The Hickory Staff

SUMNER LAKE, COLORADO

July 1979

Michael Wilson checked the flow of air from his regulator and pulled bulky flippers onto his feet. He waited, but Tim Stafford wasn’t ready yet. ‘C’mon Tim, hurry up,’ he said impatiently as he dangled his feet from the dock. It was hot in the mountains today, but the water would be cold in Sumner Lake; it always was. He was glad to have a full wetsuit. Tim wore a wetsuit as well, but unlike Michael, the younger boy did not wear a hood – he said it made his mask flood. Michael always wished he could bear the cold like Tim could, but he couldn’t stand the icy temperature against his skin. Although still in middle school, the two boys had been diving since the previous summer when both decided to give up riding the bench week after week at soccer games. Their mothers sat together on the beach near the dock, reading and gossiping.

The lake was one of their favourite dive sites. It was stream-fed and crystal-clear for much of the summer, so a diver could see further than fifty feet, even in the deepest areas, and there were plenty of sites to visit along the bottom. Back in the 1960s a small plane had crashed and had never been recovered from the lake’s floor. Michael and Tim didn’t know if anyone had been killed, but it was great fun to visit the broken sections of the aircraft. There were several rock outcroppings that were excellent places to find and dislodge lost fishing lures, and periodically they would come across a camera, a pocketknife and other cool items accidentally dropped in the water.

The best part about diving in Sumner Lake was the mining equipment that littered the bottom. The lake, created as a reservoir for Denver-area homes, covered an area mined by gold and silver prospectors more than a hundred years earlier. Michael’s teacher had told him there were flooded mine shafts too, but the boys hadn’t found any yet – secretly, Michael was glad: he knew fearless Tim would dive headlong into the flooded shafts, while he would be plagued by thoughts of iridescent spirits, ungainly, crippled fish and thick tangles of slippery weeds that would cling to his ankles and hold him prisoner inside the inky darkness for ever.

Scattered across the lake bottom were the remains of miners’ shacks and pieces of abandoned equipment, most far too large for the boys ever to haul to the surface. Sometimes they would find a hand tool, a lost boot or some silverware left behind when the mines were flooded. Along with their visits to the aeroplane and their search for lost fishing lures, the boys combed the lake floor in search of mining artefacts. Mr Meyers, the old man who owned the antique store around the corner from Tim’s house, paid them a few dollars for anything of value they brought to his shop.

‘Just push the clamp down and you’re done,’ Michael directed impatiently. Tim, who was small and not very strong, struggled with the clamp attaching his scuba tank to the buoyancy compensator. ‘Let me help you,’ he said finally, pulling his feet from the water and struggling to stand.

‘I can do it,’ Tim grunted as he pushed hard to close the clamp around the tank. ‘See? Let’s go.’

‘Okay, where should we head?’ Tim had virtually memorised the lake floor.

‘Forty feet for sixty minutes,’ Tim suggested. ‘We’ll swim over near the big rocks where those guys are fishing and then cover the flats to the plane. We can head back this way when we hit five hundred pounds.’

‘That’s cool. Maybe we’ll find some lures or something.’ Michael spat into his mask to mitigate fogging, then, holding the mask and tank, he rolled from the dock into the water. He tucked his face down onto his chest as he felt the icy water rush into his wetsuit between his hood and the back of his jacket. That was always the worst moment, until his body temperature warmed the thin layer of water between his skin and the neoprene; in just a few seconds he felt quite comfortable, despite the cold. He looked up when he heard a splash and watched as Tim leapt feet-first into the lake, then adjusted his facemask and kicked towards the bottom.

Fifty minutes later, Michael motioned to Tim: five minutes before they needed to head back to the dock. Tim was playing outside the fuselage of the aeroplane, pretending to pilot it like a submarine through the depths of Sumner Lake. They had found two fishing lures and seventy-five cents near the rock outcropping about a hundred yards west of the aeroplane; Tim was thrilled with their discovery and Michael could hear him yelling, even through his regulator. Their find had been followed by a long swim to the crash site across the area Tim called ‘the flats’, a stretch of barren ground with nothing but sand, rocks and a few plants dotting the brown expanse. Tim waved once and headed out across the flats towards the dock. He was the faster swimmer; Michael put his head down and kicked as hard as he could to keep up.

They were halfway across when something caught Michael’s eye. It looked like a starfish half-buried in the sand, glinting momentarily in the sun. Michael stopped and waited for the sand to settle before he reached for the small star-shaped object. It resisted his initial tug and Michael realised the buried item was larger than it first looked. As he pulled harder, the strangely shaped metal object came free in a cloud of silt. He raised his find to his facemask: a spur. He shouted for Tim, but his friend was already out of range. As he polished the edge with his thumb, Michael could make out the letters ‘US’ etched gracefully onto the side near where the spur attached to a boot heel.

This was a great find, the best treasure the two divers had ever pulled from Sumner Lake. The letters carved into the metal meant it must have come from a soldier or a cavalry rider. Michael could barely contain himself as he continued searching the sandy bottom, hoping to uncover more – Mr Meyers would surely give them at least five dollars for the single spur, but if he found its mate they’d be worth much more. He checked his pressure gauge, and saw he had only two hundred PSI left in his tank. Looking around, he made a mental note of the spot: he and Tim would come back the following weekend.

Michael was running his hand through the sand one last time when he saw the key. It didn’t look like an ordinary key: it was long and flat, with two differently shaped teeth protruding from both sides of one end. It had the letters BIS etched into one side, the number 17C carved into the other. This would be one for Mr Meyers’ key jar, the huge glass jar the old man claimed his great-grandfather had used for making pickles in Austria in the 1800s. Today it held hundreds of keys, many of them fitting antique locks, like those in the cabinets and wooden chests for sale in Mr Meyers’ shop. Others were thrown into the jar in exchange for a wish. ‘They are the keys to the known world,’ Mr Meyers told all who asked. ‘If you make a wish when you drop one in, it will always come true.’ Michael was too old to believe such fairy stories, but Tim loved to drop keys into the enormous jar.

Michael slipped his latest find inside his wetsuit, gripped the spur like a recovered national treasure and swam hurriedly to the dock.