Gold Futures
Then there was the CEO of a gold
company, the woman we met on the train across Canada, the train that would bring
us to the ferries in Vancouver
and on to Alaska,
our final destination. In the dining car, over the poached cod and creamed corn
she whispered, “The prognosis isn’t good. It’s stage 4 cancer,” and I saw then
how scared she was, inside that professional demeanor, understood her need to
chronicle the last train trip, asking strangers to snap her picture—on the
platform in Winnipeg, in the dome car near Jasper as mountains slid by. Her
husband kept a tight smile on his face the whole way, along the shores of the
Great Lakes, past the grain silos of the plains, past Saskatchewan, Calgary,
for he could see farther down the road, already pictured showing the photos six
months from now, precious, more precious than gold.
A few weeks later, when
they returned from the trip to read in the morning paper that gold took a dive,
how could she not make the comparison, as she watched the markets tumble,
hoping gold would rally, hoping that people would turn from intangibles to
notice how weak silver was as a metal and want an element that had stood the
test of time. Did the husband then point out that riding the train across Canada, wasn’t
that too a test of time, both still on this earth to see what had not been
seen--a mountain goat! A moose!—at the end to witness a glacier meet the sea,
see that solid mass splintering off, sheaves of ice falling, things breaking
away from their solid form? Wasn’t there the sheer beauty of the parting?
Toni Mirosevich