Hot diggity

Author: By Ralph Jimenez, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 25, 1996

Page: M1

Section: Travel

We were a father-and-son team prospecting in Arkansas's Arkansas' Crater of Diamonds State Park -- the only diamond mine on the continent open to the public.

Since 1906 when farmer John Huddleston plucked the first one from the soil, more than 70,000 diamonds have been discovered at the mine. The average find is roughly the size of a matchhead match head and worth perhaps a few hundred dollars. But this is the place that produced the Star of Arkansas, the Amarillo Starlight and Uncle Sam, at 40.23 carats, the largest diamond ever discovered in North America.

The state purchased the mine in 1972. Now, for $4 a day ($1.50 for children), anyone can hunt for diamonds in the park, and the rule is finders-keepers.

We knew that amateurs like us have found rocks worth five and six figures. Not often maybe, but it's happened. But it wasn't simply greed that brought us to Murfreesboro, Arkansas, a town of 1,500 about halfway between President Bill Clinton's birthplace of Hope and his boyhood home of Hot Springs. Credit cheap air fares and the romance of the stone.

When adults think of diamonds, they think of weddings, Elizabeth Taylor and Tiffany's. When young boys think of diamonds, they think of Superman. Our son, Nick, spent most of his third year in a Superman costume. His eyes would sparkle whenever Superman placed a simple lump of coal in his palm and squeezed it into a diamond. For his fifth birthday, I bought 200 cheap rhinestones from a jewelry supply house and scattered them on the beach before the children arrived for the party.

So it was my fault, now that he's 10, that I found myself slogging 60-pound buckets of yellow Arkansas clay across a broiling field to where Nick could wash the dirt in search of diamonds.

Ordinarily, an expedition like this would have remained in the column labeled ``things to do someday.'' But airlines work in mysterious ways. For reasons a friendly travel agent couldn't explain, the $578 round-trip flight from Boston to Little Rock was, for a limited time only, on sale for $158. There was only one catch. We had to leave on a Saturday and return on a Monday or Tuesday.

We spent Saturday night in Hot Springs, a historic resort town where practically everybody seemed to know Clinton personally. Since our deal with Nick's principal called for this to be an educational outing, we visited Clinton's boyhood homes -- the local park service office provides a handy map to them.

We also toured the exhibits at Hot Springs National Park. The park and the old bathhouses where presidents, mobsters and the glamoratti of the flapper era came to soak in the therapeutic waters occupy much of the city's downtown.

Everywhere we went, we asked about diamonds. Cissy Elmore, the desk clerk at our motel, was enthusiastic. ``They really do find diamonds there,'' she said. ``Most of the time it's after a severe storm that washes the [fragments] away. I've got $8,000 or $10,000 worth of stones from there, but I only get to go look a few times a year.''

At the Perry Plaza Motel whose pool Roger and Bill Clinton sneaked into for late-night swims, owner Gaile Rudaitis also brought up the link between diamonds and rain.

If it stays dry, they will be tough to find, she said. ``But if you don't have any luck, go to the crystal mine. Everybody goes home with something from the crystal mine.''

But we'd come for diamonds. So with Nick serving his first stint as navigator, we went southwest out of Hot Springs to Murfreesboro some 80 miles away. When we weren't rhapsodizing about the huge diamonds soon to be ours, we read the names on signs out loud -- ``Little Debbie's Auto Sales''; ``Ozark Annie's Gift Shop''; ``The Wild Hog Barbecue''; and, our favorite, a sign that said simply ``Feed and Video Store.''

``Maybe there will be a tornado and we'll be the first people there after it hits. I'll bet then we find 500 diamonds,'' Nick said hopefully.

This part of Arkansas looked as if it were all built between 1948 and 1962. Cows grazed in the fields behind modest ranch homes on rural roads with red-dirt shoulders.

Murfreesboro is a dry town of 1,500 souls in a dry county. Save for a rock shop or two and the Queen of Diamonds Motel, where a room for two is $50, it didn't seem as though living near a diamond mine guaranteed prosperity. Yet the sign at Miner's Camping & Rock Shop offered a ``free genuine diamond to our campers.''

``My wife and I have found 70 just raking the leaves right out there,'' said Chuck Goodin, the campground's owner.

Some miners stay at motels, but most camp. A tent site in the state park was $13 per night, hot showers included. As we pulled into the parking lot, the siren that signals a diamond find heralded another score.

You can learn a lot about diamonds in the park's visitor center. We skipped it that afternoon. The diamond mine closes at 6 p.m. Armed with garden trowels and rock hammers, we practically ran out to seek our fortune.

The ``crater of diamonds'' turned out to be a 35-acre field of dreams. The volcanic blast that hurled the diamonds to the surface 95 million years ago was so powerful that it left no telltale cinder cone. Members of the park staff plow deep furrows in the field monthly to expose new soil for searchers.

For the next hour, we beat on cementlike clods of clay and diamond-bearing lava called kimberlite with hammers and scratched in the dirt with the trowels. Park officials say more than 1,000 diamonds are reported in most years. The actual take, though, is likely far higher, although a park sign informs visitors that the IRS will not tax your find until you sell it.

Dissillusioned and badly in need of advice, we struck up a conversation with a guy in high rubber boots and long rubber gloves. He was Tom Suboski, a 58-year-old retired corporate manager from Michigan who flies his own plane to the park to prospect. Suboski was wet-screening, shaking soil through a succession of smaller gauge sieves held underwater at the park's washing stations.

``Once you find your first diamond, you'll know in an instant and never again mistake it for quartz,'' said Suboski. The diamonds could be brown, yellow, white, black or champagne-colored, but all have an oily sheen -- a greasy look that Suboski said prevents dirt from sticking to them.

``One out of every 6 million particles dug here is a diamond, or so the books say,'' he said. ``This method accounts for about 98 percent of the finds.''

He flipped the fine-meshed screen upside down on the table and peered at multicolored stones the size of big sand. ``The mineral to watch for is peridot, the dark green stuff,'' he said. ``Diamonds are always associated with peridot.''

A few minutes later, he called me over. ``See if you can find the diamond in there,'' Suboski said. I picked the tiny gem out of the pile of wet stones on my second try. When Suboski looked at it through his magnifying glass, however, he burst out laughing.

``It's already faceted. It's a diamond from somebody's ring,'' he said. It was Suboski's third diamond of the week. ``But if I were doing this for the money, I'd've starved to death long ago,'' he said. ``I guess I'm just a hunter by nature. I love the process of hunting and finding.''

After dinner, we read about diamonds by lantern light and hoped for rain. Another father-and-son team was camped next to us on a site strung with muliticolored Christmas tree lights. The father, a wiry man with long gold and silver hair, introduced himself as Don DeNiri of Tucson and Woodstock, N.Y.

One more diamond and he and his 14-year-old son, Duke, would have paid for their six-week stay in a leaky tent in the diamond fields and have a grubstake to see them into a summer in Woodstock, Don said.

His son was a Huck Finn kind of boy who preferred poker, home schooling and prospecting to the travails of junior high school. ``We froze our butts off for the first month,'' Duke said. ``But we always find diamonds when it rains. When you find a diamond, it's like winning the Super Bowl.''

There are 100 points in a carat and 5 carats in a gram. The DeNiri team had found a one-carat stone and a 30-pointer.

``The big one had a little occlusion in it, but we still got $260 for it and $325 for the smaller ones,'' Don DeNiri said. We sold them to a guy on his way to Alaska who was traveling with six coffee cans filled with gold nuggets.''

In the morning, we abandoned the useless rock hammers and for a very modest fee rented a small shovel, a large bucket and a set of three graduated sieves. Tom's mining lesson had left us optimistic. But the drudgery of digging and screening soon had us punchy.

``Nobody's going to put anything over on Fred C. Dobbs,'' I said, a la Humphrey Bogart in ``Treasure of the Sierra Madre'' as I chased Nick through the field. ``I know you're holding out on me. You've found some.''

Every time frustration brought us to the brink of quitting, we heard another diamond yarn.

``I've been doing this for five years, and I'm closing in on 200 now,'' said Richard Cooper, a retired logger from Locksburg, Ark. Cooper was knee-deep in a rapidly growing hole, yet he somehow managed to keep his white T-shirt clean. ``You can generally figure about a thousand dollars a carat, though some go a lot higher if they're perfect,'' Cooper said.

``How come everybody but us finds diamonds,'' Nick said.

Another prospector pointed to a man slowly raking dirt on a hillside. ``That's the guy that reported the 31-point brown yesterday,'' he said.

Rod Walker, a 48-year-old Houston man on his second visit to the crater, was happy to show off his small brown diamond. ``I didn't even know it was a diamond when I took it,'' he said. ``They told me that it was a diamond at the visitors' center.''

We returned to the search after lunch, but the storm we had wished for arrived. Save when bolts of lightning lit the field, it was too dark to see a dime, let alone a diamond. Even Don and Duke, who were dressed in slickers and rubber boots, gave up. ``We need one more big one but we've got another day to find it,'' Don said.

We waited, but the storm stuck fast, forcing our hand. The sure-thing crystal mine was 100 miles away in the direction of the airport, where our flight left at 1 the following afternoon.

We could stay, hunt for diamonds in the morning and sprint to the airport. But that meant no crystals, I told Nick. Reluctantly, we decided that a crystal in hand was worth two diamonds in the dirt.

Back in Little Rock, a hot shower and a platter of barbecue at Stubby's, a local landmark where a heaping plate of mixed ribs, chicken and beef cost $9.95, almost cured our diamond fever.

In the morning, we drove to Ron Coleman's Crystal Mines 14 miles north of Hot Springs. The whole way, Nick took great delight in pointing out that virtually all the traffic, including a Terminix man with a 5-foot plastic termite on the roof of his car, was headed in the opposite direction.

``They're all going to get diamonds,'' Nick said. ``Don and Duke are just walking around filling their pockets about now.''

We only had an hour left to make our fortune when we arrived at the big open pit whose perfect quartz crystals went into thousands of radios. The mine reserves the best for itself, but for $20 a day, visitors can take all they want of the tailings. Because we only had an hour to spare, the mine's manager kindly halved the entrance fee.

Save for two New Age prospectors who discussed the healing properties of every crystal they found, we were alone on the huge pile of mine tailings. Rock crystals washed clean by the rain shone in pale sunlight. We halffilled a 5-gallon pail with crystals, including a single point weighing three pounds. At rock shop prices, we had harvested a small fortune.

Yet, as we looked down on Arkansas from the windows of the plane, we thought of Don and Duke and diamonds. ``I bet they found some,'' Nick said.

``Keep watching,'' I replied. ``If we see a brand new motor home decked out with Christmas lights heading north, we'll know they did.''

For more information, write to Crater of Diamonds State Park, Route 1, Box 364, Murfreesboro, AR 71958; or telephone (501) 285-3115.