Sweat Bees and Diamonds
By Gentry Patterson
Panting, I wiped the sweat from my brow with my arm, leaving behind a streak of reddish-brown dirt across my forehead. I could feel the next wave of perspiration dripping down from my hairline and percolating out of the skin above my eyebrows. It was oppressively hot and muggy.
I started to think something along the lines of This is not worth the trouble or There is no way that there are actually mines up here, but no sooner had the thought started than a sweat bee abruptly zinged into my ear, demanding immediate attention.
I slapped at the intruder, grunted, and kept trudging, pushing vines and big green fleshy plants aside, slipping and stumbling on red rocks and dead trees hidden beneath the tightly packed foliage on the upper slopes of Red Mountain. Swarms of other obnoxious insects hummed with the low roar of distant traffic from the city.
Squinting my eyes against the sun, I tried to peer up through the undergrowth to catch a glimpse of the crest of the ridge, but it was too dense to tell how much farther we had to go.
Annoyed and itchy, a thought crossed my mind. What if that lady had no clue what she was talking about?
I brushed the thought aside like a bug and kept hiking. We were already in too deep. There was no way I was going to turn around now. Parallel to me off in the woods somewhere I could hear Jose, my roommate, cursing and sliding his way up through the briars and poison ivy.
“Oi, Jose! Can you see the top??” I shouted.
“No dude,” came the reply, followed by an emphatic “F these bugs!”
We were on a mission launched by intel from a friendly woman at that week’s Grotto meeting, a monthly gathering of the caving club in Birmingham, of which Jose and I are both members. Standing around after the club’s official proceedings, we had mentioned that we were roommates and that we lived in the Southside neighborhood at the base of Red Mountain.
“So you guys have been up there to the mines then, right?” she replied. Sharing a look of surprise and intrigue, we had shaken our heads. Mines? I’ve lived in Southside for nearly seven years now. What mines?
The author’s roommate, Jose, on their front porch, preparing for the trip into the Red Mountain mines.
Now, two days later, we found ourselves exhausted and dirty, standing at the crest of Red Mountain, searching for the reputed mine shafts. We both carried backpacks with headlamps, knee pads, and helmets, and I held a coil of rope slung around my shoulder. We were ready for anything.
Along with the equipment, I also carried a moderate bit of skepticism. An abandoned mine shaft was just too cool of a thing to exist within hiking distance from the steps of my apartment. It just didn’t square up. After seven years in this neighborhood, how could I possibly be unaware of something like that?
“I think we should angle that way, down to the right,” Jose suggested, pointing through the trees. I agreed, and we began our descent through the brush of the backside of the mountain, holding onto limbs and skidding between dark red boulders, colored by the rich deposits of iron for which the mountain is famous.
As we continued downward, I pushed thorns and skepticism aside, and before long, a large depression in the mountain’s topography emerged through the trees. I pointed, yelling, but Jose was already marching to it. Eagerly, I followed. He let out a whoop, and I sprinted to close the distance. Standing at the depression’s edge, my eyes followed his gaze down the steep bank and stopped abruptly at a gaping entrance to an abandoned mine shaft.
I couldn’t believe it.
We wasted less than a second laughing and high-fiving before launching ourselves down the slope to get a better look, giddy with excitement. “Bro!” I stuttered, Jose unable to even reply through the big cheesy grin on his face.
We threw our packs down on the ground and slipped on kneepads, donned helmets, and clicked on headlamps. The cool air breezed over us from the inside of the earth as we ventured out of the brutal sun and into the darkness.
My entire body brimmed with the thrill of adventure. The excitement of the unknown crackled across my skin like static electricity, and I soaked in my surroundings like a fresh sponge in a raging river. I couldn’t help but laugh again at the absurdity of the situation.
We were inside a complex of abandoned mine shafts, and we walked there. We were in Southside. For nearly a decade, a labyrinth of tunnels snaked its way through the bedrock right under my nose, and the entire time I didn’t have even the slightest inkling it was there.
A warped and rusted set of railroad tracks led us deeper into the mine, and the dull roar of the city and the bugs and the wind slowly quieted away behind us, giving way to the hollow echo of water dripping from the ceiling and the soft crumble of dirt beneath our boots. I walked along, peering up and around, noticing side passages and the nearly vanished remains of rusted buckets and railroad ties.
Free from the sweat bees, I could finally hear myself think.
The skyline of Birmingham, Alabama.
Processing the astonishment of our discovery, I began to ponder the implications. Why on earth had it taken me seven years to get here, an hour by foot from my front door? How had something this enormous, this fascinating, this cool, evaded my attention?
Every year I’ve lived in the Southside neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama, I’ve been prepared to leave. Sandwiched between the University of Alabama in Birmingham, my alma mater, and Red Mountain, Southside is not the kind of place you’d ever see in the Forbes “Travel Top 100” or Condé Nast.
An eclectic mix of historic homes sliced and diced into rental units, condos, and run-of-the-mill apartment buildings, the neighborhood is crammed up on the slopes of the mountain, pushed up by the rapid growth of the university and its associated hospital.
When I first moved here to attend UAB as a student, the neighborhood held a bit of an edge. One of my friends was robbed at gunpoint outside the local corner store. My girlfriend’s roommate was carjacked. Periodically gunshots would pop like fireworks late in the night.
That edge has dulled recently, with the gradual disappearance of abandoned properties and the steady emergence of upscale new developments, as a tide of gentrification has slowly rolled in on the shores of our city. I’ve noted these changes with a mix of mild interest and apathy, because I’ve always looked at myself as a visitor here.
While in school, I listed my parents’ address in another city as my own on any official documents. I borrowed money and purchased a dilapidated house near campus, not to put down roots, but with the intention of fixing it and flipping it within a year. It took me three.
I met a girl and fell in love, but she was still in school. It’s just another year, I thought. What’s another year? We’ll move together when she’s done.
And so one after another, it’s added up to seven, and I’m still in Birmingham. I’m still in Southside. And now, I’m in a mine.
As we ventured deeper along the trail formed by the railroad tracks, I allowed myself to take a ride on this train of thought. The cool air was calming, and driven with the purpose of exploration, Jose and I weren’t wasting any time on small talk.
Why, all these years, have I been in such a hurry to move on from this neighborhood, from this city? Where did I think I would go?
Vague ideas of adventure, exotic locations on the edges of maps, bustling cities with interesting people—these are the images, the feelings I’d imagine whenever I’d consider the “next stop” on my journey. Anything but Southside, Birmingham, Alabama. I saw myself as a traveler, stuck by circumstance, but only temporarily.
On some level, I knew, adventure awaited me elsewhere.
What I didn’t know was that adventure was right underneath me the entire time.
“Hey, come look at this!” Jose’s voice rang out against the stone walls of the passage somewhere above me. In my reverie, I had lost sight of him.
Swinging my head up and over to the left, I could just barely see his boots, twenty feet up a vertical passage leading up and away from the main borehole. I clambered over to see what he’d found.
A magnificent dome soared above us. A combination of water and minerals in the rock reflected a brilliant silver against the light of our headlamps. The ceiling looked like it was coated in a sheet of platinum, studded with diamonds, glistening and beckoning to us, completely capturing our attention.
“This is amazing,” I said aloud, half to myself and half to Jose. He nodded in agreement, staring.
For several minutes, we soaked in the view. The slightest movement of one of our lights produced a vibrant shimmer on the rocks, light dancing and twinkling like a night sky packed edge to edge with stars.
My thoughts returned to my neighborhood.
That’s when it dawned on me, that in my hurry to leave and move on to somewhere cooler, somewhere with more adventure, I had inadvertently and ironically put myself in a cage. I thought I had seen everything, and so I became blind. It was my own preconceptions that created the circumstances of my discontent. I thought Southside had nothing to offer, and so it offered me nothing.
Little did I know that right beneath my feet, there were diamonds waiting to be discovered.
Gentry Patterson is an American writer and cartographer living in Birmingham, Alabama. He loves to be outside and enjoys spending time with a good book. He leads the Dead Foot Book Club.
