I drove northwest from the square, tailing a station wagon with two bicycles affixed to the top. At some point the wagon pulled off and I followed signs to a trailhead. I set out, hands in pockets. The path was deserted but for a few runners and one old woman walking her regal husky.

Above, a flutter of warbling birds flapped together, then suddenly split apart, disturbed by something I couldn’t discern. The husky barked. And soon, I found myself on a ridge overlooking the splay of the North Georgia mountains, those rich evergreen summits that rolled out into distant blue shapes just shades away from the sky. Runners’ voices echoed behind me, but I couldn’t make out their words. Cotton ball clouds ringed the higher peaks.

Below plunged the valley, the state sinking low and deep. Through the trees came an interrupting vein of murky water. A river—perhaps one where, as in the American and the Yuba, someone waded two hundred years ago, caught a bounty in his hands, shouted, Gold, gold, gold in the river, shouted something about the American promise, and intoxicated the world.

I squatted low on the trail so that the river bled out of view, becoming just a ropy shape hanging between the trees. I knelt, teetering on the precipice, gravity threatening, and dropped my head as in accidental prayer. My vision was filled half by the dimming blue sky and half by the trees blooming verdant before autumn’s hot flare-ups, before winter’s dulling.

I still want, sometimes, to stand in front of time, to dam it up, halt or reroute its current. But as I pressed myself to that earth, I thought about Anjali Joshi shrinking under the weight of time and Anita beginning to grow larger in it and me, about to take some important strides toward a tomorrow that had long seemed elusive, and I thought that perhaps all this was good, or at least natural. Because I suspect that if I were to change the past, I would have to trace its river back to its primordial estuaries, to some place where all desire began, to the universe before neutron stars rained gold onto Earth. I don’t think I would find, even in those elemental waters, the pure beginning of history, but instead the future already rising up, silt and gold and sweat, slicking across the surface of the water like oil and then drifting on.

Acknowledgments

I owe many thanks. Here are some. To Gita Krishnankutty, for the literary genes.

To Andrew Ridker, who believed in Gold Diggers first and fervently. Without his wisdom and friendship, it would not exist. To Ayana Mathis, for lending her considerable intelligence to an early draft. To Gold Diggers’ other pivotal readers: Lee Cole, Pooja Bhatia, Sarah Thankam Mathews, and Wes Williams. To Janelle Effiwatt, who lived with and tended to this book, too. To Charlie D’Ambrosio, for pointing to where the story lay.