|
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
|