The return of the ring
J.R.R. Tolkien would enjoy this one
Derek Halberg was back on the Cape from North Carolina around Christmas, 2022, and seeing as the family concluded that his remarkable father-in-law Peter Johnson shouldn’t be wielding weedwackers and chainsaws anymore (with Peter’s wholehearted agreement), Derek was doing just that on a handsome trail that leads through family land to Little Pleasant Bay in Orleans.
The reviving forest is protected by conservation restrictions, and Derek is sympatico; he runs a land conservation organization in North Carolina when he’s not wacking brush here, so he married into the right family.
It was cold, work and winter gloves in play. When enough was cleared the troupe tromped to the bay for a look at Pochet Island, Sampson Island, Money Head, and the mouth of “the River” that leads up to Nauset Marine. Not for long; wind chill pushed them off.
On the hike back Derek realized something very upsetting: His wedding ring had slipped away.
He and Christy (Johnson) had been married in 1999, 9-11 of all days, two years before the tragic event, kids college age by now. Of course that ring meant a lot; for the next three hours he combed the trail, even went to a hardware store and rented a detector that sweeps the ground and emits a frequency to signal metal.
“The ring must have come off while I was changing gloves,” he figured, and so he kept retracing the trail, never searching the beach itself.
“I found nothing except one dime, not even an old dime,” he laughs.
When he broke the news to Christy, she was fine but he remained upset. He remembered how he had asked the jeweler to inscribe the inside of the band with their initials, CMJ and DEH, plus the wedding date. “The jeweler thought that was a little tacky, but I insisted,” he smiles.
Then life, as it does, carried on.
Fast forward 16 months to May 8, 2024 and another wedding anniversary, this time Sarah and Bill Dermody celebrating. They have a home in Brewster, Sarah with deep Orleans roots in the Nichols family who own land beside the Johnsons’ at Little Pleasant Bay. She often visited her grandmother as a kid, still loves it there and takes her big dog walking the bay.
Sarah got a surprise anniversary present that day.
“I’d been wanting a metal detector and no one really wanted me to get one, they thought I’d look like this old lady walking around,” she laughs. “But then Bill appeared with it, so I was excited.”
She went straight to the bay and fired it up. “I took a couple of steps, not far at all, and heard it go off. I dug into the sand maybe six inches down, and there it was! A ring!”
In perfect shape, the ring was inscribed with initials, and a date. So she wrote a note, made a few copies to put in neighborhood locations, folded one and wedged it into an old garage door on the Johnson land:
“I found a man’s wedding ring on the beach yesterday. I sure hope we can find the owner.” She added a description, including the inscription, and her phone number.
None of the Johnsons stop down to the garage regularly at that time of year. So the note sat there, rain pouring, squirrels scampering, for more than a month until June 12, when Christy stopped by. It was still there, still legible.
“Christy called right away, and Sarah was over-the-moon happy,” Derek says.
“Next thing you know, Sarah appeared at my door in Brewster,” Peter recalls. The ring, like something out of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, had returned.
“I do believe I will never find anything else with that machine,” says Sarah. “I’ve only taken it out once since. I realized it’s only good at the beach, if you’re in hard dirt you can’t dig down and get something out, especially if you’re on someone’s land, and need to make a big hole. Plus everyone was right; it’s a little embarrassing to walk around with it.”
“The whole thing kind of renews your faith in humanity,” Derek concludes. “Sarah could have just taken it. But it wasn’t about making money for her, it was finding something she could connect to a person.
“Now thanks to her we have another great family story from Cape Cod that we will tell for a long, long time.”
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Great story!!