#lostring Tag | Page 3 of 6 | The Ring Finders

Earlier this week, I received a call from a gentleman who had lost his 14k white gold wedding band while building a fire pit oasis in his back yard. A MONTH AGO! In our initial phone conversation he explained that while trimming some shrubs around the pit and throwing scraps into a pile, his ring flew off. The gentleman told me that over the last month he recruited friends and family to help look for the ring but with no luck. He stated that he would go out in the early morning before his two little children woke up, and paced the ground around the area which he felt it could have been, again with no luck in finding his wedding band. He mentioned that he even rented a cheap metal detector but without knowing settings and the intricacies of the machine his hope was slowly fading that he would ever locate the ring. His wife told him that she was going to get him another one for Christmas but he said he could not let it go and went to the internet to see about getting someone to help.

I empathized with him. The feeling of knowing that something with so much meaning has to be right there but not being able to find it is so frustrating. I told him that I would be happy to come by and help to locate the ring the following morning.

I arrived at the location and the homeowner pointed me in the direction of the lost ring. I had the homeowner re-enact what he felt had happened several times. Each time asking questions and challenging some of his perceived memory of what happened. Since a month had gone by, it can be very easy to formulate details that may not have actually occurred or that are altered a bit. We came up with a 20’x20’ search area which there could be a strong possibility of finding the ring. In this area was a row of hedges, a dirt pile and an overgrown brush. Not the worse area, but certainly not the best searching environment.

At this point his family came out to watch. As I started to swing the detector over the ground and all the “beeps” started, I heard his children asking questions about what I was doing. For me, keeping that spark for adventure spark alive for kiddos is very important and in any other time (pandemic-less) I would have had them help in ‘THE GREAT RING SEARCH’. It was so awesome to overhear as I was waist deep in a bush that she wanted a metal detector when she got older.

As I worked around the area I was finding the usual bottle caps, nails, left over construction material, and the ever present foil. About 30 min into the search, while off to the side of the dirt pile I got a solid surface tone and went in with the pin pointer for a closer look. I moved the taller grasses aside and scraped back some leaves and then…..a ring…and on the inside….14k. I could not believe it! It was off to the far side of the possible search area (which happens more often times than not).

You don’t always get to see someone genuinely smile, but today, I did, and the gentleman got his wedding band back. After the find, I found out that he was a VA physician and with the year we have had, it made seeing this smile absolutely priceless.