He can take a set of tools and make you a rifle, a wedding band, a gold-mining machine, a bridge, a house, a beautiful wood carving, an automobile part, or a replica of a 1687 gold Spanish doubloon. If you can't make it yourself and if you find yourself either residing on or passing through the Osa Peninsula—proclaimed by some as the “Cradle of Western Civilization”—you need to see Paul Milton Clift, resident architect, inventor, and general miracle worker.

We kicked it off that night with a rum and coke. Soon we were joined by Pablo, Turbo Dave and Paul's bodyguard, Sonia, a lithesome, svelte local beauty, who supervised the entire process closely.

While Turbo and Pablo sat in the other room heatedly hammering out some Osa Water Works proposal, Paul heated a small cylindrical anvil and ring with a jeweler's acetylene torch. It took a good two rum and cokes to reach a workable temperature. While fielding annoying unrelated questions about distances from the well to the house and from the spring to the storage tank from the peanut gallery, Paul placed the first half ounce of gold into a tablespoon and to keep the gold from sticking, coated the ring and anvil top with carbon from his accordingly adjusted flame. Then he poured the gold into the ring and with the torch melted the pile of solid sunshine into a more or less round orange glowing globule of liquid sunshine.

At that stage Paul removed the ring and began to shape the gold with a small flat-faced hammer. Every 20 strokes or so at his behest I would flip the flattened gold to the other side for some more pounding as he kept the torch flaming. This went on for about six flips. As I was to come to find out by the second coin, the ultimate size and shape of the coin is determined by the goldsmith, whimsy, and possibly by the amount of rum consumed. All six coins would turn out to have the same weight but to differ in thickness and surface area.

But Paul didn't rush these coins even after the rum began to dwindle. He was meticulous, careful, and critical of his own work. With furrowed brow at a sensitive stage, he completely ignored a shouted out question from the other room to focus his efforts so that he can rightfully take pride in the finished product.

Of course workers and watchers slurped their pain killers, as needed—or not—between the making of each of the six coins, giving the anvil time to adequately reheat.

Twice the finished product was rejected, re-melted and re-stamped. Arm wrestling to cap off the peanut gallery’s proposal writing may have sucked up some of Davy’s energy—or maybe he was distracted by his own incredulity—since there was at least one misfire. To his enormous credit, he never hit Paul's hands. The gold coin party was a huge success.

We had gone from 3.7 ounces of dull, contaminated gold to six brilliant replicas of the 1687 Spanish doubloon. Thanks, Paul!