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  Nowhere To Hunt? No Way.

Anyone who has been in the vicinity of young children has either had or heard this conversation more than once:

Kid: I’m bored.
You: So go do something.
Kid: There’s nothing to do.
You: How about calling some of your friends?
Kid: They’re not home.
You: You’ve got a million dollars worth of toys and stuff laying around. Go play with some of it.
Kid: I’ve played with everything already.
You: Then go see what’s on TV.
Kid: There’s nothing on.
You: How about reading a book?
Kid: No. That’s boring.
You: Go draw something.
Kid: That’s boring, too.
You (finally wising up): I’ve got some laundry and dishes you could help me wash and dry.
Kid (taking off): I think I’ll go read a book or draw or something.

I think about this when I occasionally read a post on the forum from someone saying there’s really nowhere in his community to hunt. This is silly, because it’s just not true. Maybe the person really meant there’s no lost Civil or Revolutionary War camps, or old plantations, or nowhere to find old silver or gold coins leaping out of the ground whenever he walks past. Fact is, unless you live in a community 100 percent covered in asphalt, concrete or Astroturf because everyone who lives there is a member of Asphalters-Cementers-Turfers Local 1066 and is deadly serious about practicing their asses off, there most certainly is somewhere to hunt. Probably a whole mess of somewheres to hunt.

The key to it all is adjusting your attitude so you set reasonable expectations in the first place. Or, as Cool Hand Luke might observe, getting your mind right, boss.

I’ve already touched on a whole slew of places for the urban detectorist to hunt in his own neighborhood in the article "Places To Hunt In Any Neighborhood," which can be found in the For Beginner's section of the Gazette. But there are two places -- parks and woods -- that deserve some additional discussion because 1) every community has either one or the other (or both, if you’re fortunate enough), and 2) it’s easy to miss the full potential they represent. Or worse, dismiss them altogether.

Blind Guy’s Silver In The Parks
This is the biggest no-brainer ever invented. Other than Taliban-land, maybe, every community under the sun has at least one park. (Jeez, even the Communists under Stalin had parks, for Pete’s sake.) America is big on having open, green places for its young ’uns to get sent to when their parents are fed up with listening to wild banshees screaming in the yard. And because the vast majority of city fathers past and present are parents themselves, they will bankrupt the municipal till if necessary to build screaming banshee space -- complete with moderately dangerous playground equipment -- somewhere on someone’s street in town. So the fact is, every town has at least one park of some sort. And in those parks go on all sorts of activities that cause things to fall out of pockets and fly off hands: Concerts, festivals, organized sports and pickup games, sledding, ne’er-do-wells loitering on curbs ... the list is practically endless. Especially when you consider that if something sticks up higher than ground level, there’s been a whole slew of people over the years who have climbed up it, hung upside down from it, or jumped off it.

The only problem, if you’re one of those who sees this as a problem, is that you have to adjust your attitude to switch to clad hunter mode for two reasons, one more obvious and more rewarding than the other. This means accepting the fact that digging modern clad coins is indeed an acceptable form of this hobby. Not only is it an acceptable form of this hobby, but it’s also an enjoyable one. That is, if you let yourself enjoy it by not giving a rat’s ass about what other people think about clad hunting.

In some circles, clad hunting is regarded as the lowly stepchild of detecting. Most of this disdain comes from relic hunters because they consider a pile of dirt-caked relics far more appealing than a pile of dirt-caked pocket change. Also, relic hunting involves countless hours of painstaking research and detective work, plodding through muddy fields, or hacking through bramble and bush, whereas clad hunting typically involves nothing more than picking a spot -- any spot -- and swinging away while hoping for the best. By and large, they’re absolutely correct. Clad hunting takes so little forethought and experience, Stevie Wonder could have a good afternoon, too. The relic hunter’s superior attitude is a natural inclination if you’ve got places where Sherman’s army whiled away the months dropping all sorts of cool stuff while waiting on the supply train bringing the Zippo lighters and kerosene to burn down Altanta. And truth be told, if I had stomping grounds like those, I’d probably turn a blind eye to clads, too. After all, there’s a certain cachet to having a crusty old Hotchkiss shell propping open the kitchen door. But I don’t have places like these in my neighborhood (and chances are, neither do you), so you have to make do with what you’ve got. And what you’ve got are parks. Tons of them.

Herein lies the bigger, yet more hidden, advantage to hunting clad: Besides rescuing you from sitting in the house and doing nothing because you think you have nowhere to hunt, clad coins aren’t the only coins in the ground. While silver is indeed becoming harder to find these days, it’s most certainly still out there in greater abundance than we’re led to think simply because there’s no physical way possible, especially with very large parks, to totally work out a site. This is a 100 percent scientific and mathematic fact even given the finest detectors on the market, and a fact which you should never forget. Not only that, there are still a fair amount of relics to be found in parks because -- and this is the most important thing to remember -- almost all parks were once farming homesteads, or had a house of some sort on it at one time or another. (The same goes for many of those small roadside picnic areas, too.)

This is because town and county government are inherently lazy, and picking up land that’s already been cleared to a large degree by someone else already is easier to deal with than having to spend a jillion more dollars on such aggravations as chopping down hunks of wild trees and adding to the social problem of homeless woodland creatures having to go on welfare. This is far more expensive than occasionally having to replace an end-loader that falls into an old cistern or an outhouse pit. So maybe George Bailey is never born and that old place on Sycamore falls in on itself, or maybe the local hermit lights up his shotgun shack -- and himself -- when he falls asleep toking a Pall Mall. The town picks up the property for a song in back taxes or at the sheriff’s auction, bulldozes the place flat, lays some sod, plunks down some swings and slides and you end up with Bailey Park one way or another.

Unless your subdivision’s parks sprouted up in a farmer’s field anytime after you or your parents were still seriously bummed out over Kennedy’s decision to see for himself if the folks of Dallas were really as friendly as everyone said, there will indeed be older coins (especially silver) in the neighborhood park. For the record, "older" is a relative term. Some parks may have been built just when the silver Roosevelt and Washington were going out of business in 1964, so younger "old" silver may be as good as it gets. Others may have been around much longer, so they’ll potentially carry a wider array of silver, such as Mercury dimes, Standing Liberty quarters, or Walking Liberty and Franklin halves.

Consequently, there are people -- including relic hunters who do hit parks from time to time because it’s more expensive to go to the Cayman Islands or hookers for something new and different to do -- who look for nothing but old silver coins. They listen for the whispers of those deeper-buried goodies and bypass everything else. This is indeed one way to look for old coins. But is it the best way, particularly for beginners? I don’t think so, because the hallmark of any successful detectorist is confidence. Yes, the silver’s out there, but it’s not out there in as much abundance as it was 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Instead, the easiest way to hunt for old coins -- and manage your expectations in the process -- is to not look for them in the first place.

Of course, there are some naysayers who would disagree with this train of thought. "Scott, you doof," they may say, "anyone can set their expectations to zero and go around swinging a coil looking for clads. It’s nothing but the lazy man’s way out." Well, hell yeah, it absolutely is. But you tell me -- what will piss you off and get your detector collecting dust in the closet faster: Swinging a coil all day long for nothing but old coins and finding none, or swinging a coil all day long for an apron full of modern coins (and some gold or silver jewelry now and then for good measure) -- and eventually running across some old silver or copper on one of those outings? Because if you do this long enough, you most certainly will end up digging some old coins. Depending on the size and age of the park and how many detectorists have breezed through there before you, there will be either quite a few or a small few still left to be found, but they’re indeed there.

Truth be told, a big reason a lot of beginners who expect old coins to be in a particular place end up disappointed is because of the inescapable law of nature that says whenever you’re looking for something, you never find it. How many times have you tripped over something around the house 10,000 times, but when you actually need it for something, it’s never around? Ever notice how quickly it surfaces when you’re looking for something else a few days later, though? This applies to detecting as well, so just go with the flow, look for something else and eventually the silver will turn up.

A case in point is a relatively new park in the town next to mine which I like to hunt because it’s a very pleasant park with lots of steep hills that draw a lot of people laying on them -- which means I end up finding a lot of dimes and quarters. It’s been an even more favorite park of mine since I dug a 1942-S Mercury dime from its parkway next to the sidewalk. I wasn’t looking for it, or expecting it to be there. It was just there. It’s the only "old" coin I’ve found there to date, but again, where there’s one, there are likely to be others somewhere. Yet every time I hunt that park, I go with nothing more than the notion that I’m going to pick another $5 to $20 in quarters off the hills. That way, if I never find another old coin there in the future, I’ll still never be disappointed.

The Woods Down The Street
For most detectorists -- especially relic hunters -- the woods are almost always synonymous with homesteads. But all woods aren’t created equal, and not all woods have had homesteads in them. I have one of these down the street from me. Up until the time just before the Japanese stopped by to admire our naval flotilla at Pearl Harbor, my neighborhood was a farmer’s field. The woods next to it was nothing more than the spot marking where the farmer stopped buying more land because he got tired of cutting down more trees by himself. Nothing more, nothing less. No homesteads. No nothing. Just a bunch of dirt and trees. Some detectorists would see woods like these as pretty worthless because there’s never been anything there.

This is where some people would be wrong because there have, in fact, been things there: People. Before and since the 1940s, those woods have seen an assortment (a thin assortment to be sure, but still an assortment nonetheless) of traveling Indians, hunters, hikers, campers, kids playing cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians, kids smooching, adults doing the nasty in the great outdoors, those damn kids beering it up. And all these transient people have one thing in common: They’ve dropped things. Meanwhile, for the occasional relic hunter in me, the fringes of the woods are filled with the detritus of neighbors too lazy to cart their junk down to whatever passed as the local landfill in the days before municipal trash collection.

The woods at the end of my street and those like it are often no coin-producing giants in the way parks are by any means, but there are indeed coins and other valuables waiting to be found there. Some notable old-coin finds of mine -- a 1917 Lincoln cent and a 1905-O Barber dime -- have been found in the middle of wooded nowhere, and I barely have spent enough time in these featureless woods to even come remotely close to scratching the surface. Again, where there’s one old coin, there are always more. And the best thing about woods like these is they see virtually no detecting pressure at all, simply because the world is full of detectorists who think that unless there are some remnants of occupation to be seen, there’s nothing to be found.

Like the kid who’s bored because he supposedly has nothing to do, it’s amazing how soon your perspective can change when you suggest doing something distasteful instead, like giving up. Change your perspective on your "nowheres to hunt" and you’ll discover how much more enjoyment you’ll have because you’re outside doing something productive instead of being unproductive inside.

© 2001 Scott Buckner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 




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