The Wide Open Spaces and a
GEIGER COUNTER
citizen and official of Mexico, discovered gold in his mill race. Dad was more cautious. That’s the wonderful part about maturity and experience and knowledge. It equips us to better evaluate a given situation. He switched the counter off and sat down and ate his lunch. Somehow I wasn’t' so hungry. Fifteen min utes later we made another test. It was the same. By now I was convinced. Dad was only cautiously optimistic. We hiked on and came back two hours later. We made another test. There was only the normal, mod erately high background count. I was confused and puzzled. Dad sat down on the slick pine grass, leaned back on one elbow, picked up a twig and methodically broke off small sections. I didn’t say anything. Pretty soon he had the problem figured out. Somewhere down those hundreds of side canyons there was a rich deposit of uranium. It was giving off radioactive gas that was gathering into invisible clouds and drift ing against the mountain. In the calm, still air such a cloud had settled on us that noontime. I learned a lesson from one who knew his source books fairly well. A man can ill afford to get tangled up in a lot of misinformation. Especially in the field of religion. It’s too important. Whenever we start out with the wrong information we’re going to end up wrong. A well-meaning wife or friend or preacher can get a man so confused in matters of religion that the truth is pretty nearly lost. I think the best solution is to do some original thinking and investigating on our own. The source book is the Bible and fortunately it’s written in a language any eight-year-old can readily understand. Get away by yourself and read the New Testament through again and again. Forget everything you’ve ever heard or read or thought about Christianity. Start with an open, inquiring mind. And each time you read simply say, God, 1 want to know your way of salvation for me. Show me from your Word. And if you’re honest . . . and I mean that in the strictest sense of the word . . . it won’t be long until you’ll understand what Jesus Christ means when He says, “ I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”
The way some people talk religion it’s pretty tough figuring out just what it’s all about. But then I guess the same goes for politics and the stock market and the art of looping a number 12 dry fly out over your favorite trout hole. Misunderstanding about how a lot of things work is not unusual. Take my encounter with uranium prospecting. I grew up in gold and lead mining camps in the high, isolated mountains of Idaho. My dad is an expert on minerals, an interest I guess that stems back to his college days (Monmouth and Stanford). And he’s the kind of man that keeps the doors of learning open. So when the uranium boom hit the West dad was well-armed with information to launch himself on a new hobby. I went along recently with him on a uranium pros pecting trip. We went back to our beloved mountains of Idaho. We took along a black light and a Geiger counter and a couple of trout rods. The fishing in that wild back-country is almost always good. We camped first on Stanley Lake in the Sawtooths back up from Sun Valley. Then we cut over on a dirt road to Payette Lakes and then on down to Council and from there due west on another dirt road to the Cuddy Mountain area. This range is over 8,000 feet high and looks down on the ribbon like Snake River just before it plunges into Hell’s Canyon. Traveling these rutted roads brought back a flood of memories. This was the country where I shot my first grouse at nine and my first deer at 12. It was about noon when it happened. We’d hiked a ways from the car and from time to time had stopped to take a background count. At that eleva tion you get quite a little radioactivity from cosmic rays, and then too most of that country has a scat tering of thorium which is also radioactive. It is such factors as these that determine the background count but have nothing to do with the presence of uranium. It was while stopped to make a background check that the counter exploded into action. The clicks in the headphone and the reading on the dial indicated enormous radioactivity. It looked like a strike and I think I felt some of the same wild excitement that electrified the pioneers around Sacra mento in 1848 when John Augustus Sutter, one-time
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