I got a call on this crisp fall day from a young man who had lost his platinum wedding band while playing with his two-year-old son in a corn box at the county fair. If you’ve never seen one, a corn box is a big wooden sandbox filled with several inches of dried corn kernels instead of sand. Kids climb in, scoop, pour, and bury their feet, and it’s about the most fun a toddler can have for the price of admission. It’s also a surprisingly easy place for a ring to disappear, since thousands of loose kernels shift and settle around every little hand and foot.
He had searched for hours the previous day, sifting kernels through his fingers, but came up empty. He did have a very good idea of the corner of the box where they’d been playing, which gave me a real head start. We met early the next morning, before the fair reopened, when the grounds were quiet and the box was still undisturbed. I started making slow, overlapping passes, and it took only a few minutes before the detector gave me a clear, steady tone. A little careful scooping, and there it was: his platinum band, right where he thought it had gone. He slipped it back on his finger with a big smile.
Moments like that are why I do this.
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