Back in 1990, Dan O’Neill and I produced the first issue of The Wild Dog, a four-page supplement in the Nevada City alternative paper, Community Endeavor. The paper was commissioned and paid for by Duane Sandin to tell his story of being persecuted by the state and local governments. (If you want to know more about that, you’ll have to read my graphic autobiography, Scablands.) Duane’s story filled the first three pages, and Dan supplied the fourth, reproduced here. It is a true story told by one of the concrete truck drivers on his deathbed. (They were all sworn to silence by their employer.) It was estimated that almost 5000 gallons of gasoline poured down the ravine into the old mineshaft, but Caltrans covered their tracks, quite literally. We thought that the story would spark outrage in the community, but no one seemed to care. Maybe it was because it was a cartoon, and people thought it was made up. Well, here it is again, if anyone’s interested…
I hope nobody drills a water well in that area.
Was this an actual rumor/ story? I can see how local and state governments don’t like the cartoonist rabble rousing people from their slumber with how dangerous governments are by exposing what they hide from the people.
Have as anyone else noticed that the more information the people know the more pissed off at the system they get? No wonder we are taught to not ask questions and to be content going through life blissfully ignorant.
Sorry Bob,
I skipped the line where you said it is a true story.
One of these days, the cart-pulling critters they left down there, which have since morphed into bulging-eyed, gas-soaked albinos with rat-eating teeth, will surface again, plunging nighttime Gold Country into terror, and turning the flashlight wars of our youth into a grizzly reality.
Gas shaft lake; take it easy, small mistake.