Art and Writing by Jamie Bass, Olympics Field Forester
ǵʰelh₃- gold
This year, let me tell you of gold. Your mind goes to a metal, understandable. But my gold is not the gold that gilds a rich man’s penthouse or the kind that clinks heavy on the neck. Not gold for which you can get cash, right now, or the 14k luster from a late night informercial lady’s ears. Not even the kind found in a California mountain stream. There are no 49ers within 49 miles of my gold.
There’s gold hidden inside a perfectly ripe peach, so rich it falls apart in my greedy hands. I hungrily and messily devour its molten sweetness and can think of no better treasure. My gold is the glowing fuzzy yellow behind of a bumblebee running into my dandelion wild hair spread out on an unkempt lawn. The yellow-white gold of a perfect slice of aged parmesan, sparkling on the tongue with tyrosine crystals like laughter between two old friends.
On rare days, when I’m finally tucked back into my warm truck for the drive home along the coast road, the fog begins to roll up into the creek bottoms and sprawl over the hillside. From up on the ridge I can see it reaching lacy thick fingers up towards me. At the exact right time, the setting sun drops below the clouds for just a sacred minute. The fog transforms into a blazing golden fleece, laced through cedar and glinting orange and red solar fire. It’s a thick golden fleece the likes of which Jason or his Argonauts could never hold, only these mountains can wear this robe of kings.
If we dig back into the English version of the word for that metal, past the original Dutch or Germanic phrases or even a Persian one that means “to shine”, we find the Indo-European word ǵʰelh₃-. It doesn’t refer to a mineral, or shiny metal, but instead- ”to flourish”, as well as the color green-yellow. How easy it is to see how those two meanings became linked. If you’ve seen sunshine-soaked green leaves, scattering gold light over a river where the shines of small fish and sphagnum moss wink out of the shallows, you might understand ǵʰelh₃-, you might understand what I think of gold.
Yes, we’re well known for our greens and our browns, drenched as we are in Pacific rain. But don’t you know it, we have gold that grows right of the ground here too. The happy fat, rich, marigold color of chanterelle mushrooms bursting up from a dark, dank forest floor. Glowing and bright, their fleshy heads a happier sight than gold coins, and tastier to us forest dwellers. Gold found in the merry brushy heads of goldenrod, blooming when it seems spring’s blooms are all gone, and I sing the song of the witch of the wes-mer-land to them as thanks for mending my own battle wounds. In the fall, the maples and huckleberries turn their leaves a brilliant gold that lights up dreary fall days. One strange woman striding under a bower of maple gold ceilings and hanging green-yellow moss tapestries that is more ornate and richly gilded than a rococo French court, though my muddy, worn clothes correctly indicate me as only a servant of this place.
Gold to me is the concentration of many dizzying forms of sunlight. Cut open that tree blocking the road, and the rich yellow-white color of- count them! How many years soaking up sun? Pop those years in the fireplace and the blaze of the sun returns to you. The creeks here turn the deep brown-orange-gold of concentrated fruit butter, a strong heady tea made of the thousands upon thousands of years of life and death under a steady sun. Concentrated forest decadence, brewed to perfection.
If serotonin had a color I think it would be this kind of glowing honey gold, the word itself has the same crystal sharp heaviness as “sunlight” or “sanguine”. It’s easy to imagine, like a high-school chemistry video with a low computer graphics budget, sparks of bright serotonin buzzing around our synapses like confused bumblebees.
I like to think that the yellow metal was named after the feeling of sunlight on skin after a long, wet winter. That maybe it only reflects this bigger feeling of richness, like the moon only reflects a light it cannot make on its own. That the desperate need to hoard a metal is just an attempt to hang on and control that feeling of endless abundance the ephemeral appearance of chanterelle or salmon roe gives us. The fear of losing golden, flourishing things, leading to an unhinged pursuit of this metallic facsimile, a self-fulfilling prophecy in the end. More likely I just have too much time to wonder at things, too many days with a pack full of good things to eat and eyes full of splendor. It leads me to demand I have that word for my own use. Regardless, I try to remember, as I follow the thread of shining yellow stripes in the road back to my own warm hearth, what gold really is. ǵʰelh₃- to flourish.
