Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Ladona Gardner’s husband, Aaron Gardner, gave her a diamond ring as a Christmas present just after they moved to Sweet Home and just before he deployed to Iraq with his Army unit before Christmas.
It wasn’t as if it were her wedding ring, she said, but under the circumstances, it was more important.
Somehow she dropped the ring in the snow that recently covered Sweet Home.
“I just came home from vacation, and I had 9 inches of snow in my yard,” Gardner said. “I shoveled off half my driveway.”
She had no gloves though, and her fingers started swelling, she said, so she put her ring in her pocket. She forgot to zip the pocket as she moved her car and shoveled the other half of the driveway.
Later she discovered her ring was no longer in her pocket.
Her search was quickly frustrated because she wasn’t looking in the right place for the ring.
She got on her hands and knees and started digging through the snow, she said. With twilight approaching, to ensure that the ring would not disappear into the city’s storm drains with melting snow, she blocked the runoff with rocks and bags.
The next morning she looked around some more in the light but still couldn’t find the ring, she said. That’s when she went to Oregon Prospecting and Rita’s Relics and rented a metal detector.
“She told me she lost a ring,” owner Rita Huston said. “And I gave her a few pointers.”
Gardner was unable to locate the ring, primarily because of the rebar in the concrete driveway, and she wasn’t actually looking in the right place.
“She came back the next day, and I asked if she’d had any luck,” Huston said. “She said, no.”
Huston called her husband, Steve, and suggested they give it one more shot.
Steve Huston grabbed his White’s Electronics MXT detector and they went to work at Gardner’s Grape Court home.
“For general stuff like that, White’s MXT is the best machine,” Huston said.
Gardner said Huston told her that the ring would not be where she thought.
“He said it would be in the last place you’d think it would,” Gardner said.
He had Gardner walk him through what she had done the day she lost the ring, Huston said. She told him that a neighbor boy had thrown a snowball at her at one point and she grabbed some snow and ran across the yard to throw it back at him.
That gave Huston a clue about where she may have lost the ring.
He gambled on how he thought the ring was made and set his detector’s sensitivity to ignore rebar and manhole covers. He ran over the driveway, although he did not expect to find the ring there and then moved on to the yard where Gardner had chased the boy who had thrown the snowball.
Huston detected something in a mound of snow, he said. He grabbed a handful of snow at a time, putting it under the detector and then tossing away the snow until he found a handful of snow that showed a metal object inside.
“Then I walked up to her and put the snow close to her feet,” Huston said. He let her recover the ring.
“She was very pleased,” Huston said. “She turned, went back in the house and said, ‘Don’t leave, yet.'”
Huston said he knew what was coming, and he tried to get away, but with a handful of bills she caught up to him in his truck and told him, “This is all I have.”
He refused, Gardner said.
“I told her, I can’t accept it. I’ve never charged for finding a ring, and I don’t want to start with you.”
“That’s when she started to cry,” Huston said. He told her not to cry – It was choking him up too.
“My payment is the look on their faces,” he said. “My satisfaction is making someone happy.”
Huston said he enjoys detecting. He started out using a White’s Electronics Coinstar II in 1971. He spent a couple of decades during which he did no detecting, he said, and now it’s his passion.
The Gardners grew up in Creswell and moved into a new home on Grape Court after looking for property to purchase in a variety of areas. Ladona Gardner is now working for Edward Jones in Lebanon.
She said she didn’t expect the kind of help she got from Huston in a town where she hasn’t gotten a chance to get to know anyone yet. “Finding it and not expecting anything in return – that’s amazing.”