Fishing for Nickels
Demetri Martin has a joke about metal detectors, that he’d like to get a batch of hand-crafted metal urns marked “Get a life!” and bury them in scattered locations. Makes sense.
I got a metal detector when I was a kid, maybe seven or eight years old. I asked for it. Out of all the wonders the world has to offer, I wanted a metal detector for my birthday. Even now, I’m not entirely sure why; it just seemed so…neat. The portable jobs were coming into mass production, and were advertised on local stations on Sundays, when the airwaves were cheap. They like to imply that the world was littered with buried pirate treasure, and all that stood between you and a fortune was the inability to sense metal inches below the surface of the ground. Even if you were so unfortunate as to have a back yard utterly lacking in chests from a Spanish galleon, a small fortune could be made in finding small change that had dropped out of pockets. And think of what a relief it would be to find those lost car keys!
Those ads were pretty shifty, even to my innocent eyes. Not many Spanish galleons made it to suburban Illinois, and even fewer sank there. I confess I did harbor fantasies of recovering car keys inexplicably dropped back near the lilac bushes, instead of right next to the car. But if the opportunity never arose, that was okay, too. I didn’t expect to get rich; I just thought it would be neat to go finding stuff. Pocket change would be nice, but I’d be happy with old, rusty washers and springs, too. I was driven by a nascent geekiness, the pleasure of handling something needlessly technological.
The real disappointment was that the metal detector didn’t do that all too well, either. Technically, of course, metal detectors do not detect metal, but rather regions of high conductivity. They project a magnetic field, and highly conductive materials—like metal—alter the field as it passes over them. And those regions are continuous, not discrete, so the signal is likewise a matter of degree. It’s not so much silence…silence…silence…beep! quarter…silence…silence as staticstaticstaticstaticstaticcracklestaticstatic. That barely audible crackle could be a bottle cap, or it could be the product of holding the metal detector’s antenna a quarter inch closer to the ground than you did on the last pass, or it could be Jupiter rising in Sagittarius. Wave the detector past again, and you might get a different result. Not very reliable. Often, it registered a positive when there was nothing to be found; we had a dog, and I suspect dog wee-wee is a fair conductor. After a little frustration, we discovered the machine didn’t give a clear signal when deliberately passed over a keyring. Add the general unpleasantness of the continual static buzz, and the fact that the lightweight, portable mechanism was still awkwardly large for a seven-year-old, and I lost interest quickly.
I was a quicker learner than some guys. For a few years afterwards, you could still see somebody, usually a seedy adult, waving one about any large beach. Periodically, they’d stop and pick something out of the sand, but this was a time when the pop-tops did not remain attached to soda cans, so I can’t believe they ever found much—certainly not enough to repay the endless hours of waving detector around while everybody else was swimming or playing volleyball or climbing dunes. When I spotted one of these guys, I mostly thought, “sucker.” But some part of me still wistfully wished I could find something with mine.
For a long time, I looked back on my metal detector as one of the lousiest gifts I’d ever received, despite being at my own request. It didn’t’ work, and for years clogged my closet as a reminder of my own gullibility. But with the perspective of age, I may need to rethink that assessment. Certainly, I remember it better than most of my birthday presents—the excitement at unwrapping it and taking it out for a test run, if nothing else. And it was a powerful lesson in the value of a critical eye towards advertising. Ah, wisdom. Perhaps the greatest gift of all.