Summer Wrap-Up: Toothpaste, Lost Cows and $700

I haven’t found a ton of amazing things. I haven't had any particularly mind-bending experiences (except for one or two) over the last couple of months so I’ve been reluctant to write. Nor do I feel remotely capable of somehow melding my recent finds into any sort of life lesson or interesting through-line. So I’m just going to do a quick recap of the summer.

First, the Club Hunt.

I am a member of the Middle Tennessee Metal Detecting Club – a monthly meeting of some really friendly men and a smattering (me, Cheryl) of women.  We gather in a church rumpus room on the first Friday of every month and show each other what we’ve dug out of the dirt. Then there is Business to conduct, votes to tally, and “awards” (like an old bottle or a used magazine) to hand out. There are also many doughnuts available. I don’t go every month and when I do go, I try to be lubricated with a margarita from a nearby Mexican restaurant. The margarita makes me not want the doughnut.

Every year, the hardworking officers of the MTMDC arrange a Club Hunt for the members. This year, we'd been given permission to hunt a large farm not far from where I found my OHIO last November. Sounded quite promising. I put new batteries in both my machines and packed a lot of Gatorade.

It was mid-June. The day of the Hunt was clear and hot. By the time Cheryl and I got to the site, on some gently rolling hills, there already quite a few folks out there swinging.  We jumped right in. It was hard going – it hadn’t rained in coon’s age and the ground was not cooperative, but everyone had high hopes. I dug some old, rusty farm stuff, but enjoyed discovering this, back in a copse of trees.

Honk.

 Here's the inside.

Sad.

Cool.

After a big barbecue lunch, we all moved to higher ground, a pasture on the other side of a fence, and things quickly got interesting. There had been a house here, long ago. Here’s what it looked like from the top of the hill.

I dug this…

Whitley loves round things.

And this…

Someone said this was
part of an old bed, but I
can't figure how...

And this…

Decided to straighten it and
promptly broke it in half. Nice.

Somebody else dug this.

And no one has seen Cow #51
since that fateful day.

Then Cheryl skunked everyone with this GORGEOUS heel plate. 

Congratulations! (Seething jealousy.)

That there’s worth about $150. Just so's you know.

By this time, Cheryl and I were so crazy hot and dehydrated that we just gave up. There are plans to revisit this site at a more civilized time. I am ready at any time.

I spent a month of the summer up in Michigan. The first two weeks I worked at Interlochen Arts Academy teaching songwriting to 33 amazing young singer/songwriters from all over the country. 

Here's me and one of my classes:

It's a great camp, but the uniform thing is a little extreme.
Particularly the whole socks-with-sandals business.
 I have never in my life been less fashionable.
And that's saying a lot.

One day I mentioned to a coworker that I’d never found an Indian head penny and this turned into a conversation about how the things we get in life might not be quite what we asked for. That evening, I took the Cibola into the woods behind one of the amphitheaters and quickly found this.

1908 Indian head penny. Hit by a bullet.

So… yeah. I consider this to be one of my prize finds of all time.

I found one other cool thing at Interlochen. Many nights, I lay in my sweltering dorm room and worked on a two-week-old New York Times crossword puzzle. I was determined to nail that bugger down – in ink – but it was having its way with me. Night after night, I tried to figure out “Vintage toothpaste brand”… I knew it was “IpaNa” or “IpaMa” or “IMaPa” or something, but I just couldn’t remember and it was really tripping me up.

Then, in a soft, loamy area outside some cabins, I found this.

Words fail.

Why, thank you… O, crossword-sprites of the Earth.

After Interlochen, I spent two weeks in Ann Arbor and did a bit of digging when I could. Took my little niece, Olivia, to Burns Park and she dug a cool, old ‘60s-ish ring.

Love is all you need.

All you need is love.

Had a fun MD session with my buddies Rod and Linda out near their homes near Chelsea. No toe-curling finds, but a whole lot of fun in the dirt. Here’s our take.

One man's trash...

I got back to Nashville near the end of August then promptly had to go to Texas to play some music. When I got back to town, I revisited my tried-and-true Brush Hill lawns for a little Mother Earth pore-cleansing. Believe it or not, in an area I’ve dug dozens of times, I pulled out an 1875 seated Liberty dime and an 1883 nickel – by far the oldest American coins I’ve dug.

In the backyard of a house on Fatherland, I dug this before the mosquitoes chased me out. It’s burned and partially melted – quite possibly from the huge fire that leveled that block of Fatherland in 1913.

Can't wait to do a proper hunt on that yard.
It is FULL of stuff.

In other news: remember my OHIO? (See my very first post on this blog, Triune Hunt.) To recap, I found something very valuable in some deep woods almost a year ago and this morning, I met the esteemed Joe Haile -- a VIP hunter/dealer in Civil War relics outside a Macaroni Grill in Brentwood, TN and sold him my little OHIO for $700. It's going to a collector who will be very happy to have it, and will display it proudly. And I wasn't sad about it at all. Well, maybe a little sad.

Bye-O-Hio...

And so now I’m caught up. Stay tuned: there are lots – LOTS – of amazing digging adventures coming up soon. Including a major purchase that I… am… about… to… make…

Rain and Redemption

After the sweet thrill of Kerrville/New Folk, June plunged me into some serious weirdness and challenge culminating in the death my good buddy – and Nashville stalwart – David “Doc” West. Seemed like once the heat and drought set in, so did a cluster of scary, infuriating, exhausting and ultimately sorrowful events in my personal sphere.

I made it through, and, I hope, extracted from the excavated dirt and muck all the little morsels of shiny wisdom I could find. I certainly tried.

And through it all, somehow, I went nearly a month without swinging a Cibola metal detector. Oh, I wanted to. But temperatures in the 100s combined with weeks of determined rainlessness rendered the ground of middle Tennessee parched and hard as gypsum. You couldn’t dig; you could just sort of … chip. I’ve never been on a chain gang and saw no reason to replicate the experience in any way. So I stayed inside with my AC.

Doc’s memorial service was July 4th, and the last of the real scorchers. And soon after that came a rain: a tentative, midnight, 5-minute emissary – as if testing the ground, then reporting back to other rains who were waiting for clearance.  Those rains came too and things are green again. My tomato plants have survived. And, best of all, the ground is damp and diggable.  Here’s a report of recent finds.

My first excursion out post-drought was to a yard on Brush Hill Road. I’d met the young family at their yard sale and they’d kindly given me permission to hunt. As so often happens, the first thing I dug was the best.

Condom containers. Vintage.

Yup. Apparently, there were some good times to be had up on Brush Hill Road back in the 1920s. High on a bluff over the Cumberland it was a perfect vacation area for Nashvillians and there were camps, log cabins, and hunting lodges sprinkled throughout this part of North Inglewood. I know of at least one rumored speakeasy too.  Folks came there to… relax.

3 Merry Widow condom containers are found all over the country, sometimes with condoms still in them. This find really interested my FB friends. When I posted this picture on my wall I got 32 responses including one from my friend Randall who said that the brand is mentioned in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Of course, I just want to know if Agnes, Mabel and Beckie were real, entrepreneurial widders, or just an advertising gimmick. Anyone?

A few days later, after work, I ventured out again. A wooded area on Brush Hill had been bulldozed; looked like a house was going in there. I drove over and poked around. Bits of broken pottery. Old iron things, all just on the surface. Most tantalizing. A nice man in a nearby house gave me the name of the builder and I called and left a message and pretty soon he called me back with permission to hunt. Thanks, Mike!

Sadly, all I found was this.

Sweetheart deal. Purrs like a kitten.

I mean, that is sweet, but I’d expected to find a lot more. I think the bulldozer just flipped everything over and now it’s covered up for good.

The next day, Cheryl and I had a digging date and headed out to yet another Brush Hill yard.

I just love this yard. One area, near a tall tree, always seems to deliver. 

Here are some things I've dug here over the past year.

Colonial-era (pre-Civil War) flat buttons and a buckle

Iron buckles

Random buttons. The one on the top left
has gold gilt on it and reads "Treble Gilt Standard."
Probably Civil War.

Two handles of things: the top one is made of bone and iron.
(Dear animal who became a bone handle: You are now on the
Internet. How does that feel?)
Bottom handle is ... pewter?

 The ground was perfect: moist but not muddy and highly conductive. I started getting signals right away in areas that I’d gone over carefully on other visits. Many were tiny little signals you really had to hone in on. But some were big honkers like the one that yielded this.

Whooooa, Nellie!

We dug a lot of nails, but hey, nails are cool. Nails held together houses that people lived in and ate dinners in and had sex in and raised babies in. Go nails.

Beautiful nails + random round things

Pulled out this mysterious brass item. Any guesses?

I have no idea.

Pulled out the bowl of an iron spoon.

Mmm. Porridge, anyone?

Pulled out what appeared to be half of a flat button, similar to the ones shown above – circa late 1700s to early 1800s that I’ve dug here in the past. So that was nice. Unremarkable, but nice.

I saw Cheryl looking at something in her hand and went to see. It was “One Thin Dime” play money 10-cent piece. CUTE! I experienced a small seizure of jealousy (very mild). Then, wonder of wonders, not five minutes later I pulled out play money of my very own.

Now I can retire.

Also a bunch of WWII-era fasteners.

Thought they were older, but no. Yawn.

Also two musket balls and a 1930 penny.

Here’s where things get interesting. Cheryl was by the road now and called me over. Get a load of what she dug. OK, serious jealousy now.

Folks, this is a Spanish Reale – a silver coin that was honored as currency all over the world in the 1700s and 1800s. American colonists would just cut’em up to make change.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_real

Just to show her my impressive skills, I dug up a 1960s (?) tie clip. 

Nifty design.

Tie clip, right?

It was official. Cheryl had skunked me good.

That night, though, I took a closer look at that “half of a flat button” that I mentioned earlier.

WHUH???

Hmmmm.

Well. This was unexpected.

I posted this photo on CoinTalk – a numismatist site – and learned that I had dug a half of an India-Bengal Presidential Pice. (Not “piece” but “pice”…) Early 1800s.

Now how an India-Bengal Presidential pice found its way to a river bluff just outside of Nashville, Tennessee, I’m not sure we’ll ever know.  But maybe…

From a coin maker to a merchant to a trader to a sailor, then across many oceans to an anxious wife who paced the small confines of her widow’s walk somewhere on the Atlantic coast. Worn for a year inside a warm bosom. Then, during hard times, used to buy flour. Carried in a pocket, traded from grubby hand to grubby hand. Cut in half, split forever. Then carried in a saddle bag down the old buffalo path that was in the process of becoming Gallatin Pike. Then left, along Love’s Branch to the river where someone said there was a hospitable cabin on the Cumberland where one could rest for a night. From grubby hand to housewife’s cleaner one. Plopped into an apron. An apron with a small hole in a critical seam.

Dirt Girl Does Texas: Songs, Dust and Random Finds

Careful readers of Dirt Girl Unleashed have been warned that from time to time I may dig into other topics herein. Topics such as songwriting, which is another of my passionately explored avocations. Therefore this post recounts my recent trip to the Texas hill country to compete in the Kerrville Folk Festival’s New Folk songwriting competition. I did not bring either of my fine Tesoro metal detectors with me as I had NO ROOM to pack them.

For those of you for whom this tangent is simply unacceptable, I will enliven my tale with pictures from completely unrelated metal detecting excursions.  We’ll see how it goes. (And there may be a wee spot of hot, throbbing MD action at the end, if you are very good and read every word. And eat your peas.)

First some background. I have been submitting songs to the New Folk competition sporadically since the mid-1990s, when I began writing songs; I’d never been a finalist and had pretty much given up. But this year, decided to try One More Time; this time was the charm.

I will leave the entire discussion of how weird it is to “compete” in songwriting for another time. Songs, by their nature – as expressions of the longings and complexities of the human spirit – are by their nature perfect and beautiful. Or are they? I have not quite figured it out.

The Kerrville Folk Festival is a biggie, in its 41^st year. I was last there in the early ‘90s as a backup singer, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the extraordinary, surreal, musical and social meta-organism that it is. Stretching over three weekends in late May and early June, Kerrville attracts thousands of folkies who camp together in happy, dusty delirium. Many regard it as a sort of annual pilgrimage and have been coming for decades.  Over the years, small communities have sprung up; there are dozens of named campsites – Camp Coho, Camp Cuisine, Camp Kaffeine, and Camp Bayou Love (say it fast) to name just a few. These are often quite elaborate, festooned with decorations and solar powered Christmas lights. Each night, the common areas become song circles that can last all night.

Once my friend, fellow songwriter (and previous New folk winner) Kathy Hussey, learned that I’d be going to Kerrville this year, she decided to come too, and guide me gently through the process. I shall be forever grateful to her. It was through her that I ended up at Camp SingKerrnicity, down in the Lower Meadow.

We arrived on Wednesday, May 23 in the late afternoon, after landing in San Antonio and renting a massive white jeep. (Kathy has very battable eyelashes which translate into impressive car rental upgrade skills.)

Our rental car did not look like this.

What a cutie. 

Got beer. Set up tents, and I blew up my mattress with a foot pedal, which I know sounded like I was having crazy, wheezing sex inside my tent all by myself. Adjusted my brain and comfort level to camping mode.

Camping at SingKerrnicity means two big, fancy meals a day (I paid for them in advance) and the first night’s fare was etoufee. Not exactly wieners and beans, and I was very grateful. The competition wasn’t until the weekend so I had a few days to acclimate. Soon, we settled into an agreeable routine.

A routine that did not involve little, tiny guns like this one.

Bang, bang.

Up by 9ish (the sun toasts you out of your tent pretty quick). Coffee and breakfast. Then off for a swim in the Medina River which is cold and clean and lovely. (You want to stay at the river as long as possible because mid-day at the fest features a lot of dust and aimless wandering around looking for shade of any sort.) Get back by 6, have a lovely meal with lovely people at your campsite, then head up to one of two stages for the evening’s entertainment.

For example, Thursday night, I particularly enjoyed Guy Forsythe, from Austin. I also enjoyed a strawberry milkshake. Thirdly, Kathy and I enjoyed a vigorous dance to some wacky Russian folk music.

Here’s me, dancing to the Russian band Limpopo.

Get down tonight, baybeeee.

Then the real fun begins: campfires and song circles all over the place. Some loud and crazy, some quiet and gentle. Some featuring all original songs, some featuring Brown Eyed Girl and Margaritaville.  You just walk around with your guitar slung over your shoulder, looking for an empty chair and some likeminded folkies. You do this until your lack of sleep renders you senseless and dopey. Then: sweet tenty slumber. Hah. You hope. Earplugs help.

The New Folk competition takes place over two days during the Memorial Day weekend: two sets Saturday and two on Sunday in the Threadgill Theater.

I was to perform my two songs on Saturday afternoon -- the closing slot of the first set -- and was pretty nervous all that morning. Lots of time spent calming down. Breathing, stretching, keeping control of my brain, running through lyrics. Lots of liquids. I just love Gatorade. I don’t care about the high fructose corn syrup. That stuff is like yummy plasma.

When it was my turn to go, I just went out and did my two songs: one about a woman in a divorce court (an experience I had one time) and another about a woman who wants her husband to just make dinner once in a while (an experience I have had on multiple occasions). I didn’t have any major flubs and people seemed to like what I did, so I felt if not confident, then satisfied that I didn’t mess up in any royal sense. Enjoyed hearing all the other contestants. There were some really excellent performances.

Best of all, my cousin John and his partner Jimmie, drove all the way from Houston to cheer me on.

Here they are. I love them!

Family is everything. Well, family
and metal detecting.

The winners were announced on Sunday night at the Mainstage and miracle of miracles, Your Dirt Girl was chosen as one of the winners of New Folk 2012. I was rather happy about it.

This, however, brought with it a new responsibility: winners have to stay at Kerrville and perform the following weekend. Or you can go home and come back but that didn’t seem to make much sense. After much hemming and hawing with my hub over the phone, it was decided that I would stay on the Happy Valley Ranch (as it is called) for ANOTHER WEEK. Al (hub) would join me for the winners concert on Sunday, June 3.

Kathy and my other Nashville friends went back to their houses, spouses, pets, air conditioners and BATHROOMS in Tennessee and I hunkered down in the sun to write songs, meet people and learn how to balance my well-deserved pride in my accomplishment (a new feeling for me) with feelings of intense loneliness and physical discomfort.

Here's me sweating in my tent.

The problem with camping is the lack
of a handy flat iron. Note the unruly bangs.

 Three days thus passed. I will add that throughout my stay I met some amazingly brilliant, kind and generous people and heard more than my share of inspiring songs. I was humbled about every five minutes.

At the nadir of my sweating, a very nice lady named Liz loaned me her LEXUS and I drove to the town of Kerrville and ate the most delicious spinach enchiladas ever. Much of their deliciousness was due to their being served in an air-conditioned restaurant.

I ate the enchiladas with a fork that resembled this one, pulled from a field in middle Tennessee.

It's forkin' awesome, dude.

After dinner, I drove the Lexus to a grocery store and stocked up. Al was coming!

The next day, he arrived and got hugged harder than he has been hugged in a long time. I’m not sure he recognized the wire-haired, dust-covered creature that seemed permanently adhered to his neck but he was quite good-natured about it.

That night, we sang and played together in really lovely song circle made even more special by the appearance of Peter "Puff the Magic Dragon" Yarrow who hugged everyone there and was so sweet.

Spent Saturday at the river and rehearsing.

Sunday we performed a 25-minute set at the New Folk concert which was much fun.

Here we are.

The Hills are alive, if looking down.

Afterwards, there were group pictures and lots of friendliness. 

I'm in the center feeling a little out of my league,
but hanging in there. No one seems to notice.

Here we are with awesome bassist Freebo, who was super nice and liked Al's guitar tones. I like Al's guitar tones too. Very much.

Freebo, Dirt Girl, Al

Monday… home to Nashville.

Which brings us to … METAL DETECTING!!! (See? You read all that music stuff and now you get a nice treat.)

I’ll be brief. It took me a few days to catch up on all the work I’d missed, but Saturday I was itching to get out there. Cheryl and Doug have used my absence to pretty much remove all Civil War artifacts from the ground but I felt I had to at least make an effort.

Cheryl and I met at a location in middle Tennessee, the property of a friend who owns hundreds of acres of beautiful land.

Right away, I found this…

Whose buckle was this?

The guy whose property it was had a good question. "Why are all these buckles in the ground?" He's got a point. Did men in the woods 200 years ago just get mad at their belts and throw them on the ground and stomp off without them? Was there a mass pants-dropping? We may never know.

Then we got on four wheelers (or whatever you call them) and went for a hair-raising “ride” through the woods to another site. Cheryl drove, bless her heart. Despite my best intentions, I am a city girl and this ride involved quite a bit of screaming for which I apologize. Here are some verbal eruptions with which I polluted the Tennessee woods:

“NOOOOOO!”

“We’re GONNA TIPPPPP OOOVERRRRR!!!!”

“MAMACITAAAAAA” (that was a weird one. I have never said that before.)

and

“I’T’S GONNA CRUSH MY LEGS AND AAAAARRRMMSS!!!!”

Anyway, it was really fun. I only picked off three ticks.

Back home, I wasn’t ready to quit and went back out to Brush Hill Road to a yard I’ve dug dozens of times. Got this.

This is the prettiest, most ladylike button
I have ever found. I wuv it.

It was perfect.

May Daze

Let’s cut right to it.

On Thursday, I couldn’t type fast enough (dayjob) for I knew that at 6 p.m. I’d be heading over to the west side of town for some fun with my girlfriends, one of whom had been feeling a bit pooky lately due to some boy-related heart strain. (The heart, she reminds us, is a muscle and does not break – but it does hurt when strained).

As all good girlfriends know, the proven balm for heart strain is:

A balmy Thursday evening, beer, lawn chairs on the driveway, chips, guac, goat cheese, nuts, a couple of Tesoro metal detectors and the landlady’s permission to hunt the large, virgin yard of an old house that backs up to the railroad tracks.

Everyone was there when I arrived and after 30 minutes of chowing and yapping, we got down to business. I took the DeLeon and got MJ started on the tried and true Cibola. She wasted no time in pulling out this.

Nice job, kiddo! There was some dancing about with excitement.

It’s an American Signature brand sterling child’s fork. Probably 1940s…

Realizing that I was not dealing with amateurs, I decided not to rein in my extraordinary expertise. So I pulled out this:

Forget the gun, check out them gams!

It’s a starter pistol. I wonder what it started…

It cleaned up nice too. Barrel still turns.

Dude, your starting days are finished.

Kim and Kathy joined in and soon there was a major excavation going on: a really deep hole yielded … a lovely piece of wire.

In the MD world, wire can really mess up your head. It’s like, everywhere at the same time and it’s so thoroughly disappointing when you pull it out. You can’t even put a positive spin on it. (“Oh, wire! I can use it as a whisk!” or “Oh good, I can fashion a coat hanger!” or the ubiquitous response: “Oh! Art project!” Really, none of them applies to wretched wire.)

In another part of the yard, I pulled out a weird, lumpy clump and decided to just clean it up later.  Well, I should have taken it a bit more seriously because here’s what it looks like cleaned up:

Back of once valuable brooch. Sigh.

Front of once valuable brooch

Tarnation. I’m sure the diamonds and rubies that once encrusted it are still slumbering peacefully in the hole. Which hole would that be? I have no idea. I fill all my holes with surgical precision.

Found these two bullets in the same hole. I’ll have to wait until the next Middle Tennessee Metal Detecting Club meeting to look in the big bullet book and figure out what these are. They don’t look Civil War to me, but I’ve been wrong before. Any suggestions?

Soon it was too dark to dig. My now fully indoctrinated girlfriends were thrilled with their grand total of 26 cents and various pieces of trash. We repaired to the dining room where MJ’s newly polished sterling silver baby fork was used to polish off a bowl of spaghetti with marinara sauce. Then we played Dominos until the wee hours. Altogether, a fine evening of estrogen and sonic waves.

Well, I didn't want to be stingy with this very nice, flat, mowed, permission-granted yard and so returned with Cheryl two days later. We had a fine time. Enjoyed a cleansing rainstorm. Behold the riches:

This...

was about six inches from this.

Cheryl dug something really cool, but not yet identified. When she sends me a photo, I will post it.

Sunday, Cheryl and I met Doug at a construction site in Murfreesboro. It was too hot to be out there long and there was just so much trash it was tough going, but I found a nice harmonica reed just lying on the ground.

Before I knew better, I threw out a bunch of these
things thinking they'd fallen off of a lawn mower.
I am not sure how I came to this conclusion, having
no knowledge of lawn mower mechanics. But no,
this is a harmonica reed and they are EVERYWHERE
in the ground in Tennessee, left behind by
thousands of young soldiers who passed the hours
delivering sweet and mournful songs into the woods
that would one day be Music City.

Also found this:

I love license plates. They festoon my kitchen.

And so, dear reader, that was the weekend.  Nothing earth-shattering but lots of fun. Gearing up for my trip to the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas where I am a finalist in the New Folk Songwriting competition. You’d think I’d be practicing, but no, I’m trying to figure out if I should pack a machine….

“It’s like we’re all livin’ in a big ol’ cup... Just fire up the blender, mix it all up…"

If you’re checking in to see if I still like metal detecting, I do. I’ve been at it for 15 months and while I do not feel quite as enslaved by it as I did at the start – when, after a day of digging, I would feel kind of sick, as if having eaten too many eclairs – I am still very, very interested in doing it every chance I get.

In the last two weeks, my busy schedule (day job as a writer for a medical school, part time job teaching dance to sweet little children, walker of dogs, cooker of meals, marketer of Not About Madonna, and – oh, yeah – writer of songs) has made it hard to find time to get out there. But you know, give me 20 minutes at the end of a crazy day and I can dig the crap out of some dirt and come home with some history in my pocket.

First of all: my own yard continues to amaze. I’ve dug it countless times, but I’ve been revisiting it with my new Tesoro DeLeon and pulling out all kinds of new stuff.  One day about two weeks ago, a quick dusk hunt in the front yard yielded this.

Ladybug and The Boss

Isn’t that cute?

And then there’s the back yard. When I bought my first machine in January of 2011, the first place I went was the back yard and I immediately found a Civil War-era musket ball and not long after, a minie ball. But that was it, relic-wise. Until that evening two weeks ago. I stuck the ladybug in my pocket and went around back and – bing, bing, bing – found three more CW bullets (one of them quite smashed) and a more modern bullet.

Was there a camp here? A skirmish?

Here’s one “moment of discovery” for ya.

Another day, on my lunch break (I work from home) I went across the street to my neighbor’s huge yard that I have likewise hunted many times. Pulled this out!

Was very excited, until I turned it over.

Made me laugh and think about the ‘60s and how, if we’d had a car I would have LOVED to collect all the Shell Mr. President Coin Game tokens. I like how all this stuff is all jumbled up in the dirt. Civil War bullets, ‘60s Shell tokens, ladybugs, pennies. The land is like a big Christmas fruitcake. And I love me a good fruitcake, any time of year.

Last Sunday, Doug and Brenda drove me and Cheryl to a field about an hour east of Nashville. Do you want me to tell you where? I won’t do it.  I won’t tell. I will tell you though, that as we drove there, I thought about how badly I wanted to find a cool coin. I have NEVER found anything more interesting than a wheat penny. So, I put that out there.

We parked under a tree and climbed over a fence. (Yes, we had permission.) It was easy hunting, as the field had been plowed recently.  Doug believed there had been homesteads here, back in the 1700s and the bits of colored crockery and the old, rusty nails we found supported that.

Then I dug this!

Doug thought it was a Large Cent – a common penny in the early 1800s. When I got home, though, I took a picture and posted it on a numismatist forum. They were so helpful! At first, they said it was a farthing, but the final diagnosis is that it is a George III Half Pence. This would date it between 1770 and 1775. Here it is up close.

Note the BR... on the bottom left. That's the start of "BRITAIN".
You can kind of see the image of a seated woman, facing left,
with her right hand outstretched. Under the line at the bottom,
you can see "17..." but I can't make out the entire date.

Strangely, the flip side has been kind of defaced. Weird.

Who did that and why?

So I guess it must have come over on a ship, then made its way, from homespun pocket to homespun pocket, to a field in Tennessee.  That night, I took the half pence to a festive dinner party. It had fun.

Today, (Easter Sunday), Doug and Cheryl and I went back to that field. On the way, we got into a minefield of a conversation about various historical and social issues. Voices were raised and spit (mine) was flying (only a little) and heart rates (mine) were raised (quite a lot). I didn’t like it much; I don’t like conflict. But I thought of it as a wonderful opportunity for the exchange of ideas, even if you can never, in a million years, agree with some of those you receive in trade. I really, really, REALLY like and respect the people I go out digging with. The fact that we have some profound differences in the way we see the world might make me uncomfortable, but it’s the price – and privilege – of living in a country where all kinds of people live together and interact every day. We're like that line in my favorite Brad Paisley song: "It's like we're all livin' in a big ol' cup... just fire up the blender and mix it all up..."

When we got to the field, I didn’t do nearly as well as last week. Doug skunked us both, pulling out a veritable museum display case of colonial-era thingies, including a silver thimble and what I think will turn out to be another half pence coin. I found three partial horseshoes (now soaking in a jar in my bathroom… why? I have no idea), an old, G-shaped iron hook, a thing that Doug says is part of an colonial-era, two-pronged fork, a metal tab off a strap from when the field was used for maneuvers during World War II, and my very first Native American arrowhead. Also a couple of flattened beer cans. Of course.

Talk about your jumble of history: arrowhead (super sharp),
colonial fork thing and WWII strap tab...

Here's the "hook"... G-shaped, as if to say,
"Gee, aren't you spending a little too much
time metal detecting?"

Hot and tired, we headed back to the car whereupon Doug drove us around to various enticing historic sites where we did not have permission to dig, and to a couple where we did have permission, but no one was home. We stopped on a bridge and the three of us looked down into a copper-colored river. There, in the sun were fish, hundreds of them, all facing the same way. I don’t know my fish, but Doug and Cheryl saw bream, catfish, bass and something called “suckers” that I really don’t hope to have any direct contact with.  Funny thing was, all these different fish were floating together, facing in the same direction. Like they were listening to a speech or a sermon – it was Easter Sunday, after all. Maybe they were focusing on their similarities. I don't know what they were up to, but it was surprisingly ... organized.

Last stop was Bledsoe’s Station – a colonial-era fort which Doug and Brenda discovered in a farmer’s field 30 years ago. Now it’s a protected historical park. As we drove in, this is what we saw:

OK. That was surreal. We went over for a chat. These four picnickers were members of the Regency Society (“a group for Ladies and Gentlemen that is dedicated to remembering and preserving the history, culture and costume of the 1790-1820 time period.”) They very kindly allowed me to take their photograph even though I was quite obviously wrecking their lovingly crafted time machine ju-ju by hurtling towards them with my IPhone. Turns out two of them were from Michigan! My enthusiastic “Go BLUE!” was met with polite nods (these were lords and ladies of the Spartan variety).

And will you look at this! Here’s their blog about that very same outing.

http://rsatn.blogspot.com/

Once again, the mingling of history.

Finally, a tangent, filmed in the field where Indians hunted, pioneers chopped wood, WWII soldiers practiced before heading off to war and tractor drivers drank Budweiser just a year or so ago. So much of metal detecting is the hunt, the history rush, the holding of the ancientness. But just as much are moments like this: