Way back in the 1830’s, they found gold in them thar hills, long before the California gold rush. The Georgia mountains sprang alive with miners and it wasn’t long before boom towns sprung up in the mountain towns. The only people that weren’t welcome were the Cherokee Indians that already lived there (and, as the city of New Echota proves, had adjusted to Western culture quite nicely, thankyouverymuch) and they were send packing out to Oklahoma.

It didn’t take long for the gold to run out and cities like Auraria went from thriving cities to ghost towns and soon the mountains were empty again (but the Cherokees weren’t invited back, they eventually got their revenge by opening a casino on the foot of the Smokies and they’ve been gladly taking White Man’s money ever since.) One town that didn’t completely disappear was a town in a valley called Dahlonega. The town had served as the mint for gold and now instead of miners it gladly opens its doors for tourists.

Dahlonega was a frequent vacation spot for my family as a child mostly because it was only an hour or two from home, but I’d also like to think it was because it had a little more authenticity than places like Gatlinburg (and about a million less t-shirt shops.) You can still pan for gold in Dahlonega at little roadside stands. The owners will give you a shovel of dirt and show you how to pan and then by the end of the session, you’ll find a couple gold flakes at the bottom of your pan to keep. (I have no idea if the dirt is really from Georgia or not, and I suspect it’s been well picked clean already for anything substantial!) This was a whole lot of fun for the whole family and kept us kids occupied for a small amount of money so mom and dad were all for it.

One such time we were in Dahlonega and panning for gold and I was hard at work, swirling away looking for my gleaming yellow treasure when one of the kids, a freckled young lad in a baseball cap who was one of the owners’ children, struck up a conversation with me. We chatted about all sorts of stuff for a long time. We talked about my home in Gwinnett, where I lived. We talked a lot about baseball. We talked about Dahlonega and what middle school was like in Dahlonega and what is was like back home. The kid was particularly inquisitive, but I really didn’t think much of it as I exclaimed with joy when the bottom of my pan sparkled back with gold.

On the car ride home as I was admiring my little vial of gold, my father broke the silence in the car. “So, that girl really took a liking to you, didn’t she Jeff?”

“Huh?” I answered, looking up.

“That girl that talked to you the entire time you were panning for gold. She was really interested in you, wasn’t she?”

There was an uncomfortable silence in the car. “You mean…. that was a girl?”

More uncomfortable silence. My mother sighed. My father said, “I don’t guess we have to worry about him with the girls yet, do we?”. My sister giggled.

The one time in my young life that a girl was actually hitting on me and I had totally missed it! I guess I had mistaken her for a boy since her hair was all up in a baseball cap. Yeah, I was real smooth in my early teen years.

The post-script to this story is that I did see her again, about a year or two later. We were on another trip to the mountains and there she was, again working with her family at that roadside gold panning spot. Of course, as girls are wont to do in their early teens, she had grown up some and now her hair was worn down. She obviously didn’t remember me as this time I was the one trying to work the conversation and she was friendly, but didn’t know me from Adam. I thought to myself how funny it was that I knew who she was and she had no clue who I was and how much attention she paid to me then and how disinterested she was now. What can I say, at fourteen, I really didn’t know much about how to impress the ladies, so I didn’t push it very hard.

…but I’ll never forget that trip to the mountains and that day I spent panning for gold and how little I knew about women. Since then the amount I’ve learned about women is probably about as much as those tiny flecks of gold in that vial I brought home.