When the weather is cool some afternoons I like to walk up into the woods behind our house with a metal detector. As a hobby, prospecting is a lot like fishing: there's the excitement you get from pulling up from below an unknown thing--even if all you do is throw it back--but mostly its about patience.

Walking with the metal detector helps me slow down, reminds me to look. I find a lot of trash, of course, old wire and and beer cabs and corroded soup-cans. A lot of nails. I take some pleasure in the simple process of sifting the dirt until I find something small as a nail. I carry a bucket and collect everything I find, keeping a few things and throwing the rest away. I've found a few old campfire sites; they're always good for burnt, rust-corroded cans. Around one location I found a two old whiskey bottles and stopped for awhile thinking about the men who once sat drinking around a fire at that spot.

My house borders the national forest, just below North Mountain. It is a gorgeous bit of woods, today, but much of the area was once clear cut and desolate. Back then the open scar of a novaculite quarry ran along a ridge a hundred or so yards up the hill, its tailings and gravel piled alongside in ugly disordered mounds. Eighty or so years later it's all grown over with ivy, trees and brush. There are few signs of the mining operation, anymore. The quarry itself is a picturesque pool, now.

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About six months ago, I was hiking and digging along the ridge near the water tower at one of North Mountain's lower peaks and the metal detector started beeping. I stopped, digging into the black dirt, rocks and loam and about four inches down found one hypodermic needle tip. Thankfully I was wearing gloves and didn't stick myself. I dug a bit more and found another, then another, then a whole bunch of them.

My mind reeled at first--here were hundreds of them in a corroded Maxwell House coffee tin buried in the woods. It seemed wrong, sinful. It was like uncovering a coiled mass of baby snakes in your sock drawer.

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All sorts of illicit stories suggested themselves. Who would have so many needles and why? Would an addict take the care to bury his used needles in the woods? How long had they been in the ground? How long did take a coffee tin to corrode?

Aside from the needles and other trash, the many scraps of tin and wire, I have found a few things worth keeping: an old iron horseshoe--I like to think it is from one of the mules that hauled novaculite down from the little quarry--as well as old pennies, metal buttons, rusted locks and a few corroded, hand-cut nails.

Finding these relics has its own kind of tiny thrill, but what sends me back up the mountain is something more than greed or curiosity, but rather a kind of remembrance, a reclamation.

What I mean is this: even digging up something as worthless as an old tin can makes me very aware of all the intangible history around me. I like thinking about the man who ate lunch from that can forty years back, how it lay beneath leaves all those years until I happened upon it. What did that man look like? What worries weighed on his heart? I resurrect those who came before: the working men who cut rocks on the mountain, their fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers, and the European explorers who followed ancient, worn trails leading them up from the South, every mile suggesting a new world and before them, the natives who mined the rocks for thousands of years, heating stones in their fires and cracking them open in razor-sharp lines.

These moments are better than any treasure. Alone in the woods at such times I feel a temporary peace with the fact of my own impermanence, the knowledge of which each day accrues the weight of truth, a peace that rests in the prayer that someone many years from now might one day find a coin lost from my own pocket, might for an instant bring me back.