Over the Christmas holiday, a friend and I were walking to lunch after a fresh snow had fallen. While engrossed in conversation, I walked into a pile of some snow and slipped.
Mostly embarrassed, I got up and felt like something was lost. I checked my pocket for the three usual things — wallet, phone, and keys. Check. All was in order so I chalked it up to my pride being what was missing and continued on to lunch (after a little laughing about the event).
We ordered sandwiches from the deli and continued talking in earnest, when about half way through the lunch, I noticed that there was nothing solid between my fingers. No the sandwhich hadn’t disappeared, and I realized it wasn’t only my pride I had lost in the fall. My wedding ring was gone. After eliminating the sandwich as the suspect :), my friend identified the fall as the culprit and we agreed to go look right after lunch.
When we returned to the scene of the “street theft”, we saw that they had plowed the snow and no trace of the imprint was left in the snow. We kicked around the snow abit before heading to hardware store (in the same shopping center) to see if they had a metal detector, but to no avail.
He agreed to keep his eye out for it, after all, he had recently found a key that had been lost in the snow until it melted. I returned to work, searched for a metal detector to see if there was one locally – the closest internet search came up 45 miles away. Certainly not going to cut it. Finally, I was encouraged by a collegue to try calling up a tool rental place (rather than just doing an internet search) and did so. They had one! But there were just about to close and someone else had lost their only set of keys in the snow and had rented the detector until morning. So even though it looks like everything is on the internet, it isn’t.
I woke up early on Christmas eve and my brother-in-law, Ben, was willing to head out on a very cold morning to search for the ring in the snow. Plus we were both fascinated by how metal detectors work.
We picked up the metal detector at the shop. It was beeping like a barking dog in the rental store and excitedly we took it out to the site of the fall. We started doing some basic sweeping of the street corner with no sounds. We continued to make adjustments to the depth and the sensitivity but still we couldn’t find anything metal. Eventually, Ben dropped his keys on the sidewalk to see if the metal detector would pick them up. We adjusted all of the settings but still couldn’t detect the keys without violently shaking the detector and even then only occasionally — this was not a good sign.
After trying to warm up the detector in a coffee shop to make sure it just wasn’t cold, we still had no success and returned to the rental place only to have them realize one of the batteries was loose (it worked well in the store earlier due to the shaking and the fact that metal was everywhere and the shaking caused the battery to touch sufficiently to beep). We made sure it could find keys on the sidewalk before leaving.
Back in the car, we returned to the site, glad that this time it detected a sprinkler. We found another piece of burried treasure, but we passed on digging it up since we were really only looking for one thing. Finally, by the grace of God, we wondered out into the street where there was about 2 inches of packed snow, and we heard a beep. We raked a little and the beep moved, and then, Ben reached down and pulled out the ring(s).
By all appearances, several cars had run over them, but they were intact, and with a little bending, even wearable. Though cars may run over our marriage, yet still it remains intact. 🙂
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