Big Imaginations: How to Start a Business without Really Trying

By Pam Jung

What sort of dreams — or trouble — can two cohousers create? Well . . .

The day after Wolf Creek Lodge’s monthly meeting in June, Suzanne Marriott and I decided to play tourist at Grass Valley’s gorgeous and historic Empire Mine State Park, a gold rush era processing gold mine. While traipsing around the verdant lawns, hundred year old trees and solid, European looking stone cottages, I kept up a chatter about all the things I had learned over my twenty years of coming to this park, hoping that my out-of-town friend and fellow cohouser would be fascinated — after all, most folks can’t seem to get enough of gold country lore, past, present and future. (Yes, we are still discovering gold in Nevada County. The newspaper reported last year the largest gold nugget find by a guy rooting around in his backyard. Hearts throughout the county fluttered with the hope of a similar find.)

Well, turns out Suzanne was much more interested in the names of flowers and trees as she admired the many roses in bloom and feasted her eyes on the magnificent expanses of lush green lawns. “Well,” said I, “I know something about these things, too — like the rocks used in the construction of the houses came from the mine itself, and the trees are second growth because the miners used all of the existing trees to stoke their smelting furnaces, hold up their mining tunnels, and rebuild their towns when they burned down.”

Just as I was about to drop another historical pearl, Suzanne said, out of the blue, “I know what you could do when you retire. You could be a tour guide! Yes, that’s it, a perfect fit.”

I snickered, I laughed, I may even have blushed. Then my brain snapped to. Well, I’ve done everything else. Why not? And what fun — squiring a flock of Red Hats around historical buildings, a group of Japanese tourists to a swimming hole on the Yuba River, or some Reno natives to Hot Summer Nights, Nevada City style, in July.

I came to as Suzanne was suggesting that she act as trip photographer, documenting the great escapades we’d go on and, as a secondary stream of income, selling prints to the adventurers — prints with a couple of speckles of fool’s gold (pyrite) glued to them for effect. “Oh, what a great idea!” I cried. “Think of the money we’ll make, the people we’ll meet, the fun we’ll have.” Oops, maybe we’re getting carried away here. We exchanged sly smiles. “What shall we call our new business?”

Laughing heartily at our flights of fancy, we exited the park and went on our way, two like-minded cohousers stirring the pot a little. What will we think of next? I don’t know about Suzanne, but I can just see the headline: Nevada County Tour Group Leaders Discover World’s Biggest Gold Nugget.

For more information on the Empire Mines, visit http://www.empiremine.org/