The Explorer’s Club

I could have been born in Canada, but the family cleaved the space between wars. In the smelter’s shadow the grass bled arsenic the day great grandpa was born. The mines didn’t stop for VE day, but he did.He shot out of that shaft like an artillery shell into the Bismarck Sea of Papua New Guinea chasing phantom u-boats smuggling Kaiser gold. Children spilled out from his wake like bills from a getaway car. One dream ended, one war began.His father, grain alcohol, and the hardy boys convinced grandpa Nazi gold was everywhere. He turned Lugers into divining rods, magnetized his tugboat, held a seance with an madame medium hoping to interrogate the ghost of some admiral who’d slam his spectral fist on a nautical chart.I was born between recurring dreams - of children finding fathers finding treasure. Dad kept the tugboat - uncle Diego tugged the medium and my three Aunts mixedreading and drinking into glory. They wrotelike hapa Hemingways, under pseudonyms, under their dad’s names, if…