Nancy Twinkie Strikes it Rich

Nancy Twinkie Strikes it Rich:

After near freezing to death in the bottom of the Satan’s Kingdom gorge looking for gold on the coldest day of the winter with Nancy Twinkie I came home and put my gold panning gear away until warm weather.  I honestly thought I had seen the last of Nancy and the whole collection of the camera crew from NBC.  I was wrong! 

For those that didn’t read the first of this series Nancy Twinkie and the Frozen Pan of Gold, Nancy Twinkie is a cute little blond TV Newscaster.

Several months passed the snow melted away, the birds returned and the next thing I knew summer had arrived.  Now in mid-summer the world of news practically comes to a standstill because not much is happening.  With this happy thought I was sitting at my desk one morning when the phone rang – it was Nancy Twinkie who wanted to do another story about gold panning now that the weather had improved.  So, we set up an appointment for two days later in the same place under the Satan’s Kingdom Bridge.

Satan’s Kingdom is a gorge on the Farmington River in New Hartford, Connecticut where the stagecoach robbers used to wait to waylay the Hartford stage when the days of the Wild West were back East.

We all met at the coffee shop, from there we drove over to the river where the whole collection of TV people debarked from their cars, so help me this time it looked like a convoy.  This time the crew looked more like the 8^th Army then a camera crew.  There must have been at least thirty of them; it looked like the whole studio came this time except the janitor.

During the summer the Satan’s Kingdom Gorge becomes the haunt of a pack of nature lovers and tree huggers who go floating down through the gorge riding on old inner tubes; this lot is called tubers, and there must have been a couple of hundred of them milling around or floating down the river.  It became immediately obvious there were more people in Satan’s Kingdom then there needed too be.

We poked through the masses to our place under the bridge next to the river where I filled one of my gold pans with about twenty pounds of river sand and gravel.  As I started to work the pan down to see if there was any gold Nancy Twinkie asked me how hard it was to pan for gold, so I told her after I finished this pan full I’d teach her how to pan for gold.  I worked the pan down to just a swirl of black sand, and sure enough there were a few small colors of gold showing at the end of the swirl.  Nancy became real interested then.  Little did I realize she was beginning to suffer from a case of gold fever!

If you have never had gold fever it is one of the more serious illnesses you can catch.  Your breathing becomes labored, your eyes pop out, nothing will cure your sickness except finding more gold. Not even black flies!

I taught Nancy Twinkie how to use a gold pan, and where to look for gold.  By the time we had finished there was a whole crowd that gathered around us watching.  We had spent several hours panning for gold, and I’ll be huckleberried if Nancy didn’t find more gold then I did.  By that time she was thoroughly hooked on gold panning, so as we left I gave her one of my new plastic gold pans, and wished her luck.

Since I wasn’t married, I casually asked her if she would like to join me for a day of panning in the Berkshires the following Saturday.  She accepted, and I was in trouble, just how much I didn’t know until later!