I’ve found lots of neat stuff while driving on back roads and highways. Lariat ropes, hand tools big and small, bunches of bungee cords, etc. I think that my neatest find was a long HEAVY duty “logging chain” that is used in securing oilfield drilling rig equipment while moving.
As for when not driving, I found a nice arrowhead in town in my backyard while real young. Also found an old abandoned cemetary once around Tremintina NM, sandstone fence and markers in Spanish all from around the turn of the century and most young. Must have been some sort of epidemic.
The most useful item turned up when my father and I took a break from Bondoing (Bondoing, Verb- to fix a car with the cheap commercial fiberglass product Bondo) my car to get some more beer and rethink are strategy. The job wasn’t going well, the holes were too big and my old standby method of using newspaper to make a paper mache like surface wasn’t working. As we were taking the long way back from the store over some dirt roads while enjoying our beers (it was legal then) we found a big (3’x3’) piece of sheet metal in the road. It was grey, slightly crumpled, and extremently thin and flexible. There was black lettering all over it like a page from a newspaper. We took it home and with tin snips and a few pop-rivets had my car fit for inspection in no time.
When I was a kid we found a kitten. We kept it but it was evil.
I found a few almost perfect arrowheads when I was growing up in Louisana. My proudest find was discovering the original family cemetary at my in-laws 1700’s era house in New Hampshire. I knew it was on the property somewhere but I couldn’t find it even after two years of trying. They have 300 acres so I searched far and wide. One day, I was poking around an old trash dump mainly used around the turn of the 20th century about 100 yards from the house. It was only about 20 feet by 20 feet and bordered by stone walls. I saw the corner of a large stone sticking out of the ground. I grabbed a shovel, exposed it and found that it was a base stone with a notch that held the tombstone. I dug test holes all that day and found three more graves. We are trying to restore the small cemetary now. My FIL wants to be buried there. I have no idea why people decided to dump their trash on to of people’s graves.
About a mile underground, just checking out an old adit for possible drill siting, I notice that the roof of the tunnel is lava, with a bumpy surface, and that it’s faulted down in front of me. So taking my trust Estwing, I swing at it, like one does. This chunk breaks away that’s absolutely covered with perfect cubic pyrites. That chunk of rock, and the ones with trilobites on them that I dug out in the Karroo, are the neatest things I’ve ever found.
Well, that and the goat skull…
When I was 7 years old my parents and I were hiking around the Cascade Creek above Durango, CO and I found a trilobyte fossil. It’s on my bookshelf right now. One of them is partially broken off but the other is intact. At our house in the same location I found a weird looking rock that at first I thought was a fossil but now I am not so sure. I should take it to my old geology prof.
We had launched our small sailboat in a creek just off Middle River at the start of our vacation. We were sailing out to the Chesapeake and we saw something floating ahead of us. As we got closer, we saw it was a cooler, without a lid, but full of ice, beer, and soda. There were no other boats nearby, and non that appeared to be looking for a lost cooler. A bit off to starboard (that’s to the right) we spotted the lid, and retrieved it, too.
We drank the sodas and gave the beer to my BIL. We used that cooler for a lot of years - I think my daughter has it now.
Being somewhat of a junk -junkie I have found several things I am proud of. One of my most prized finds is an eye of a gargoyle. I was trapsing around an old cemetary in Connecticut when I saw a near perfect half-spere shaped stone. Looking around I noticed it had come off a gargoyle eroding on top of a nearby crypt. I’ve had it now for nearly 15 years…
Among other things I’ve found and kept that are worth remembering include: an 1854 gold one dollar found in the back of a restored 1880 floor safe - mint condition - about the size of a contemporary dime.
Various old west trinkets including a jar of marbles and a stage coach number…
If it’s obscure and worth picking up, or if the way I found it is worthy of a good story, I generally pick it up and take it along.
For more formal findings try geocaching…its very fun!
I was a teenager riding my ATC down a trail in the woods that was once a set or railroad tracks. I saw something bright red that struck me as odd. I turned around and picked it up. It was a deflated helium balloon with a name and address on it.
A 9 year old girl named Jennifer from Ohio let it go at school. (20 years later and I still remember her name and home town.) It went over Lake Erie and to me in upstate New York. I wrote to her and she answered back saying of the few that were recovered, hers went the farthest.
Since then I’ve stopped on the side of the road and went after any loose balloons I’ve ever seen but no more messages.
Walking along, I found a heavy chain with hooks at ends which I dragged it home. That chain went into the trunk of my first car, has followed along vehicular progression, and has been used to remove vehicles from ditches, along with other tasks.
A few years back I worked at a store in a small strip mall. Though we were about two miles away from Lake Erie, the parking lot was home to a lot of seagulls. One morning as I’m walking across the lot to my store, a seagull drops something a few yards in front of me…something sparkly. As I head toward the object, the seagull swoops down to retrieve it, but drops it again, this time closer to me. I pick it up, and it is a faceted clear crystal, about the size of a grape,but round with two sides flattened off, with the letter “W” etched on one of the flat sides. Meanwhile the seagull is swooping around my head, screeching at me angrily. I still have the crystal, and I’m still afraid that one day that seagull’s going to find me again…
My mom was planting sunflowers in the front yard when she dug up a diamond ring. It kicked around our house for a few years, and she had it reset into a necklace for my 18th birthday. I’ve never worn it, though, because it’s not insured. Maybe I’ll wear it to prom, and I’ll definately wear it when I graduate from high school.
“Ain’t no sound like the sing of an Estwing!” Man they make the best hammers.
My find was near our hunting land. Hiking alongside a little river I found a petrified Buffalo arm bone. It resides proudly on the top shelf of my desk.
Okay… this one will sound very slanted, and anyone who knows me now won’t believe it…
When I was about 13 or 14, I found a small aluminum cross on the sidewalk, in an area where I very rarely walked. It was obviously a Christian cross, with text on it it that said something like “I Believe in Jesus.” At that point in my life, I was very confused, and I took it to be an omen. I became very involved in the church my family attended then, and the faith that developed as a result carried me through some very rough years as I finished high school and went onto college, with that cross in my pocket.
Soon after I started college, though, and after the roughest spots were passed, I lost the cross. I just hope that someone else found it and got as much out of it as I did.
I found a lot of perfect leaf fossils as a kid. I still know where to find them, and I bet if I went back, there would be more.
Once while walking, a few years ago, I looked down and saw a pen. When I picked it up, I saw that it had my first name on it. It was a green pen with my name painted on in pink letters.
Hiking on a friends property I found the wrought-iron step off a horse drawn carridge, very intricate patterns across the whole thing.
In central Australia, the remains of an old lever-action rifle. Rusted to hell & all the wood eaten away by white-ants but still a great decoration for the shelf.
I’m a picker-upper. The flat has plenty of ‘road-kill’ furniture/kitchen stuff etc. which goes straight back out on the pavement when replaced for someone else to make use of. And shells ? stones ? I’m addicted.
But found without looking ?
Sitting on a tiny shingle beach (very small pebbles, almost like gravel) in Brittany, I brought up may hand with a few grains stuck to it and there was a tiny cowrie shell They’re not that common here and it was so small you’d never have found it for looking. I keep it with me for luck.
MUCH more important, and perhaps a bit of subject, my future husband (Ponster ) I found him, just by chance, sitting in a bar. Men like him aren’t common and in a city the size of Paris you’d never have found him for looking. I intend to keep with him for life.
