One Foot In The Past

[CPT_GhostLight]

Even when I was kid I was interested in history and loved poking around in my grandpa's cigar boxes of old things he would find when he went to the mountains to fish or go rock hounding. He used to say that I had one foot in the past. When my kids were little, we used to throw them in the Jeep and head to the mountains on adventures up goat trails to old mining and logging camps and bring home bucket loads of old scrap metal and bottles. Man if I'd only had a detector back then!  I never really understood what my grandpa meant by "one foot in the past" until recent years when I got back into metal detecting.

SInce I got back into detecting, I look at the forums and see all the wonderful things that people are finding around the world and it's truly amazing. I'm sometimes very hesitant to post my finds because they are mundane by comparison. But as I look around at the boxes and buckets full of what my wife calls trash, I don't see trash. I see connections to the past. Even the most mundane pieces of articles that found their way into some scrap heap on the side of a mountain were once tools, machinery, or personal posessions of a person who long before me cherished that item while they scratched out a living just trying to survive another year in some God-forsaken remote location.

In the drastically changing world of today, it's almost impossible to imagine what it was like for people to just survive 100 or more years ago and how their posessions were few and the simplest little things brought immense joy to their hard lives. In that spirit, when I find a button or coin or piece of decorative glass, I'm instantly transported into someone else's world long ago and try to imagine what that item meant to the last person to touch it a few decades or century before.

So I ventured out a few days ago to find some diggable ground away from my frozen metropolis in an old industrial area of the past. A friend of mine told me that I won't find anything good in an industrial area, but I disagree. Where there were people, there are pieces of their hopes and dreams all around. You just need to look for them.

 I took the D2 out to the land of the lost and noticed that almost all the tumble weeds were gone. It's hard to imagine there was anything there all those years ago but it wasn't long before the big iron started showing up. I switched back and forth between my usual Relic, Silver, and Deep HC programs because I was comparing signals with F350's Reaper program. All of the programs reported similar ID signals but the Reaper program has a very different sound on iron which makes it easy to differentiate non-ferrous. I did have to adjust the Reactivity a bit to compensate for the ground mineralization, but that program went as deep as Deep HC. I'm still trying to get use to the much different audio though as I'm really tuned in to PWM audio in Pitch and Full Tones and the Reaper uses Full Tones in Square audio. I'm still workin it out.

So another long story short, my finds were nothing earth shattering, but still are interesting glimpses of life in the past to me. The only coins i found were a 1984 clad penny (where do those come from?) and a very toasted 1945 Wheat penney. I also found a buckle marked Hickok underneath, a "Union Made" button, shell shirt button, some decorative rivets, a pocket watch, a hem weight, and an older tape dispenser. It was flat when I found it and I couldn't tell what it was until I carefully bent it back into it's original shape.

I also found some late 1800s-early 1900s era cartidges, the coolest of which is a REM-UMC (early Remington) .41 Long Colt caliber revolver cartridge that was unfired. And I also found a small clam shell (I have no idea where that came from) and an embossed "The Beyer Co" bottle. So thanks for reading and remember that even the most mundane finds could have been someone's most prized posession back in the day. Happy Hunting out there!

 

The trash...

[JCR]

My sentiments exactly. And the finds look like what I normally come home with. I really like the glass & pottery too.

[strick]

Very colorful finds...digging is therapy for lots of us and it looks  like you got  full session in. 

strick

[Tom_in_CA]

Good write-up and good pix !

 

[Ogliuga]

I agree with you and thanks for your nice report!

[Sirius]

It astounds me how much trash we humans leave behind. But occasionally we also leave treasures behind as well! I often find umc shotgun shell bases by the coast and I always wonder: How'd they even end up there to begin with? So much history, yet we don't know a thing about it cause the people who dropped that coin or shot the gun are long gone now.

[F350Platinum]

I can't like anything at the moment, but Cap'n your posts are always an inspiration. 👍 You're definitely a well-rounded finder of lost/discarded things, and boldly go where no one would think they should. Bravo!

Glad you're trying my settings, like it or not it might be a good "verifier" side program for iron, not that discovering iron stops you 😀 it's best in pretty clean farm fields and parks, and if you don't want iron but do want everything else, it's there for you. Turn reactivity up to 2 in machine gun iron, lower sensitivity to about 93, and bam.

Great photos, and again even your trash is interesting, I would have never thought that stuff would be where you took those nice photos. Looks like you have miles and miles... Of miles and miles. Maybe you should use a beach scoop? 😀

[Chase Goldman]

Great perspective, finds, and pics.  Thanks for sharing.

[Rick N. MI]

Nice relic hunt, memories and history. I enjoyed scrolling thru your photos.

[unox]

Thanks for the story and sharing your pics and finds CPT👌