The woman’s wedding ring was out there, somewhere in the sand. Her husband thought he had a pretty good idea where, but it was not to be.
To back up, late in the day on Friday, my 9-year-old and I went to Atlantic Avenue Beach to explore a little with his metal detector. Only a moment after we came down the dune path from near the dank restrooms, a man ran over to us. “I lost my wife’s wedding ring. Can you possibly help us look?”
This was an exciting prospect. Other than digging up old farm metal at my sister’s former place on Accabonac Road, Ellis’s finds had been few or of scant interest. He gets a lot of metal foil and nails. At the beach there are aluminum pull-tabs. A wedding ring was potentially the biggest yet.
The husband showed us where they had been sitting with friends. He confessed that he had placed the ring in a cup in a chair’s cup holder, and when it was time to go, and the chair folded, the ring must have flown out.
We backtracked along the plover fence from the point where the loss was first noticed. Then we made a rough grid around the area they had just occupied and swept the detector back and forth.
Try as we did for about an hour, there was no happy ending. I took a cellphone number from the couple in case we found or heard of anyone finding it later.
On Monday evening, back at Atlantic Avenue for a late swim, I spoke with Harry King, a classmate of mine at East Hampton High School who is a much more serious metal seeker. He said that I was the third person that day to tell him about the missing ring.
From my perspective, there are surprisingly few metal items on East Hampton beaches. Ellis and I picked up far more plastic and paper litter than had hits from his detector. And don’t get me started on all the bonfire debris!
As far as I could tell from down the beach a ways, Harry had no luck at all either looking for the ring. The couple placed an ad in The Star this week in the hope that somebody finds it. The thing is, someone probably will, it just might take a very long time.