"Treasure??" in Benicia

They say one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. I need to differ with whoever “they” are because in this case junk became a boy’s treasure. It seems a few weeks ago after one of the longer rains, my 7 year old grandson was playing in the “back 40” which we lovingly call the open space behind our home. He came dragging home a really old / rusty piece of metal inquiring as to what it was. He was pretty sure he had found an outlaw gun from long ago. I looked at it and confirmed it was indeed an old shotgun trigger and breach assembly from a single shot shotgun. Upon closer inspection we could faintly read a stamping showing it was a Savage Model 220 single shot maybe a 12 gauge shotgun built in the early to mid-20th century.

He was really excited about it and every time he came to visit we talked about his “treasure” and could “we” go out and find the rest of it?  He discovered I have a pretty good metal detector so I told him I guessed we could take it out and see what we could find. It took us a couple of hours to put the dang thing together and get enough batteries to fire it up. I cautioned him about finding anything dangerous like a complete gun or a “treasure” that looked like a missile, bomb or hand grenade. If he did, he was to move away from it immediately, let me know and we would call the authorities who would investigate and make sure it was safely removed.

In this case, we were looking for pieces of a gun like a barrel or any miscellaneous parts. Well, I guarantee you it is much more fun to be a kid looking for treasure than it is to be an adult. My “detector” found more beer tabs, rusty nails, loose bolts than I imagined existed. My back was sore, my feet were muddy and my temperament was moving south quickly.

In the meantime, my grandson was using the first rule of looking for treasure and he “looked”. To my amazement, he pulled a barrel out of the muddy rubble and it indeed was the rest of his earlier find; it was a .410 barrel and it looked like it would fit the piece he already found. We brought it home, washed and brushed it off, and he showed his now complete treasure to his Nana, my wife, who promptly told us to take the dirty thing out of her house. We now have it at my shop and I am going to mount it onto a wood frame so he can hang it in his room, if his Mother lets him?

Now each time he comes over we play catch, talk baseball and he dreams about (our) his next big treasure hunt. He is convinced pirate treasure lies under the beaches of Benicia and told me it would really be fun to dig for treasure. I told him we have to restore every hole we dig and fun really becomes work when we don’t find anything. He assures me we will find “treasure” and while I’m not optimistic I know he will get me out there somehow because that’s what Papas do.