DIGS O' THE DAY (2010-02-25): OPERATION COBWEB
lordmarcovan
Posts: 43,530 ✭✭✭✭✭
DIGS O' THE DAY (2010-02-25): OPERATION COBWEB
I was in the doctor's office recently, to renew my prescription for thyroid medicine. The nurse instructed me to step up onto the scale. I cringed inwardly, expecting to experience the rending sound of twisted metal and the sight of springs flying everywhere as my weight crushed the thing. My doctor is a nice lady, and I didn't want to damage her equipment, but the nurse was insistent. I had to step up. As I did so, the scale managed to survive somehow. My eyes went to the digital display.
Two-eighty-three.
Holy hamburgers, Fatman! Surely that can't be right!
I knew it was, though. Yep... two hundred and eighty-three pounds.
Let's face facts, here, folks. I am no longer "pleasantly plump" or "a little chunky". I've gone full-bore FAT... and so much for not passing the dreaded two-fifty barrier. I might wear it a little better if I were six-foot-five, but I'm a mere five-ten. I knew I was getting pretty grotesque, but this just confirms what the mirror's been telling me all along. No doubt the thyroid issue has a little bit to do with it, but I can't fall back on that as an excuse. I've let myself go for far too long, and my days of eating what I pleased in the quantities I pleased, while not exercising, are pretty much gone, unless I'm willing to put up with some serious health issues.
Speaking of exercise, or the lack of it, we come back on-topic to my favorite kind- the only type of exercise that get me outdoors at all- treasure hunting.
Last year was not a big year for digging on my part. I had only two or three detector outings, and only one of them was fruitful. I got sidetracked and failed to write it up, though I did take pictures at the time. (I'll try to get to it after I finish this one.) There were a couple of outings where I went "eyeball" hunting and found some fossil shark teeth, and that was it for 2009. Now here we are in 2010 and I knew it was time to haul my horribly out-of-shape carcass into the field and put the coil to the soil once again. Time to sweep out the cobwebs, so to speak. That's why I'll call this outing "Operation Cobweb". It was more about actually getting out and doing something than it was about finding anything. I had low expectations after being dormant for so long.
Speaking of exercise, and getting in shape, my first duty of the day was to attend an event at my daughter Victoria's school. All of the school was jumping rope to benefit the American Heart Association. The school gym instructor explained how school physical education programs weren't all about dodge ball and kick ball anymore (oh- have I ever mentioned how much I loathed P.E. class when I was in school?) Now they teach the kids about proper fitness and diet, and so forth. As the speech went on, I started hearing echoes of what I'd heard in the doctor's office the other day. What's good for the kids is good for the parents, I reckon. I hope Victoria grows up with better physical habits than I have. My mother tried to raise us properly and feed us right (and I was actually a skinny kid), but once I got out on my own I went down the path to jolly obesity. Now I'm not so jolly about it. I decided to draw a little inspiration from what my daughter and her schoolmates were doing.
The jump rope thing was fun. The second-graders raised something like sixteen hundred dollars, making the total from the school nearly six thousand, and that was even before the third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders jumped. Small wonder my daughter's school has held this event's fundraising trophy for several years running.
Afterward, in the school parking lot, I noticed the right rear tire of my vehicle was almost flat. It had developed a slow leak over the last two cold nights. This morning there'd been ice on the car and frost on the grass, but it was sunny under blue skies and starting to warm up a little. I used the portable pump thingie I keep in the car to pump it back up a bit, and off I went on today's digging adventure.
The leaking tire decided my strategy. I knew of a tire place on Gloucester Street downtown. I could leave the car there for tire repairs and then walk a few blocks into Old Town for some detecting. When I got out at the tire place, I noticed an unpleasant smell of hot antifreeze and wisps of steam hissing from around the hood of the car. It was overheating, and obviously boiling over. This made me angry, because I had just spent seven hundred bucks fixing the water pump and a bunch of other things on it. I asked the tire store manager to not only fix the leaky tire, but to have a look around under the hood to see why it was overheating and to make sure the recent mechanics had done their job properly.
I walked to Old Town along an extra-wide grassy median where I have heard there used to be railroad tracks. I believe there were, because there is lots of gravel (crushed granite) in the soil which makes it hard to dig. Down here we usually do not encounter rocks in the soil. My first detector targets were trash, just as I'd expected them to be. Unfortunately there was a lot of trash all around this area, not just in the ground but lying on top of it, too.
I slung the detector over my shoulder and marched a few blocks further south down the median, until I came upon the old cemetery. This is the oldest surviving cemetery in Brunswick. The earliest marked gravestone in it, that of Mrs. Charlotte Plant, dates to 1838. Brunswick is much older than that, though, so the earliest burial ground in the city has been lost to time. Some local lore places it in Wright Square, but an archaeologist I spoke with once said that's not true. Anyway, this particular cemetery, Oak Grove, is one of the first places I ever went metal detecting in, back in the early 1980s. I remember finding a nickel from the 1950s in one of the dirt lanes, and being excited by something so "old" (I was only a young teenager at the time.)
I paused to take a photo near the main north gate of the cemetery, making sure to include plenty of blue sky and some palm trees, so I could taunt my many snowbound internet pals with pictures of our milder February weather.
These days I'm not so quick to go metal detecting in cemeteries as I used to be, but I realized that on the outside of the cemetery, I'd only hunted around three sides of the outer fence in the past. The west side, which was directly in front of me, had a dirt lane running alongside the cemetery boundary, and it was virgin territory. I had never detected it for fear of aluminum trash and because I'd been occupied with greener pastures elsewhere. I doubted anyone else had ever detected it, either.
There was bound to be plenty of trash there, but surely there could be some old coins near the gate. In the lane just outside the east gate, years ago, I'd dug a lovely high-grade 1920-S Mercury dime. Barely a foot away from that, I dug a second Mercury dime dated 1937. If the east gate could produce two Merc dimes, why couldn't the west gate produce some Indian cents or something equally interesting? Maybe a Confederate button? Dozens of Confederate soldiers lay nearby, slumbering in their graves beneath little flags and iron memorial crosses. Living ex-soldiers no doubt had visited this place many times in the past, perhaps in uniform on Confederate Memorial Day, and maybe they lost some buttons off their jackets as they went through the old wrought iron gate. I'm pretty good at imagining scenarios like this. An active imagination can be helpful to a treasure hunter, if he doesn't let it go unchecked.
I set off along the grassy strip outside the fence, but found the ground as dry and hard as concrete, so I moved into the lane, instead. Countless years of vehicle and foot traffic had worn it down well below the ground level of the lawn. Maybe this would give me access to finds that had once been buried much deeper. In this area, I knew that coins from the 1700s and early 1800s were not only possible, but could be quite shallow in the sand road, too. But there would be a lot of trash- that's the downside to hunting dirt roads. At least in the dirt it would be easier to dig, without having to hack through grassroots. Even if the dirt was hard, I could chip away at it.
The dirt, though indeed hard, was easier to dig in some places, and I chased several targets which proved to be aluminum trash or screwtop bottlecaps, just as I'd expected.
I decided to pursue one signal that read "nickel" on the detector's meter, since it was in slightly softer sand. Normally I wouldn't have bothered with a shallow nickel signal in such a trashy place, because nickel signals on my detector are more often aluminum junk than actual nickels, and it is a waste of time chiseling through brick-hard soil or hacking through roots, only to find it is a pulltab or chunk of shredded beer can. (I do usually dig the deeper nickel signals, of course.) Still, it behooves one to dig everything possible. Some small gold targets can fall into that "nickel" or "pulltab" range. (I once air-tested my wedding band. Beep! The detector proclaimed it to be a pulltab.)
One nice thing about "naked dirt", even compressed dirt in a road, is that you can dig with your feet without even bending down. I swept my foot back and forth over the area where I'd gotten the nickel signal. It immediately revealed a brown disc lying in the grey sand. Wow- it really was a nickel, this time! I didn't have my glasses so I couldn't read the year on it, but I could see there was a mintmark near the date, which meant it was a modern one. The old ones had the mintmark to the right of the building on the reverse. So a nickel, yes, but just five cents in modern change. Grubby modern change, at that.
In the southwestern corner of the cemetery there was a big old camellia bush with lots of pink flowers blooming on it- a sure hint of springtime to come. I don't know if camellia bushes are exclusively southern, but they sure make me think of the Deep South, as does our Spanish moss that hangs from the trees. Many wisps of that hung from a live oak nearby. I figured the scene was worth a snapshot.
I got a good coin-range signal on the detector, and dug. And dug. It proved to be a piece of large rusty iron, too large and too deep to recover without a major engineering effort. So close to the site of former trolley or railroad tracks, I was not surprised to find big iron. I left it there and covered the hole back up. Another signal produced a copper ring of some sort. It might have been a letter "O" off of something, but I suspect it more likely was an old grommet or washer.
One target looked like a pencil eraser at first- I often find pencil erasers (the metal collar part that attaches the actual rubber eraser to the pencil) while out digging. This was not an eraser but an old bullet, however. Near that I found an old rifle shell which was probably unrelated to the bullet. It might have once been fired in a military salute at the cemtery.
My knees were in agony from kneeling on the hard dirt. I hadn't brought my shovel with me, since I was on foot, and walking through the neighborhood with a detector on my shoulder probably would have drawn enough stares. So everytime I dug, I had to get down on my hands and knees. (Note to self: it's time to buy some knee pads.)
A "pulltab" range signal produced something I've never found before... a gold coin! It was a Spanish escudo, dated 1798! There was a small hole in it, like it had once been worn as a charm or jewelry piece.
Hahaha- gotcha for a second, there, didn't I? JUST KIDDING! Don't I WISH I'd found that!
That last bit was just a big fat lie from a big fat guy. I didn't dig that gold piece. I've never found a gold coin, though on rare occasions I've dug gold jewelry. I bought that coin. It hangs on my "Holey Gold Hat", a sort of trademark top hat I wear when I go to coin shows.
There IS a small potential for Spanish gold to be found in this town, though. It's happened before. Steve Smith, my detecting mentor, once found a slightly earlier gold escudo from the late 1700s here. On the same site he got a beautiful 1907 US ten-dollar gold piece, too! So he's accomplished the detectorist's dream not just once, but twice.
For most of us, a gold coin is literally a once-in-a-lifetime find. Will I get one in my lifetime? We shall see, we shall see. An exceedingly generous group of my internet friends and regular readers is taking up a collection to send me to England on a detecting tour. If that ever happens, maybe I'll hit gold over there. (Who'd have thought that anyone would like these little dig stories so much? I'm amazed.)
Anyway, back to what I really found. Though not gold, it was a coin- a Lincoln cent. It was clear from the Memorial reverse that it was modern. The date was 1978.
So that was it. Six cents and some trash. Not much of a haul, but typical of my less productive outings, and at least I shook the cobwebs off, right?
I'd had enough exercise for one day. I walked three or four blocks back to the tire place, only to receive the news that my car had a blown intake manifold gasket, or something like that. I know zip-o-la about cars, so they could've said it was a blown freem drive manipulator or deionized pulsejet plasmatron, for all I know. I did understand all too clearly the next thing that was said, though- my car was about to cost me ANOTHER seven hundred bucks or more. It turns out the last mechanics had done what they were supposed to with the water pump and whatnot, but I'd just had the misfortune to have yet another major repair crop up in the same month. I told the tire store manager that there was no way I could afford that right now, and that I only had enough juice on my debit card to pay him the twenty-something for the tire repair. I reached into my wallet.
Debit card? WHAT debit card? It wasn't there! AAACK! I just remembered I'd given it to my wife the day before, to pay some bills. Now I owed Tire Guy twenty-three bucks and had only eight bucks in my wallet, plus a credit card which I knew was maxed out. (Times have been pretty lean since I got laid off from the Sea Island Company two years ago.) I told him to try running the credit card. It wouldn't go, not even for such a relatively small amount. So I was stuck. He suggested I apply for a line of credit there. I asked what sort of interest rate they charged and he admitted it was 26% (ugh!), but there was no interest for the first six months. So I said, "OK, sign me up." I was going to need to fix the multiphase dilithium crystal whatchamacallit, anyway, so I could put today's tire job and the major repair on the new account and pray that I could pay it off in time before the exorbitant interest kicked in. I was approved, charged the tire repair to my new account, and was free to go. I asked Mr. Nice Tire Guy if the vehicle would be OK to drive home now that it had cooled off a bit. He said it wasn't a great idea, but I had to be back home in time to meet Victoria's school bus.
I got over the big Sidney Lanier Bridge partway home, and the temp gauge in the car redlined. She was gonna blow... I knew it. Pretty soon the car would only reach a top speed of forty miles an hour. I limped it to a truck stop at the I-95 junction and had to call for help. I called my wife, who agreed to leave her job early to come and rescue me (she was on her lunch break, anyway.)
As I gathered my belongings from the dead car, I opened the hatchback and found to my horror that the detector wasn't there. I had just left a thousand-dollar metal detector sitting in the waiting room of Tire Kingdom! What an idiot! I guess I'd been so stressed out by the news I'd gotten that I took off without retrieving it. Fortunately I had Mr. Tire Guy's business card. If he hadn't thought I was a loser before over the whole missing debit card and maxed-out credit card issues, he was gonna think it now, for sure.
With trembling hands, I dialed the number on my cellphone. By now I was thoroughly stressed out.
An elderly black woman answered. When I asked for Mr. Tire Guy (whose name was Billy Something), she told me I had the wrong number. OK, I was getting too flustered. I carefully checked the number on the card and dialed again. Got the same old lady. Third try, same lady.
WHAT WAS GOING ON? Why would the Tire Kingdom manager's telephone number listed on his business card ring at somebody's home? I went into the Steak & Shake restaurant to wait for my wife, after calling her back to see if she could swing by and pick up my detector before she rescued me. I tried Tire Kingdom a fourth time and finally got Billy- Mr. Tire Guy. I told him what happened, asked him to give the detector to my wife, and to have the car towed back there so they could go ahead with the major repair.
That was truly bizarre. I don't know why the same telephone number would have come up wrong on the first three out of four tries, but it did. I had checked and rechecked it. It must have been some sort of weird cell phone tower thing, except I was no longer moving when I made any of the calls. Strange. It felt like Fate was taunting me, making the phone misdial while I was in the midst of such a disastrous afternoon.
It all turned out fine in the end, though. My wife rescued the detector and then me, we had lunch, and went home. That was it.
Now aren't you glad I dragged you along to see what one of my typical unproductive digs looks like, and pranked you by pretending to find a gold coin, too? No? Aww, c'mon... it was fun (except the automotive part).
Wish me better luck next time, please!
~RWS
INDEX OF DIG STORIES
I was in the doctor's office recently, to renew my prescription for thyroid medicine. The nurse instructed me to step up onto the scale. I cringed inwardly, expecting to experience the rending sound of twisted metal and the sight of springs flying everywhere as my weight crushed the thing. My doctor is a nice lady, and I didn't want to damage her equipment, but the nurse was insistent. I had to step up. As I did so, the scale managed to survive somehow. My eyes went to the digital display.
Two-eighty-three.
Holy hamburgers, Fatman! Surely that can't be right!
I knew it was, though. Yep... two hundred and eighty-three pounds.
Let's face facts, here, folks. I am no longer "pleasantly plump" or "a little chunky". I've gone full-bore FAT... and so much for not passing the dreaded two-fifty barrier. I might wear it a little better if I were six-foot-five, but I'm a mere five-ten. I knew I was getting pretty grotesque, but this just confirms what the mirror's been telling me all along. No doubt the thyroid issue has a little bit to do with it, but I can't fall back on that as an excuse. I've let myself go for far too long, and my days of eating what I pleased in the quantities I pleased, while not exercising, are pretty much gone, unless I'm willing to put up with some serious health issues.
Speaking of exercise, or the lack of it, we come back on-topic to my favorite kind- the only type of exercise that get me outdoors at all- treasure hunting.
Last year was not a big year for digging on my part. I had only two or three detector outings, and only one of them was fruitful. I got sidetracked and failed to write it up, though I did take pictures at the time. (I'll try to get to it after I finish this one.) There were a couple of outings where I went "eyeball" hunting and found some fossil shark teeth, and that was it for 2009. Now here we are in 2010 and I knew it was time to haul my horribly out-of-shape carcass into the field and put the coil to the soil once again. Time to sweep out the cobwebs, so to speak. That's why I'll call this outing "Operation Cobweb". It was more about actually getting out and doing something than it was about finding anything. I had low expectations after being dormant for so long.
Speaking of exercise, and getting in shape, my first duty of the day was to attend an event at my daughter Victoria's school. All of the school was jumping rope to benefit the American Heart Association. The school gym instructor explained how school physical education programs weren't all about dodge ball and kick ball anymore (oh- have I ever mentioned how much I loathed P.E. class when I was in school?) Now they teach the kids about proper fitness and diet, and so forth. As the speech went on, I started hearing echoes of what I'd heard in the doctor's office the other day. What's good for the kids is good for the parents, I reckon. I hope Victoria grows up with better physical habits than I have. My mother tried to raise us properly and feed us right (and I was actually a skinny kid), but once I got out on my own I went down the path to jolly obesity. Now I'm not so jolly about it. I decided to draw a little inspiration from what my daughter and her schoolmates were doing.
The jump rope thing was fun. The second-graders raised something like sixteen hundred dollars, making the total from the school nearly six thousand, and that was even before the third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders jumped. Small wonder my daughter's school has held this event's fundraising trophy for several years running.
Afterward, in the school parking lot, I noticed the right rear tire of my vehicle was almost flat. It had developed a slow leak over the last two cold nights. This morning there'd been ice on the car and frost on the grass, but it was sunny under blue skies and starting to warm up a little. I used the portable pump thingie I keep in the car to pump it back up a bit, and off I went on today's digging adventure.
The leaking tire decided my strategy. I knew of a tire place on Gloucester Street downtown. I could leave the car there for tire repairs and then walk a few blocks into Old Town for some detecting. When I got out at the tire place, I noticed an unpleasant smell of hot antifreeze and wisps of steam hissing from around the hood of the car. It was overheating, and obviously boiling over. This made me angry, because I had just spent seven hundred bucks fixing the water pump and a bunch of other things on it. I asked the tire store manager to not only fix the leaky tire, but to have a look around under the hood to see why it was overheating and to make sure the recent mechanics had done their job properly.
I walked to Old Town along an extra-wide grassy median where I have heard there used to be railroad tracks. I believe there were, because there is lots of gravel (crushed granite) in the soil which makes it hard to dig. Down here we usually do not encounter rocks in the soil. My first detector targets were trash, just as I'd expected them to be. Unfortunately there was a lot of trash all around this area, not just in the ground but lying on top of it, too.
I slung the detector over my shoulder and marched a few blocks further south down the median, until I came upon the old cemetery. This is the oldest surviving cemetery in Brunswick. The earliest marked gravestone in it, that of Mrs. Charlotte Plant, dates to 1838. Brunswick is much older than that, though, so the earliest burial ground in the city has been lost to time. Some local lore places it in Wright Square, but an archaeologist I spoke with once said that's not true. Anyway, this particular cemetery, Oak Grove, is one of the first places I ever went metal detecting in, back in the early 1980s. I remember finding a nickel from the 1950s in one of the dirt lanes, and being excited by something so "old" (I was only a young teenager at the time.)
I paused to take a photo near the main north gate of the cemetery, making sure to include plenty of blue sky and some palm trees, so I could taunt my many snowbound internet pals with pictures of our milder February weather.
These days I'm not so quick to go metal detecting in cemeteries as I used to be, but I realized that on the outside of the cemetery, I'd only hunted around three sides of the outer fence in the past. The west side, which was directly in front of me, had a dirt lane running alongside the cemetery boundary, and it was virgin territory. I had never detected it for fear of aluminum trash and because I'd been occupied with greener pastures elsewhere. I doubted anyone else had ever detected it, either.
There was bound to be plenty of trash there, but surely there could be some old coins near the gate. In the lane just outside the east gate, years ago, I'd dug a lovely high-grade 1920-S Mercury dime. Barely a foot away from that, I dug a second Mercury dime dated 1937. If the east gate could produce two Merc dimes, why couldn't the west gate produce some Indian cents or something equally interesting? Maybe a Confederate button? Dozens of Confederate soldiers lay nearby, slumbering in their graves beneath little flags and iron memorial crosses. Living ex-soldiers no doubt had visited this place many times in the past, perhaps in uniform on Confederate Memorial Day, and maybe they lost some buttons off their jackets as they went through the old wrought iron gate. I'm pretty good at imagining scenarios like this. An active imagination can be helpful to a treasure hunter, if he doesn't let it go unchecked.
I set off along the grassy strip outside the fence, but found the ground as dry and hard as concrete, so I moved into the lane, instead. Countless years of vehicle and foot traffic had worn it down well below the ground level of the lawn. Maybe this would give me access to finds that had once been buried much deeper. In this area, I knew that coins from the 1700s and early 1800s were not only possible, but could be quite shallow in the sand road, too. But there would be a lot of trash- that's the downside to hunting dirt roads. At least in the dirt it would be easier to dig, without having to hack through grassroots. Even if the dirt was hard, I could chip away at it.
The dirt, though indeed hard, was easier to dig in some places, and I chased several targets which proved to be aluminum trash or screwtop bottlecaps, just as I'd expected.
I decided to pursue one signal that read "nickel" on the detector's meter, since it was in slightly softer sand. Normally I wouldn't have bothered with a shallow nickel signal in such a trashy place, because nickel signals on my detector are more often aluminum junk than actual nickels, and it is a waste of time chiseling through brick-hard soil or hacking through roots, only to find it is a pulltab or chunk of shredded beer can. (I do usually dig the deeper nickel signals, of course.) Still, it behooves one to dig everything possible. Some small gold targets can fall into that "nickel" or "pulltab" range. (I once air-tested my wedding band. Beep! The detector proclaimed it to be a pulltab.)
One nice thing about "naked dirt", even compressed dirt in a road, is that you can dig with your feet without even bending down. I swept my foot back and forth over the area where I'd gotten the nickel signal. It immediately revealed a brown disc lying in the grey sand. Wow- it really was a nickel, this time! I didn't have my glasses so I couldn't read the year on it, but I could see there was a mintmark near the date, which meant it was a modern one. The old ones had the mintmark to the right of the building on the reverse. So a nickel, yes, but just five cents in modern change. Grubby modern change, at that.
In the southwestern corner of the cemetery there was a big old camellia bush with lots of pink flowers blooming on it- a sure hint of springtime to come. I don't know if camellia bushes are exclusively southern, but they sure make me think of the Deep South, as does our Spanish moss that hangs from the trees. Many wisps of that hung from a live oak nearby. I figured the scene was worth a snapshot.
I got a good coin-range signal on the detector, and dug. And dug. It proved to be a piece of large rusty iron, too large and too deep to recover without a major engineering effort. So close to the site of former trolley or railroad tracks, I was not surprised to find big iron. I left it there and covered the hole back up. Another signal produced a copper ring of some sort. It might have been a letter "O" off of something, but I suspect it more likely was an old grommet or washer.
One target looked like a pencil eraser at first- I often find pencil erasers (the metal collar part that attaches the actual rubber eraser to the pencil) while out digging. This was not an eraser but an old bullet, however. Near that I found an old rifle shell which was probably unrelated to the bullet. It might have once been fired in a military salute at the cemtery.
My knees were in agony from kneeling on the hard dirt. I hadn't brought my shovel with me, since I was on foot, and walking through the neighborhood with a detector on my shoulder probably would have drawn enough stares. So everytime I dug, I had to get down on my hands and knees. (Note to self: it's time to buy some knee pads.)
A "pulltab" range signal produced something I've never found before... a gold coin! It was a Spanish escudo, dated 1798! There was a small hole in it, like it had once been worn as a charm or jewelry piece.
Hahaha- gotcha for a second, there, didn't I? JUST KIDDING! Don't I WISH I'd found that!
That last bit was just a big fat lie from a big fat guy. I didn't dig that gold piece. I've never found a gold coin, though on rare occasions I've dug gold jewelry. I bought that coin. It hangs on my "Holey Gold Hat", a sort of trademark top hat I wear when I go to coin shows.
There IS a small potential for Spanish gold to be found in this town, though. It's happened before. Steve Smith, my detecting mentor, once found a slightly earlier gold escudo from the late 1700s here. On the same site he got a beautiful 1907 US ten-dollar gold piece, too! So he's accomplished the detectorist's dream not just once, but twice.
For most of us, a gold coin is literally a once-in-a-lifetime find. Will I get one in my lifetime? We shall see, we shall see. An exceedingly generous group of my internet friends and regular readers is taking up a collection to send me to England on a detecting tour. If that ever happens, maybe I'll hit gold over there. (Who'd have thought that anyone would like these little dig stories so much? I'm amazed.)
Anyway, back to what I really found. Though not gold, it was a coin- a Lincoln cent. It was clear from the Memorial reverse that it was modern. The date was 1978.
So that was it. Six cents and some trash. Not much of a haul, but typical of my less productive outings, and at least I shook the cobwebs off, right?
I'd had enough exercise for one day. I walked three or four blocks back to the tire place, only to receive the news that my car had a blown intake manifold gasket, or something like that. I know zip-o-la about cars, so they could've said it was a blown freem drive manipulator or deionized pulsejet plasmatron, for all I know. I did understand all too clearly the next thing that was said, though- my car was about to cost me ANOTHER seven hundred bucks or more. It turns out the last mechanics had done what they were supposed to with the water pump and whatnot, but I'd just had the misfortune to have yet another major repair crop up in the same month. I told the tire store manager that there was no way I could afford that right now, and that I only had enough juice on my debit card to pay him the twenty-something for the tire repair. I reached into my wallet.
Debit card? WHAT debit card? It wasn't there! AAACK! I just remembered I'd given it to my wife the day before, to pay some bills. Now I owed Tire Guy twenty-three bucks and had only eight bucks in my wallet, plus a credit card which I knew was maxed out. (Times have been pretty lean since I got laid off from the Sea Island Company two years ago.) I told him to try running the credit card. It wouldn't go, not even for such a relatively small amount. So I was stuck. He suggested I apply for a line of credit there. I asked what sort of interest rate they charged and he admitted it was 26% (ugh!), but there was no interest for the first six months. So I said, "OK, sign me up." I was going to need to fix the multiphase dilithium crystal whatchamacallit, anyway, so I could put today's tire job and the major repair on the new account and pray that I could pay it off in time before the exorbitant interest kicked in. I was approved, charged the tire repair to my new account, and was free to go. I asked Mr. Nice Tire Guy if the vehicle would be OK to drive home now that it had cooled off a bit. He said it wasn't a great idea, but I had to be back home in time to meet Victoria's school bus.
I got over the big Sidney Lanier Bridge partway home, and the temp gauge in the car redlined. She was gonna blow... I knew it. Pretty soon the car would only reach a top speed of forty miles an hour. I limped it to a truck stop at the I-95 junction and had to call for help. I called my wife, who agreed to leave her job early to come and rescue me (she was on her lunch break, anyway.)
As I gathered my belongings from the dead car, I opened the hatchback and found to my horror that the detector wasn't there. I had just left a thousand-dollar metal detector sitting in the waiting room of Tire Kingdom! What an idiot! I guess I'd been so stressed out by the news I'd gotten that I took off without retrieving it. Fortunately I had Mr. Tire Guy's business card. If he hadn't thought I was a loser before over the whole missing debit card and maxed-out credit card issues, he was gonna think it now, for sure.
With trembling hands, I dialed the number on my cellphone. By now I was thoroughly stressed out.
An elderly black woman answered. When I asked for Mr. Tire Guy (whose name was Billy Something), she told me I had the wrong number. OK, I was getting too flustered. I carefully checked the number on the card and dialed again. Got the same old lady. Third try, same lady.
WHAT WAS GOING ON? Why would the Tire Kingdom manager's telephone number listed on his business card ring at somebody's home? I went into the Steak & Shake restaurant to wait for my wife, after calling her back to see if she could swing by and pick up my detector before she rescued me. I tried Tire Kingdom a fourth time and finally got Billy- Mr. Tire Guy. I told him what happened, asked him to give the detector to my wife, and to have the car towed back there so they could go ahead with the major repair.
That was truly bizarre. I don't know why the same telephone number would have come up wrong on the first three out of four tries, but it did. I had checked and rechecked it. It must have been some sort of weird cell phone tower thing, except I was no longer moving when I made any of the calls. Strange. It felt like Fate was taunting me, making the phone misdial while I was in the midst of such a disastrous afternoon.
It all turned out fine in the end, though. My wife rescued the detector and then me, we had lunch, and went home. That was it.
Now aren't you glad I dragged you along to see what one of my typical unproductive digs looks like, and pranked you by pretending to find a gold coin, too? No? Aww, c'mon... it was fun (except the automotive part).
Wish me better luck next time, please!
~RWS
INDEX OF DIG STORIES
0
Comments
Great write up and enjoyable read as always.
It 'tis nice being in South Ga. Digging time year round with no snow banks or frozen ground to deal with. Like you, I just wish I had more time to go play in the dirt. When May-September comes, it's an ordeal to battle the sweltering Ga humid heat and mosquitoes.......but that's what keeps the Yankees away.
Good luck next time. Looks like you're gonna have to hit some playgrounds to find some change to pay the tire man........
Too many positive BST transactions with too many members to list.
Better luck on your next outing. Thoroughly enjoyed the story though!
is that you end up being governed by inferiors. – Plato