Boomtown (2 page)

Boomtown turned out to be a place where everybody's favorite thing to do was to blow stuff up. I was also surprised by the ethnic makeup of the town; in spite of their varied backgrounds, men and women and children worked together as a community of equals. They valued education more than money, worked hard, stayed married, loved their children, cared for the environment, and honored the heritage of other cultures.

You may ask, “How is that possible?”

I see your point. A place like that can't be real.

But it should be.

CHAPTER 1

A Shaky Start

I
almost died today. Not quite, but
almost
. Not by any of the most common methods—heart attack, car accident, drowning, old age—that sort of thing. My survival was measured in
inches
. If my truck driver hadn't tackled me; if he didn't have the foresight to jump on me and knock me into the water; if he had hesitated even for a moment, this book would be five sentences long and it would end with dot, dot, dot . . .

Obviously, I
didn't
die, or I wouldn't be sitting here writing this story and telling you exactly what happened. I'm not sure you'll believe it. I'm not sure that
I
do.

It all started early Friday morning on the last day of our journey from California to Washington. We had stayed over-night at the Travelodge in Wenatchee, where we'd arranged to catch up with our moving truck and driver. From there we followed in the shadow cast by the lumbering, bright orange vehicle as it made its way up Highway 97 toward our new home in Boomtown.

Ruth, our oldest at age sixteen, and her younger siblings, Jonny and Sarah, ages thirteen and ten respectively, kept their noses pressed against the windows of our old Chevy station wagon.

“Look, Mom,
apple trees
!”

“Look over there—pears and peaches and raspberries.”

“Look at all the cows and horses and sheep. And what are
those
, Mom?”

Janice answered, “Those are llamas, dear.”

Sarah said, “Really? A herd of llamas? Can I have one?”

“Of course not. They're only for looking at.”

“Can I have a cow instead?”

“No dear, you can't have a cow.”

“What about a sheep? They aren't very big. I could keep it in my room.”

I interrupted the negotiations. “Be serious, Sarah, what would you do if you had a sheep for a pet?”

“They make
wool
, don't they? I could cut off the wool, and Mom could make yarn out of it. She could knit sweaters. That's what people do in small towns. They have sheep and they make sweaters.”

“Your mother doesn't know how to knit.”

“She could
learn
.”

“Maybe she will, but you
still
can't have a sheep. They're very messy.”

“That's okay!” Sarah answered. “So am I. You'd hardly notice.”

“No!”

We drove past sparkling canyon streams, scrubby pine forests, and golden wheat fields. It was all so beautiful. The kids had lived their entire lives in the crowded city streets of California. Janice was from San Francisco, and I was from New York. The only place you could see animals in New York was at the zoo or in the subways during rush hour. With thirsty eyes, we drank it all in.

Janice sighed. “Wide-open spaces. Bright blue sky. Puffy white clouds as far as the eye can see. It's like paradise.”

The moving truck continued its lurching trek north as we rolled through the small mining town of Ainogold. Our arrival included curious onlookers who stopped to stare at the strangers. New neighbors perhaps? Not this time. We halted at the single traffic light and continued on.

A few months later, someone in Boomtown told me the interesting history of how Ainogold got its name. “It happened nearly a huner't years ago during the days of the Yukon Gold Rush. A certain prospector named Coyote Jones came up from California to stake his claim. Spent all he had buying the land and securing the equipment he needed to dig his mine. Ah heard he was up in the hills almost a year and a half 'fore he came back down to the main camp without nary a nugget to show for all his trouble. He weren't the only one. Must have been two huner't other miners with the same bad luck. Coyote Jones said, ‘There just ain't no gold!' Get it?
‘Ain't no
gold.'
Ainogold!' The name sorta stuck and they been callin' the place Ainogold ever since.”

After leaving the little village, we traveled alongside a wide river with rugged cliffs rising to our left and open fields to the right with an occasional farmhouse dotting the landscape. Our map showed Boomtown only eight miles farther up the road. I made the announcement, “Only a few more minutes and we'll be there!”

We turned east onto Blasting Cap Avenue and Jonny cheered as the tires bumped across the Ifilami Bridge and over the Okanogan River. We were greeted by a brightly painted sign that said Welcome to Boomtown! Underneath were the words
Home of Chang's Famous Fireworks Factory
. There was also a round logo with the portrait of an Asian man painted in the center. I had to assume it was the face of the aforementioned Chang, founder of his Famous Fireworks Factory.

“Dad!” shouted Jonny. “Did you see that sign? They've got a
fireworks factory
! You never said nothin' about a fireworks factory!”

“I never said
anything
about fireworks,” I replied, correcting his grammar. “It's because I didn't know. The search committee from the church didn't mention it.”

“But where is it? I want to
see
it!”

“I don't know, Jon. Let's get settled in our new house first. We'll have time for fireworks later.”

Actually, we didn't have to wait very long. Following the hand-drawn map the church secretary had mailed to us, we turned left onto Dynamite Drive and saw the huge factory looming in front of us. Just beyond it to the right we could see Chang's Black Powder Plant, with trails of smoke snaking upward from its twin cones, like two smoldering witches' hats. Even from inside the station wagon, we could smell the pun-gent odor of sulfur.

But it was the fireworks factory that commanded our attention. It was five stories tall and built entirely out of red brick, with what seemed like a hundred windows along each side and almost three hundred feet in length. On the roof were four towering smokestacks that had the name of the company painted in black. The stacked-up letters spelled out Chang's Famous Fireworks Factory, big enough that you could see them for miles. Black wrought-iron stairs climbed the outer walls like spider webs, and we could see dozens of workers busily moving up and down carrying supplies and equipment like ants in an ant farm. Several railcars were parked along-side the building and were in the process of being loaded. Everywhere you looked, there was bustling activity.

I was so busy studying the building that I almost slammed into the back of the moving truck when it lurched to a sudden halt. From behind the truck, we couldn't see why. We sat for a minute wondering what was going on until I pulled over to the shoulder, shifted the gear into Park, and turned off the ignition. I opened my door and climbed out to investigate. Janice and the kids quickly unbuckled and opened their doors to follow me.

I turned back to them. “You can stay in the car. I'm just going to talk to the driver.”

“Stay in the car, Mr. Button?” responded Janice. “You want me to keep three kids trapped in a hot station wagon while you go running around a fireworks factory?”

“I'm not going
into
the factory, Janice. I just want to find out why the moving truck stopped.”

Jonny and Sarah ran up beside me. “We want to find out too!”

“And me,” added Ruth.

Overruled, I shrugged my shoulders and walked around the moving truck to the front, with my family right behind me. We found the driver talking to a Chinese man wearing a white lab coat and surrounded by three other men who were dressed similarly. The lab technician—that's what he appeared to be—held a clipboard and was gesturing to an object anchored in the center of a wide, shallow pond situated in front of the factory.

“Excuse me,” I inquired, “is there a problem?”

The Chinese gentleman answered politely, “No, sir. But as you can see, we were about to conduct a test. Pardon us, but if you need to get past this point, you will have to go back to Blasting Cap Avenue and drive around through the town. Sorry about the inconvenience.”

Jonny, his eyes alight with excitement, pushed past me and asked, “What are you doing? What
kind
of test?”

In the center of the road was a small console on a metal stand. Sprouting from the console was a nest of black and red wires connected to a black box and running across the ground. The wires led to the pond, and from there they dis-appeared underwater. I guessed they were connected to what appeared to be a small boat. The boat was heavily anchored—we could see the ropes—and inside the boat was a silver tube lying on its side, about the size of a small water heater, with a metal bell at one end and a cone on the other.

“Jonny,” I said, ignoring his enthusiasm, “how many times have I told you not to interrupt when adults are talking?”

“But, Dad . . .”

“Don't argue. These people are busy, and we need to get out of their way.”

The Chinese gentleman smiled. “It's quite all right. We're
never
too busy for curious children. My name is Han-woo,” he said, extending a hand toward Jonny. “And who are you?”

“My name is Jonathan, but people call me Jonny. This is my big sister, Ruth, and my little sister, Sarah. I call her ‘Sorry' though.”

“Sorry?” Han-wu asked.

“Yeah, because she's always saying, ‘I'm Sorry.' Like the time she broke open a pen to find out where the ink was coming from. It made such a mess, we had to replace our sofa and the carpet.”

Sarah laughed and said, “I'm Sorry!”

Ruth added, “Then there was the time she tried to wash the cat—except she couldn't find the soap, so she used Vaseline instead.”

“Vaseline?” exclaimed Han-wu.

“Yes,
Vaseline
, a whole jumbo-sized jar of it! By the time she finished, the cat was so slippery it took us a week to catch it. Then it took another month to wash out the Vaseline. You can't imagine how hard it is to wash a wet, oily cat.”

“I'm Sorry!” Sarah giggled.

“Oh, sure, you're
Sorry
,” said her mother. “Like the time you wanted to see what would happen if you put marshmal-lows in the clothes dryer.”

“Or when you jumped out of the baptistery closet during Communion and Mr. Gray dumped an entire tray of grape juice cups all over Mrs. Larson's new white dress,” Jonny said.

“I'm Sorry! I'm Sorry!
I'm Sorry!
” Sarah said, taking a bow.

Han-wu and his team laughed. “I guess we shouldn't turn our backs on you or maybe
we'll
be Sorry—you think so?”

Sarah nodded vigorously. “I'm trouble, that's for sure! Just ask my dad.”

I agreed wholeheartedly. Sarah had gotten herself into all kinds of crazy situations in the ten short years since she was born. She was aptly named. I had named her Sarah after the wife of Abraham. The Old Testament Sarah was famous as the mother of Isaac and the grandmother of Israel, but she was also famous for laughing at God. There were times when I wondered if God wasn't laughing at
Sarah
. She could be hilariously funny—and impossibly infuriating—at the same time.

Then there was Jonathan, named after the son of King Saul, also from the Old Testament. As a king, Saul was a disappointment; but his son Jonathan was a hero. Since Jonathan was my first and only son, I dreamed that maybe someday
he'd
do some-thing heroic. I had no great ambitions for myself except to be the pastor of a small congregation. That was enough for me.