what if we made a riffle box

Growing up in Chilliwack................................1950

The music festival....oh gawd what a drag.....every year.......it is so boring .....well....what if we did not go.....would they miss us....Bill ....I can't stand that festival...neither can I....I know something that's educational.....what......remember the fools gold we were picking up last Saturday at the rock quarry...yeah...well, what if we made a riffle box ....yeah..and took a 5 gallon can for water....maybe we could do some serious mining.....we talked ourselves into it.....we will skip the festival and mine for gold...what a cool idea...what if we get caught...let's worry about that later..besides we wont get "caught" but dealing with it next school day will be tricky.. anything is better than going to the music festival..... so mining we did...that was really fun...we banged together a box from stuff Bill's dad had...Mr.Maxwell (Ralph) was a carpenter...in fact he was foreman on the job when the Paramount theatre was built in 1948.....anyway we made a box with wooden riffles in it, took a 5 gallon pail and a shovel .......and set it up at the rock quarry, by a puddle of water.......we had an idea where the best mining was.. ..we had been there before...but this time we had a gold mining setup....it was a sunny day in April..........we had a lunch .....and a couple of bottles of pop.....and we had a great time....at the end of the afternoon we had a small matchbox full of fools gold...it was like a treasure...fun to pour out and look at...to hold it .....it looked like gold..I guess it felt like gold ........we found out it was called iron pyrites.......ok ..that day was over....now what..so we go to school the next day.....to our amazement we were not missed...just the other kids wondered where we were....and how we pulled it off...Bill and I were not in the same rooms in grade 8 nor in the same musical presentation....but we guessed the teachers were just to wrapped up in their festival business to notice us gone.....what a win we had pulled off....and that's what it was....it was never brought up and we had a heck of a good festival day.