“If I think I can do something,” he says, “I’ll break my back trying.” Over the next eight years he participated in events all over Ohio, until he earned membership in the International Pro Rodeo Association. That night he approached the announcer to ask how he might try riding the man ignored him, but Somers eventually patched together a Western outfit, climbed onto a bull, and learned as he went. In his late teens he attended a rodeo and became fascinated with bull riding. Partly to compensate for his lack of a formal education, Somers is an obsessive autodidact. He exudes a shy charisma, but also looks haunted and wary, as if constantly engaging demons both inherited and acquired. “I’ve been burned to the ground,” he says, “and rebuilt.” But rather than give in to the urge to fight, he left. Somers was by then morphing into a man who had tasted enough of his own blood. As Chad entered adolescence, his stepdad sometimes punched him in the face to assert his authority, but Somers refused to cry or, as he puts it, to “break inside.” This went on until he was 15. He rarely saw his biological father, and spent large swaths of time with his grandparents, to avoid his violent stepfather. Somers dropped out of school three days into the ninth grade, partly because he had undiagnosed ADHD and couldn’t follow the lessons, and partly because he had so many chores-splitting wood, chopping hay, cutting down corn-that he would have slept through his classes even if he could focus on the schoolwork. The day I meet him, he’s wearing a Chicago Medical School long-sleeve T-shirt and dirt-smeared jeans riddled with holes. At 44, he has straight brown hair, a dramatically creased face, and tattooed arms. His sentences come out as free verse, a sort of Rust Belt beat poetry. “I’ve seen it flowered,” he says, “I’ve seen it flooded, I’ve seen it frozen, I’ve seen it angry, I’ve seen it calm.” He made a study of the trees and the contours of the landscape. He spent countless days roaming the property, chittering with the squirrels, watching for bobcats, listening to the wild turkeys warn off coyotes at dusk. She and Chad eventually became a couple, and neither outgrew their attachment to the land. That land was divided when it was bequeathed to her generation, and Hope and one brother inherited a more than 20-acre parcel that encompasses a steep, wooded bluff over a creek. Her brothers often invited their friend Chad Somers along. As a girl in the 1980s, Hope Bowser spent long and carefree days there, climbing trees, hopping rocks, picking mushrooms, and camping out. The spread covered more than 300 acres in east-central Ohio, encompassing a farm with hayfields and a home, barn, and bunkhouse. The Bowser family property was an incredible place to be a child. Its base split off into three large limbs that formed a cockeyed W, and it stood largely alone, as if it had bought out its neighbors. After roaming around for a while, he’d taken a break to smoke a cigarette on a slender ledge hard up against a huge old birch tree, situated two-thirds of the way down the steep, several-hundred-foot bluff. He’d gone there that day, as he had hundreds of times before, to hike and sort things out in his mind. For now, it was a beautiful day in the summer of 2018, and he was alone in those quiet woods, and there was only him and the oddly permeable soil. He wasn’t yet thinking about why that might be the case, or how it all might fit together: the old yard-sale picture, the strange carvings on nearby beech trees, the weird gold-mine legend. But Somers was surprised at how easily the shale gave way. And Hope would roll her eyes and say that he was off chasing another one of his obsessive dreams. People would say he’d lost his mind and laugh. He knew how it would look if anyone had been there to see him. Within minutes he had clawed his way down a foot, then two. It was a half-crazy way to get Jesse James’s buried treasure, he knew, but he hadn’t brought a shovel with him that day, so he just gouged at the soft ground on the hillside. After Chad Somers saw the vision, he started digging with his bare hands.
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