enough that their fears and admonitions no longer clung to me. I’m not sure what I expected to find, but I knew that the longer it remained taboo territory, the more difficult it was for me to separate myself from the mystery.

Their little cottage was long gone, so I walked the one-block main street of facades right out of a Western movie and found myself searching the faces that passed me on the sidewalk. I was looking for my father’s round eyes and big ears, my mother’s asymmetrical smile, seeking a family resemblance that wasn’t mine. What made me think Tippy could be here?

I wondered what a grown-up version of the toddler in my mother’s photos might look like. It was a measure of how deeply my life was entwined with his, of how my efforts to replace him had firmly planted him somewhere inside me. Despite all this, I never thought of him as a brother. Not once have I referred to him as “my brother, Tippy.” He was simply my parents’ first child who dwelled in the unknown hazy world of my mother and father before I existed.

It didn’t seem right that I’d benefitted from his misfortune. I could have grown up with a mother who couldn’t support us. Or lived with a resentful stepfather who didn’t want to raise another man’s child. I might have been neglected, abused. At the very least, I would have been labeled illegitimate. In those days, there were two boxes on a birth certificate for the doctor to check: legitimate or illegitimate. A birth certificate was required to enter school, so all my teachers would have known of my shameful status.

When people learned about Tippy, I became an object of curiosity, worthy of pity. Some speculated on all the ways he might have died. Did I think he’d been kidnapped? Could he be alive? Worse were the easy, thoughtless salves—He’s in a better place now. I’m so sorry for your loss. Don’t be sorry, I’d think. It wasn’t my loss anyway. How did your family ever get through it? I’m not sure they did.

When I went off to Berkeley, my nugget came along with me, a reminder of those I was leaving behind. I’d chosen a university that was too far away to allow frequent visits home. I’d done this on purpose, not knowing how much I’d miss my family or how hard it would be to start a life of my own. Once in a while I’d take it out, try it on, feel it thump against my chest and put it back in its little satin-lined box. A gold nugget doesn’t go well with t-shirts and jeans. I never did figure out what to wear with it.

During my sophomore year there, I received crank phone calls from an elderly woman.

I know where Tippy is, she wheezed.

The calls came about once a month, usually in the early evening. I’d be settling down after a dinner of Rice-A-Roni, my nose buried in Janson’s History of Art. Somewhere between “The Venus of Willendorf” and “Van Gogh,” the phone would ring and there it was, that whisky voice.

I know where Tippy is.

I pictured Hansel and Gretel whenever she called, the breadcrumbs on the forest floor leading to the cottage with the big oven. If she wasn’t standing next to that oven, I guessed she was in a dreadful beige kitchen with appliances from the 1940s, maybe in Fresno.

I don’t know why she wanted to hurt me. Perhaps she craved getting close to a big story because it made her lonely life seem a little larger. She might simply have been a mean old lady. If she’d hoped for a reaction, I didn’t give it to her.

I know where Tippy is.

I listened, my mouth open, always as surprised as the first time she called. What if the old lady did know where he was? I knew she was a crank, but I wished every time she called she’d prove she wasn’t, and that she would finally reveal his whereabouts.

Please tell me where he is so I can be released from the responsibility for my parents’ happiness.

My mother had explained that I’d been waited and hoped for. After Tippy disappeared, we wished and wished and one day you came home with us. What my young mind heard was that I was adopted because he had vanished. He was the cause; I was the effect.

Years later, after I’d started my own family far away from the Mother Lode and my relatives with their nuggets, I received a plain brown package at our old fixer-upper on Staten Island. It was wrapped in brown paper with no return address. I recognized my mother’s backhand cursive across the front. Anonymous, sort of, it carried the implicit message not to send it back.

I took the package upstairs, running my hand along the recently restored dark banister. At the top of the stairs I entered our make-do kitchen. We were still learning about paint colors. The kitchen, our first and biggest mistake, was the vivid orange of the inside of a salmon. I heated water in the microwave to make a cup of tea in front of the wall with patches of other colors we’d tried. Stepping into the small sunny dining room, I found a seat by the window. I could still see the dark spot in the ceiling where the mushrooms had grown thick after our mansard roof failed. Our three-year-old son was at Snug Harbor preschool and our brand-new daughter was napping on the third floor in her crib. A few quiet moments to myself before she’d wake and want to be nursed.

The 9 x 12 bundle was lumpy and about an inch thick. Didn’t seem like books or toys for the kids. I snipped it open and inside was a stack of yellowed news clippings. I carefully unfolded the one on top from page B3 of the San Francisco Call Bulletin, dated November 3, 1945. It featured a large photo of a small blond boy holding his teddy bear, smiling at the camera. He had the unmistakable family overbite. The headlines chronicled the disappearance and search for him.

Mystery of Dickie tum Suden!

Son of Rich Bay Area Family Vanishes.

Dogs Will Hunt Lost Baby.

River Dragged in Last Hope of Finding Boy.

Hope Abandoned for Lost tum Suden Boy.

My first thought was This does not belong to me. My mother had handed me her biggest burden for safekeeping, and I wasn’t willing to take on any more of her sadness. Yet I couldn’t throw Tippy away, tossing all those screaming headlines into the trash. Instead I re-wrapped the clippings and placed them carefully in the bottom drawer of my desk, where they remained for years. I kept them in a safe place where I wouldn’t have to consider them and went on with my life.

The package had arrived when my son was around the age that Tippy was when he disappeared. It reminded me not to let him play alone in our front yard, no talking to strangers. My fears grew and blossomed until one spring day at Clove Lake Park when I grabbed my son from a patch of grass, tossed him into the back seat of our car, jumped in after him and locked all the doors, head down, convinced that a passerby had intended to take him from me. The passerby was only chasing a soccer ball across the green. I would eventually learn how to control my fears. I’d give my children a more carefree childhood than I had, balancing my protectiveness with some common sense. I thought that made me a better mother than my own, but it was simply not my fate to lose a child.

My nugget carries the heft of Tippy’s absence. Where did he go? Following a chipmunk down the usual path, then off to the left where he knew he’d find the little stream. Wading across, the scents of pine and wet filling his head, the cool water a delightful shock on his feet. Maybe he paused to watch the rainbow trout hatched that summer as they shimmered between the rocks. Flecks of mica, also known as fool’s gold, on the creek bed below. Reach down, try to catch the glittering specks, but they run through your fingers, onward downstream. Sloshing across to the other side, clambering up the bank, he headed for home.

Home was back the way he came. We’ll never know why he didn’t take it. Maybe the majestic landscape lured him deeper into it. The forest has always been strange that way. Or someone took him from it, wanting a child of their own or knowing someone who did, like the anonymous doctor at my birth. Perhaps the worst happened, a crime against a child, a murder forever hidden.

I turn the nugget over and over, feeling the smooth parts and the bumps with my fingers, a promise of great wealth and sorrow, formed hundreds of millions of years ago. It was born at the bottom of the ocean in a stew of volcanic, tectonic, and hydrothermal activity. It’s odd to think that it rose to the heights of the Sierra Nevada, to be found in the same forest wandered by a small boy and his dog. A lonely object, a reminder of an original family I can never know, and another family I loved. The keepsake of a boy who wandered into the woods and never came home.