There’s little point in looking for us in an atlas. Aurum Colorado doesn’t even rate a tiny dot. At least not in any of the maps that I’ve looked at. Aurum of course means gold. We’re in Moffat County on Highway 40 roughly midway between Craig and Dinosaur and a little west of Maybell. No! I kid you not! I did say Dinosaur. It’s about 45 miles to the west of us near the border with Utah. At least that’s on the map! Craig’s the same distance the other way. Craig’s the bigger of the two, nearly 10,000, and the county seat. Dinosaur has about 500. From our name you’ll guess that we’re a mining settlement. Actually, an ex-mining settlement but I’ll tell you more about that later. We’re one of the hundreds in this great land of ours that boomed to later go bust. But, better than most, we haven’t disappeared.

Work started here after the second world war. Gold prices were high and it seemed that the good days were going to last forever. Permanent buildings were erected. All of them company buildings, company housing. Who else would build out here? The mine lasted up until the late nineties. Yields gradually dropped. Then breaks in the main veins were reached, an earth fault, and their continuation could not be found. Suddenly the mine and its infrastructure was at give-away prices. There seemed to be no reason for a continued existence here. Why would anyone want to stay? My parents were among the few who did. Unlike most mining sites, Aurum has the advantage of proximity to a reasonably busy highway.

I was brought up in Aurum. Did my early schooling here. It’s not a place that would suit everyone. North-west Colorado, as you may know, is high desert and since our neighbour Maybell holds the record for the state’s lowest temperature, minus 61 degrees, you’ll get some inkling of what it can be like here in winter. You have to be born here or be a hunter. It’s hunting heaven. We have elk, deer, and antelope. Plenty of other wild-life too.

In the early days, we didn’t have any television and only a half-way decent radio reception and that only at night. We are hemmed in by hills. No video recorders then of course. We did, though, have films in the recreation hall on Saturday nights. A serial—Captain Marvel—Flash Gordon— The Shadow—shorts, cartoons, and the main picture. We had just one projector so there were breaks with the lights on to change reels, a swell of conversation, a few quick drags for the addicts. They wouldn’t allow smoking while the film was running.

The hall was the hub of the settlement. It had a good kitchen, a pool table. It was used for indoor bowls, card evenings, parties, concerts, the women used it during the day for whatever women meet for, and on the occasional Sunday we’d have a Reverend in from somewhere to hold a service. One week we had David Timmins, our own David Timmins. He was even then becoming widely known as Pastor Timmins though I’m not sure that he has any real theological qualifications. I did hear that he had attended a Baptist seminary further south but left after a couple of semesters. About the time that he began to claiming a special calling from God.

He was introduced by the lesser pastor who had conducted the warm-up. A warm-up because it was being televised and, qualified or not, David made a sensation with most of us. Perhaps that was because we’d been pre-conditioned by his fame. Our local boy was getting national exposure as the rising star of television evangelism.

He needed a large crew. And trucks! There was lighting gear—sound gear—the large dolly- mounted cameras that you’ll remember from those days—the generator truck needed to run everything—they wouldn’t trust the mine plant—the recording truck with its monitors and Ampex recorders. Floor managers to orchestrate everything. Operators moving around wearing headsets while remaining unseen. Setting-up took much longer than David’s actual sermon and the warm-up. Several days in fact. And we, his audience, were carefully instructed as to how we must act: to ignore everything going on around us. This was television production, there were locality shots, and all to show a wider audience Pastor David’s humble origins and prove his basic humility. And, when everything was ready to go, the leading-man, David, turned up in his black Lincoln Continental for the final script conference.

I may be a cynic but, as I watched his performance, I couldn’t help thinking of Jesus standing on that small hill to be heard by the crowd. Even I can remember much of what was said on that occasion. And he didn’t need any of this. Yet his words have etched themselves into men’s minds.

Painting David as humble was surely hypocritical unless this was some new David and not the David Timmins that I remember. The me-first, know-it-all, put-his-peers-down David who was so skilled at turning an innocent face to adults. I had real difficulty in believing in this sanitized, vitamin-enriched version.

We didn’t see ourselves on television. As I said, we had no television signal at the time. Now-a- days we have a satellite dish on every roof but there were no satellites back then. Yet, after the big event, we had to have television like everybody else. We had mine engineers, men with technical knowledge, so why not? The solution was to find a place where there was enough signal, up on one of the hills, and feed it down to the settlement. At first the company was unwilling to pay but there was enough interest for a community project. Television had become a necessity.

We put up a large diamond-shaped wire antenna on the far slope of one of the hills with its long axis pointing toward Denver, the nearest city, 175 miles away. A rhomboid I think they called it. Anyway it had to be big to pick up plenty of the by-then weak signal. The signal was amplified and sent down to us on a thing called a G-line. Everybody pitched in, teen-agers too, digging holes, erecting poles. In the settlement, distribution was done on the existing utilities poles and by then the company had seen the wisdom of coming to the party. They paid for the distribution amplifier. They were finding it increasingly hard to hire workers.

We could receive only two channels with any degree of clarity and one of them carried ‘David Timmin’s Chapel of Faith’ on Sunday mornings. I should think that everybody here if not on shift watched it since he was our boy, our prophet. But not me. His ministry was of the ‘Claim Your Miracle’ type and ran at fever pitch. God was the magic genie who just longed to grant your every wish. And underlying everything was the plug for contributions to reach the unsaved. Meaning more stations, more air time. Many here gave on a regular basis seeing themselves as having a part in God’s work.

With the advent of television, the closeness of our community seemed to wither and community is important when you’re a bit distant from the benefits of civilization. It wasn’t just that the Saturday movies ceased for lack of interest. Everything seemed to change. We stopped being one big family. Some moved their families to Craig and only came out to work their shift leaving a few empty houses. The money here was still better than most. What was meant to keep us together had had the opposite effect.

That’s years ago now. The mine continued to operate. It had some good years but they became fewer and coming on the earth fault that had moved the veins spelled an end. They made several new adits in an attempt to find the veins again but without success.

Now here’s the interesting part. A worthless mine and a worthless settlement and David Timmins bought them at a fire sale price and put in a manager. His publicists did their best to let the whole world know of his altruism, his love for this place and its people. And it is true that his takeover has provided continued employment but the little devil inside me laughs at the talk of altruism and insists that he saw the opportunity to make a buck. It asks why we’ve only seen him back here on that one occasion now so long ago.

We have become a tourist mine. We are actors in Hollywood miners’ garb. Whiskers are the norm. We have a museum cum gift shop where visitors can buy quartz ornaments, paperweights and such, with minute flecks of gold. And it’s real gold but we buy them in from elsewhere. For the more adventurous we have mine tours, safety talks first stressing the extreme danger, a helmet with a light for everyone, sharp little hammers so that they can chip off anything that takes their fancy. There is still a little gold there but not in payable amounts. Enough to keep the rubes happy though. To make it more exciting there is the creaking of overloaded props, the sound of distant rockfalls,and the various other deep-earth sounds, and all of them real. Except that they are recorded and issue from concealed loudspeakers. The mine is really ultra safe, it’s over-propped, and well lighted. It needs to be for insurance purposes. But people like to have a little scare. And we have a gas station on the highway with miner-garbed pump attendants and an attached diner serving supposed miners’ staples. We really should be ashamed of ourselves.

But talking about being ashamed, you’ll have noticed that our David Timmins has come unstuck, found to have visited a male prostitute for the last three years. And this from the man who preached so strongly against homosexuality. He’s claiming it was only for massage and never for sex. But this Jason Green, the prostitute, says that David regularly asked for and was given methamphetamine. David says that he always threw it away. He is playing up contrition, reproducing Jim Bakker’s flood of tears on cue, but actually admits to nothing. He is apologizing only for acting without thinking in circumstances that might allow some people to jump to the wrong conclusions and be hurt. He has stood down as the senior pastor of the mega-church that he established but continues to draw his $300,000-a-year salary.

I cannot understand how he could have expected to hide anything in his fishbowl although that seems to be the norm with these people. This man Jason saw the man he’d known as ‘Alf’ on a news program hobnobbing with the President no less. Things had only lasted as long as they had because Jason has carefully avoided religious programming. Who can blame him? Seeing David on the day’s news made him realised that he had a very saleable story.

And yet I’m sure that David will be back on screen and coast to coast before long. There have been so many who have been caught out and bounced back again. You name it, they’ve done it. Adultery, used male and female prostitutes, committed fraud, used drugs, misused contributions, faked healings, used tiny in-ear radios to receive prayer-card information ‘direct from The Lord’. I’m told that at least a dozen top televangelists have been seriously compromised and yet successfully rehabilitated. The route back is well sign-posted.

And it’s important to a lot of people that David does come back. He’s a real money spinner and this is a business. Millions of dollars are involved. David has 350 employees and that doesn’t include us here at Aurum. I expect that he’ll be laundered and repolished. Soon thereafter, everyone in the data bank will get a ‘personal’ letter in simulated handwriting and those who can least afford it will go back to making down-payments on their salvation.

What on earth is wrong with us? This great country of ours has any number of world-recognised Bible scholars. Sound–godly–men. BUT!!

We don’t read their works.–We don’t pay them any attention at all.

We reckon on marching into heaven with the medicine-show that’s led by our favourite snake-oil

salesman.