I looked at the old map online. The website allows you to toggle between a modern satellite image and a 1913 topographic map. The historical document is pockmarked with black squares, each one marking a habitation. When I slide the transparency to the present though, the squares disappear, replaced with green and brown—water or no water, irrigated or arid—the present landscape of the Owens Valley. Nothing left of the old homesteads.

I enjoy looking for the remnants of these lost places.

I park my truck along the edge of a sand road where I think the house once stood. I only make a few soft steps into the sage and rabbitbrush before the first signs of humanity appear. Broken glass. Ceramic shards with their white and blue scenes from faraway places and long-gone times. Rusted cans. Jar lids made of tin with coarse, heavy threads. Enough to confirm the map wasn’t lying. I head back to the truck.

I pull out my finds pouch, a zippered nylon bag with a belt and a holster for my pin-pointer, and wrap it around my waist. Next comes the Sharpshooter, a small but bombproof shovel sturdy enough to pry the bumper off an old Cadillac if I ever needed to. Then the star of the hunt: my Manticore metal detector.

I power up and begin to swing the coil as close to the ground as I can. Slowly. Methodically. A meditation on tonality.

Rusted cans announce themselves with a low, unmistakable grunt of failure. Tin lids ring higher, ambiguous enough to deserve investigation. In a trashy site, the mélange becomes cacophonous through the detector’s speaker, something that takes months of careful listening to decipher and understand. But once you do, a good detector can pull the faintest brass button from a sea of rust, allowing you the assurance to dig less junk. This place is loaded with should-be-dug tones that lead me to believe there’s more to be found.

I hear a repeating high chirp among the low-hertz iron tones—a quail amongst the chickens. It’s masked by junk, for sure, but it’s there. I slow the coil and narrow its back and forth to just a few inches of oscillation. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Repetitive. Non-ferrous. Buried beneath some boughs of sage. I swipe my leg and move the fragrant branches to the side before stabbing my shovel into the sandy soil.

Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, what I find turns out to be bullet fragments, shotgun shells, brass rivets, or bits of horse tack. This was different. Thin. Greenish. Rounded along the longer outside edge, squared on the shorter inside edge. Unmistakably broken. And there was a design on either side. Foreign. I swipe the coil over the hole, hoping for the other pieces, but get nothing.

He would have come through San Francisco, like most of them did, stepping onto a city already well versed in brokering the backs of men. He stayed through the cool, wet spring, learning a few things there—some the easy way, some the hard way—like not keeping anything of value in his pockets. Not being one to need the same lesson twice, by candlelight he girth-hitched a leather cord through the square hole in the one hundred year old heirloom his father had given him for luck, and hung it around his neck, near his heart, where he could reach it easily if he needed to.

Rumor ran through San Francisco’s Portsmouth Square of work east of the Mother Lode, on the far side of the Sierra Nevada. By early summer, the year of the Rabbit, in 1875, he was heading toward the rising sun, riding in a wagon with others like him, watching the city haze fall away behind them and the snow-capped mountains rise ahead.

As the wagon began the long descent down the Sonora Pass Trail, he reached for the thin bronze comfort of home around his neck.

I wipe my thumb across the object, the way you might wipe a bit of sleep from under your dog’s eye. I’ve seen this before. I know what this bit of bronze is. My heart beats a little faster.

The wagon finished its journey in the mining town of Aurora, and it wasn’t long before he found himself chasing veins of ore in dim candlelight with the thousands of others who lived there. Each morning, on his way down to the working face, he pressed a finger into the square hole of the old coin and held it against his chest.

But just as abundance gets played out, so does the need to be there.

He and others like him moved again, this time finding work with a new railroad leg headed south. The Carson and Colorado. The year was 1880.

By the time the tracks reached the Owens Valley, the new law had already decided he wouldn’t be leaving. “…the coming of Chinese laborers be, and the same is hereby, suspended…”

If he left, he could not return. If he stayed, he would never belong.

He tugged the necklace from around his neck and let it fall into the wagon tracks that rutted the road.

Some things endure.

I take the coin fragment and put it in my pouch. Then I move it to a zippered pocket in my jacket—don’t keep valuable finds in your pouch. I pack up and make the short drive home. Under the kitchen tap, I give the coin a light rinse and dry it with a soft towel.

I turn on the iPad and Google Chinese coins and quickly realize I’m falling down a rabbit hole. There are hundreds of these cash coins, minted across centuries and dynasties. The chances of identifying a quarter of one feel slim. Image search is no help, so I turn to the Reddit community. Within ten minutes, someone from r/metaldetecting identifies it as a coin from the Qing Dynasty, 1736–1795, Changsha Mint, Hunan Province. I shifted in my seat.

Lost in thought, I tab over to Google News, and it refreshes—another headline about federal immigration enforcement. This ageless story begins to write itself.