Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

Dad’s voice came soothing and calm, the rhythm of his words lulling me into the first brain slowing down stages of sleep.

“Once upon a time in 795 AD, Vikings invaded Ireland and looted and plundered as they pleased, then buried their spoils and gold treasures all over the countryside…”

I loved listening to his voice, always uplifting and assuring, as if to say, no matter what happens, a story of the long past would make it all better. And it usually did.

During the day, Dad worked in the goldmines of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and always delighted us at night with stories of ‘finding gold treasures’.

Sometimes it would be a fairytale, sometimes it was a real story of what happened that day underground. 

A miners life underground was no joke, he used to say. And it’s definitely not for sissies (weak ones). By the time I was seven, I could easily explain the workings of a goldmine.

From Dad I learned how extracting gold was a laborious, time consuming process with many steps and anyone who found gold per happenstance as a treasure as told in the fairytales by merely ‘looking’ or ‘whishing’ for it, seemed unreal to me and simply a foolish, uneducated notion. 

But I listened attentively to the fairy tale stories, just perhaps I was wrong, listening closely for some clues, because I always wanted to dissect something into its smaller or individual parts before simply believing it.

When Dad took me with him to the mines to show how it all worked, I remembered thinking that finding gold on your own was almost impossible. It would involve a lot of people and a whole bunch of preparation steps, accompanied by blood sweat and tears… and time.

I remember how he would remove his hard hat, wipe the sweat from his brow that carved deep lines through the dust cakes on his face, and then suddenly break a smile, make a joke and simply carry on, as if it was nothing at all. 

My Dad was a master of creating an illusion. The illusion that he was okay, that everything was okay. Which at times it wasn’t. Far from it in fact. 

Dad wanted to be a farmer, not a miner, the choice already made long ago when growing up on a farm. The love for earth, animals and the freedom he thought it contained, was one of the things that kept him going. But he never made it to the farm.

During the years when gold prices slumped, or when the input costs became simply too high, and the mines were not earning enough to keep everyone on payroll, the sadness of losing friends and their families potentially going hungry made my dad deeply emotional. He often spilled tears of empathy and guilt, because he still had a job where others didn’t.

With a cracked voice he would say…“In die sweet van ons aangesig, sal ons, ons brood verdien,” (meaning, through the sweat on our brow, we will earn our bread). Then he would utter a laugh that did not always reach his eyes. 

But most of the time that smile did, and he would recite a poem learnt from his days at primary school, or sing ‘Fly me to the moon’ which my mother played for him on the piano to lessen the blow and tension of their unfulfilled dreams.

‘Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars, let me see what spring is like, on Jupiter and Mars…’ my Dad and mom would sing together sometimes. Mom always wanted to be an opera singer, and the best that transpired from that dream was to sing with my Dad.

Bart Howard took 20 years to write this love song for his partner, a song that captured the essence of romance and the yearning for adventures. At its core, it was about the desire to escape the mundane and soar into the unknown, hand in hand with a beloved. 

Frank Sinatra made it famous and he became part of my childhood memories as one of the people who saved Dad.

Singing and reciting poems were my Dad’s way to cope with the endless toil of digging for that highly prized (and priced) gold in hardy, dusty, filthy conditions underground, conditions very few people would believe of what sacrifices it actually took to dig for the gold that shone on their fingers – digging for it, and actually full well knowing you’ll never own it yourself.

To find very valid reasons for coping, keep on digging, and doing it day after day after day like my Dad and his co-workers all in the same boat, where your heart and dreams actually laid elsewhere, one had to dig very very deep into your own soul.

The song continued… ‘Fill my heart with song, let me sing forever more, you are all I long for, all I worship and adore.’

Were the words for my mother? Or the outcry for a farm and freedom from this struggle? 

I cringed and forced my thoughts back to his voice, telling the story of the gold pot at the end of the rainbow… 

‘Once upon a time in 795 AD, Vikings invaded Ireland and looted and plundered as they pleased, then buried their spoils and gold treasures across the countryside.’

‘When the Vikings eventually left the Irish Emerald Isle, they left behind some of their stolen gold… which the leprechauns found,’ my Dad said with big eyes to create more drama.

‘In order to ensure no humans could take what they now considered their gold, the leprechauns reburied it in pots deep underground all over the island so no human could ever find it – which actually made them no better than the Vikings,’ Dad added with a wink and a smirk. ‘Worse in fact, as they just took it, the Vikings at least put up a fight for it.’

‘The leprechauns were water spirit fairies called luchorpán who took the form of a tiny bearded old man, often depicted in Irish lore wearing a coat, cocked hat and leather apron.’ 

Solitary by nature, they lived in remote places and made shoes and brogues, but the sound of their hammering betrayed their presence. If captured and threatened with bodily violence, they might, if their captor kept eyes on them, reveal the hiding places of the pots of gold.

‘Why would they make shoes and brogues if they had enough gold?’ I wondered.

‘Hmm good question. Why would I dig for gold, if I am not the one who will ever own it?’ 

I was not sure if he asked me or just himself. I kept quiet.

He paused a bit, thought for a while then said, ‘Maybe because they had no use for it. Maybe they knew it was never theirs for the taking even though it was buried in their backyard.’

‘Because it belonged to the Vikings?’

‘No, the Vikings stole it from the Irish.’

‘So it belonged to the Irish.’

‘Yes.’

‘So why not give it back? What good did it do in the ground?’

Dad thought about it, then shrugged, ‘Maybe it was more fun hiding it from explorers.’

‘Like who?’ I wondered out loud.

‘Everybody. Us humans love adventures and exploring. But there have been many treasure hunters for centuries, most notably those looking for the El Dorado gold city, somewhere in the Americas. The city had a Golden King, the tribal chief of the Muisca people of Altiplano Cundiboyacense in Colombia.’

‘Each new king, as an initiation rite, covered himself with gold dust and was placed on a raft. At his feet his people placed a great heap of gold and emeralds for him to offer to the gods, by throwing it into the lake. In the raft with him went four principal subject chiefs, decked in plumes, crowns, bracelets, pendants and earrings, all of gold.’ 

‘Everybody searched for these gold treasures and the city made of gold as the legend tells, but till this day it was never found.

I frowned. Still not understanding why everybody wanted gold.

Dad carried on with the leprechaun story…

Since leprechaun were water fairies, they were the ones who coloured rain drops into such a beautiful spectrum of colours and light of a rainbow. Over time it was said, whenever rainbows appeared, there where the end of any rainbow touched the earth, some leprechaun’s pot of gold was buried. 

‘A rainbow is a spectrum of light that appears in the sky in a half circle when sunlight is refracted through raindrops or other drops of moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere. It is composed of seven colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet,’ explained my Dad. 

‘I know dad,’ I giggled, but listened regardless, as he carried on, lost in his own explanation that almost came as a contemplation.

This rainbow is caused by light being refracted when entering a droplet of water, then reflected inside on the back of the droplet and refracted again when leaving it.

In a double rainbow, a second arc is seen outside the primary arc, and has the order of its colours reversed, with red on the inner side of the arc. This is caused by the light being reflected twice on the inside of the droplet before leaving it.

‘But rainbows seem to move farther away when moving closer to them, because the rainbow will shift in response to your motion. Each person at each unique location sees their own individual rainbow,’ Dad paused… Then asked, 

‘So what’s the moral of the story?

I thought a bit, not always knowing what the right answers should be, then said, ‘There is no moral. It’s just a story,’ I giggled, and Dad chuckled with me, then said:

Rainbows do not have an end because they are not an arch with two ends. Rainbows are actually full 360-degree circles, which we can normally only see when we are very high up in the air, in a plane, or on a mountain, or from space.’

The arch shape is only an illusion as viewed from standing on the ground and the other half is cut off by the horizon. They called it a glory, which NASA defined as an optical phenomenon that looks like small, circular rainbows of interlocking colours.’

‘So what’s the moral of the story now?’ Dad persisted.

‘That a rainbow is a full circle,’ I answered hesitantly, again not always sure of the right answer.

‘Yes,’ Dad said in delight.

Some people use the metaphor of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – to mean as something they really want to have or achieve. Finding the pot of gold would feel like the realisation of hopes and dreams. Coming full circle.

‘The pot of gold doesn’t exist,’ Dad warned. ‘You must find a way to be happy wherever you are, and with what you have, because finding gold is very very hard work and you may never find it, but you can be happy every day while digging for it.’

‘Or steal it,’ I joked in reference to the Vikings.

‘Or steal it, yes,’ he smiled. ‘If you want to deal with the consequences.’

Dad always had something more profound to tell at the end of each of his stories. As if there was always something more to life than just the obvious, which there were of course.

Later in life I thought that it was one of the biggest lessons that shaped me, to be rational, even if you are prone to be lured by dreams, to always check yourself and be realistic, be logical.

I’m not sure it was a good thing though, because it often made me cynical, clinical, abstract and too unromantic, unproachable even, sometimes even unlovable, I was too harsh and straight to the point.

Our life growing up was a constant struggle to survive while Dad was digging for that gold in the mines. Not a struggle by the lack of that gold, but by the brutal honesty of what life showed us growing up with a mother who was schizophrenic, and Dad ignoring the part he played in her unhappiness.

Regardless of a happy life or an unhappy one, the search for gold continues… because gold has visual beauty and the idea of having it, a magnetic appeal, that appeal that signifies something more, an aspiration maybe? Or an ideal?

Gold had and still does of course, a prominent position throughout the ages as a highly coveted, worshipped material, durable and noncorrosive. It is a medium of exchange, and a store of value and investment.

Gold has been a symbol of divinity, luxury, royalty, majesty, wealth, power, success, achievement, triumph, good omens, prestige, prosperity. To own it, gave confidence, high social status, true sense of material property, freedom, future financial security, feeling of abundance, and style.

In today’s modern world, it has established a direct link to protect electronic money and paper currencies in case of widespread economic disruptions, inflation, hyperinflation, recessions, and business uncertainties.

But it was rare and very difficult to extract, and thus, synonymous with power.

Gold is powerful, because having it distinguishes you from the masses.

As are fairytale stories, they have power, because they capture people’s imaginations. Which again are mere illusions and empty dreams.

Telling stories become rituals for humans in searching for something, it could be gold, romance, love, self actualisation, courage. These searching rituals become habits, habits become your reality … and you just keep on searching.