The Difference Between Detecting Goals And Wishful Thinking

Yesterday, I was perusing the detecting forums and came across a post inviting others to volunteer their detecting goals for this year. The responses consisted of things like, "I’d like to find my first (insert your favorite old thing you haven’t yet found here)." Eventually, I had to stop reading because I started developing some rather scary mental images of grown men sitting on a mall Santa’s lap asking for Flying Eagle cents and gem-laden platinum rings.

A stab there at humor? Not exactly. There’s a nugget of truth in there because not a single response addressed actual goals. These people might as well have been writing letters to Santa because there’s a wide chasm of difference separating wishes and goals. On one hand, saying, "I’d like to have a million dollars this year" is wishful thinking. (I’d like to have Nicole Kidman show up unannounced at my front door and jump naked into my lap after buying me a big yacht for no good reason, too, but I’ll develop the magical ability to shit $20 bills before that happens.) On the other hand, coming up with a new idea for a business, developing a business and marketing plan and then following those plans into business by Month X is a bona fide goal that’ll actually get you on your way to making a million.

Whether you end up with a million bucks from your new business by the time you’re slurring your way through "Auld Lang Syne" at midnight next January 1 is another thing entirely. But even if you came up $950,000 short, you’d still be closer to having a million in your pocket than you would be if you spent the same amount of time telling everyone you’d love to have a million.

Whether you’re operating a business or operating a metal detector, there are two ingredients necessary for achieving a goal: 1) Developing and following a prescribed plan (and eliminating the dead ends that will steer you away from that plan), and 2) Setting reasonable and attainable goals.

Let’s say I’ve made it my mission this year to find my first Seated Liberty quarter, which to a lot of detectorists is the equivalent of a muskie (the so-called fish of 10,000 casts) to guys to fish. But is it as realistic a goal as I think? Surely it’s more realistic than choosing a $10 gold piece to be one of my firsts for this year, but it’s still not as realistic (knowing my neighborhood as I do) as choosing something else, like a Walking Liberty half.

Knowing SLQs were minted between 1838 and 1891, I would need to find sites whose activity dates back to roughly between 1840 and 1900. I give the chances of someone losing an SLQ an additional decade at very most, since coins are routinely used approximately that long after being replaced by another design. And I certainly have, in theory, the opportunity since the village in which I live was settled during the 1830s.

Disappeared homesteads and turn of the century homes are certainly possibilities, but they aren’t sure bets by any means in any neighborhood. Before the turn of the century, the United States was largely agrarian, with most of the country populated by subsistence farmers in the middle of nowhere growing and making almost everything they needed to eke out what was, all things considered, a pretty miserable existence. Prior to the end of World War II, money was tough to come by for indigenous farmer and immigrant alike. Those who did need an occasional consumer item or service usually bartered for it (most country doctors ended up collecting more livestock than they knew what to do with; try paying for a shot and a beer down at the saloon with a chicken and see how far you get), and those who did have money didn’t exactly go walking around the Back Forty with it in their pockets to lose.

Until the end of World War II, coinage was a scarce and precious commodity, and this is something many of us lose sight of. Consequently, many detectorists who hunt turn of the century properties end up coming away with an overabundance of old relics (most of it disappointingly worthless junk like corroded shoe buckles, buttons, horseshoes, pocket knives and barn door hinges), not old coins. Am I going to find an SLQ at places like these, even though I have at least two dozen of these sites within five miles of my home? Maybe. Maybe not. But I will have a better chance of finding an SLQ where money was most likely to change hands on a day-in, day-out basis -- places like the commercial district of my town, grainery mills, lumber mills or small bottling plants. As widespread as bartering may have been at one time, there were still many places where you had to fork over cash on the barrel to get what you needed. In short, if you want to find money, find the places where money changed hands.

For most of us, the places which saw this kind of activity disappeared ages ago. Wood slat sidewalks were replaced by cement sidewalks, pioneer storefronts and railroad depots have been torn down and replaced by strip malls, and old schools have been torn down, moved or landscaped to death -- their original dirt trucked away long ago or asphalted over for a faculty parking lot. It’s hard enough these days to happen upon a silver Franklin half, let alone an SLQ.

Another thing working against me finding an SLQ is the fact that coins this old are deep. Really deep -- and unfortunately, far out of the range of most low- and mid-line detectors like mine and, probably, yours. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all run across accounts of people finding old coins and relics lying in plain sight in some gully or an inch down in someone’s front yard, but those are the extreme exception (and often the product of dumb luck) rather than the rule. For the rest of us, the best opportunities for finding old coinage lie in construction projects where old, virgin soil is dredged up by backhoes and bulldozers, or old concrete sidewalks in commercial districts are pulled up to reveal the old coins and other valuables that fell between the slats of wood sidewalks and the dirt simply concreted over.

However, those kinds of opportunities and few and far between. So what are you gonna do in the meantime? Chase your tail? Twiddle your thumbs? Spend more time with the wife instead of detecting? Nope. If you’re like most of us, you’re going to spend the better part of the year stumbling around in the dark wandering from site to site without a clue, hoping you’ll be lucky enough this time out to come home with something good. If you don’t, well, there’s always "next time." Well, Kimosabe, the Chicago Cubs have been operating on the "better luck next year" philosophy for several decades now, and you see the good it’s done them.

All things considered, I would be completely foolish -- no matter how much research I did at my local library or historical society -- to think I could count an SLQ among my attainable goals this year, or any year for that matter. Should I happen dig one up in my travels, I will consider such an occasion to be what is truly is: A fortunate and exceptionally rare convergence of research effort and dumb luck. Come to think of it, plain dumb-ass luck is the main reason most people show up in those "Best Finds Of The Year" issues of treasure hunting magazines.

So what’s a goal-driven detectorist to do, then? This is where setting reasonable and attainable goals comes into the picture. If I opened a hot dog stand in a working class neighborhood, could I reasonable expect to make $1 million in a year? Not unless I’m offering crack as a condiment. Could I reasonably expect to make $250,000 a year? Maybe, if I had one helluva dog, had the foresight to pick a good location and devoted every waking moment to the business. Could I reasonably expect to make $50,000 a year after taxes and overhead? Sure I could. Same goes with metal detecting. Instead of devoting an entire season single-mindedly hunting for the elusive SLQ, I’d be better off figuring out what I could expect to accomplish in a hunting season according to the conditions which I know exist here and now.

For example, I would be better off setting a goal this season of digging 1,000 clads (denomination unimportant) and 50 pieces of jewelry at tot lots and swimming areas. I know from experience the ratio of beaches and those ubiquitous little playgrounds covered with bark chips, pea gravel or sand outnumber the number of old-dirt sites by at least 100 to 1, no matter where in this country you happen to be. I also know from experience that I’ll come away with at least one piece of jewelry (cheap or valuable, similarly unimportant) and at least 25 clad coins from each tot lot I come across; even more if I’m able to carefully hunt more than one in a day. I’m not blessed with any amazing detecting ability, so this is an entirely reasonable level for anyone. According to simple mathematics and laws of probability, if I started out during the first week of April hunting nothing but different tot lots only twice a week, I would accomplish my goal by the end of October (28 weeks x 50 clads/week = 1,400 clads; 28 weeks x 2 jewelry pieces/week = 56 jewelry pieces).

If you find yourself nearing your stated goal once Independence Day rolls around, raise your sights by, say, an additional 250 coins and 25 pieces of jewelry. Or if you discover it would take holy intercession to meet your expectations, adjust your goal downward to something more reasonable. Nobody’s going to fault you for being overly optimistic. If you meet your goal before your target date, put a different twist on your hunting, such as finding more dimes than pennies by the end of the year, or scouring old schoolyards you’ve hunted to death for a certain quantity of non-coin finds using a minimum of discrimination. Whatever, the whole idea is to keep things consistently challenging and fun, not totally impossible.

Yeah, in the whole scheme of things, ending your day with a booty bag full of cheap rings and clads isn’t nearly as glamorous as beating the bushes for the often happenstance coin or relic manufactured sometime around the time when Abe Lincoln was complaining about his brains lying in his lap, but you’ll end up with something far more valuable in the long run: You’ll be able to say you truly accomplished something this year.

© 1999 Scott Buckner