The Golden Touched

There's just something about the Discovery Channel reality show, Bering Sea Gold, that restores my faith in reality television. Most reality TV is fake and scripted and rather obviously so. See: Amish Mafia or Moonshiners among dozen's of others that are heavily scripted and rely on tremendously untalented, non-actors to, well- act- and it shows. Reality TV is the drunken step-brother of the documentary. You could learn all you need to know about moonshine in a single 90 minute documentary but you can fill a Tuesday night time slot about moonshine for years to come if you treat the show like it's Beverly Hillbillies making moonshine. A documentary tells a story through editing, via the soul of the filmmaker while reality just shows up. 

Bering Sea Gold is about some of the goofiest knuckleheads you've ever seen, but it puts them on barges and slapped together boats, offshore of Nome, Alaska diving for gold in the summer. It even shows the same folks diving under the ice in winter, as well. Ya gotta be nuts and they are. Some of these people are- at times- pretty much homeless. If there are big time gold-dredging operations they must not be interesting because none of those are featured. Though the Pomrenke family has hundreds of thousands invested in their barge, dredging operation, it's from years of expanding rather than somebody starting out with a small fortune in search of a larger one. There's some unseen benefactors behind the scenes backing some of these people. But for the most part I think these people are backed in the usual manner of, money from friends and family and desperate credit card choices.

Essentially, to mine for gold you need a barge of sorts seaworthy enough to go a few hundred yards off shore and a diver experienced enough to dive what looks to be about 25 feet down and operate a big shopvac that sucks up material from the Bering Sea floor. Like mining on shore, the material runs through a sluice catching (hopefully) little bits of gold that add up to big money.

This is tough stuff. The Bering Sea is never pleasant. The dive suits are heated. It's Alaska. Nobody who does this is too normal. They just couldn't be.

The drama seems real. These people seem to work hard and not play well with others. I seriously question if Steve Reidel and Scott Meisterheim aren't mentally ill because they seem stubbornly determined to NOT make any money at this. Steve is just a free-spirited goofball and Scott is an asshole. I think that between the two of them they've made about $12 diving for gold. They remind me of guys I've worked with who were always looking to go home for any reason. None of the men are what you might call normal as anger issues abound. That far up north it might as well be the bi-polar ice caps.

There is one woman regular, Emily Reidel, daughter of Steve. You watch him and you have to grade her on a curve allowing for having him as a father. All things considered, she's pretty normal. Attractive too. They don't doll any of the fellas up for the shoots so with Emily, what you see is Emily au natural. She cleans up pretty well too. Everybody in life and reality TV has to have a back story and hers was that she got into gold dredging hoping  to finance a trip to Italy to study opera. Well, why not? But, three seasons later she's still in Alaska, now as captain of her own dredge. She has history with Zeke, another captain that may have been of the friends with benefits persuasion. He was in love with her in season one but it seemed unrequited. That story is there but I don't feel as if they've exploited it unnecessarily and I like that. It's a gold show. It's not the Cheers bar.

One man- Vern Adkison- is searching for gold  because he is a staunch, anti-government conservative of the Ron Paul variety, I might guess, because he wants the gold for its enduring value as currency. He doesn't trust the Fed. I wonder if he doesn't spend his spare time on the internet... This old guy has spent every nickel he has and gone into debt to find gold. When the economy collapses and he's sitting on a million dollars in gold, he'll be able to afford that loaf of bread that going for $100k.

Programs like these are heavily edited. The genius is in the production. That is why 'The Deadliest Catch' still holds people's attention after so many years of the same guys catching crab. They let stuff happen and they film it. If they miss something, like Zeke Tenhoff getting arrested and fighting with the cops, they deal with the aftermath of that rather than fucking around trying to recreate it as others might do.  I highly respect that. Zeke's description to his mates of his arrest and incarceration was far better than if the cameras had been there. The guy is a maniac. Last season his childhood friend committed suicide with a pistol. It was the second of his childhood friends to die in that manner. This can't bode well for Zeke.

I kinda root for these people. I can't help it. If you and a couple of rag-tag lunkheads can dive into the frigid waters of the Bering Sea and find gold, find as much as you can. Though there is a lot of luck involved, there is nothing easy about it. If I were more comfortable in the water and less comfortable in my sanity, I might do it myself.