Just sharing....
So about 40 years ago, right after I had read “Alas Babylon”(for the second time) and “Malevil” I was very concerned about “What If” something cataclysmic might happen. So I gathered up some supplies and put them in a metal drum. I sealed up the drum and painted it with several coats with a brand new kind of paint that came in two cans, one can was hardener and the other was resin. It did not wash out of the brushes at all and I ended up ruining about 4 of my father’s paint brushes with that stuff. I buried that barrel.
I did that in late May of 1974 just before I got married and went to boot camp. I spent the better part of a day with a shovel digging a hole in the floor of an old barn on a good friend’s farm. I dug the hole down to about 8 feet then I dug a hole in the bottom as deep as I could dig with a set of post hole diggers(probably about 36 inches or so) and filled that hole and the bottom foot of the big hole with inch and a half “crusher run” gravel. My thinking was to make a French drain to keep my barrel from “sitting” in water. I set the barrel down in the hole then I filled the hole around the barrel up with river sand. I used the dirt from the hole to fill the last two feet or so of the hole. I packed it down and swept it and piled about 4 inches more of the dirt on it so that as it settled it would not leave a depression. The next day I stacked about 100 bales of alfalfa hay over it to hide the fresh dirt and the disturbed area. My friend would feed the hay out over the winter but I hoped that by then it would have settled and the loose hay would be good camouflage.
On June the 24th of 1974 I married my sweetheart, and on the 25th I left for San Diego and Navy boot camp. Then in September I started sub school in New London. From there we went to Damneck Va for Guided Missile school. 26 weeks of “A” school and then 26 weeks of “C” school and then 14 weeks of “Tender School” Next came two patrols on the blue crew of the Ethan Allen SSBN 608 then 26 months on the USS Proteus AS-19 in Guam.
In the late fall of 1979 we came back home. In the spring of ’80 I drove out to the place to see what my cache looked like. The barn was gone and the whole place was now a plowed field. The barn, the house, the shop and the well house was all gone. Across the road was a brand new brick home. I drove up to the new place and knocked on the door. My friend’s mother came to the door and greeted me with a hug and a smile. My friend was married and living in Utah. His dad, her husband, had passed away two years before. The family had sold most of the place and she had built the new house with the profits from selling the 600 areas across the road.
Over the next couple of years I tried probing to find the barrel. No luck. All my reference points were gone. Last year a gentleman that I had worked with for 15 years bought a high end metal detector. I asked him if he thought he could find a metal drum with more metal in it if it were buried 3 or 4 feet deep. He said “Easy” I kind of explained what I was thinking, trying to be pretty vague about the contents of the barrel. He said if I would get permission he would be glad to give it a shot.
Last month after several trips out to the place we think we have found the barrel. I have not dug it up yet. I am not as fond of using a shovel as I used to be. My son is going to be around for a couple of days over the Christmas holiday and we have a plan.
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Originally Posted by DS
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