MEGGETT — As a boy growing up in Charleston, Matt Burton loved finding shark teeth and Civil War buckshot in fields of tall green grass near his home. Soon, he learned from YouTube how to use a battered metal detector he discovered in his family's garage to help him unearth artifacts.
He doesn't mind the days when he finds nothing more than beer can tabs or steel kebab skewers. The 30-year-old Daniel Island resident loves exploring seashores and forests as a counterpoint to his office work at an insurance company. Luckily, his girlfriend enjoys collecting seashells while he scans the beach, and she appreciates him as a visionary history buff who can hold an alabaster shard or the Colonial copper coin he recently found while his imagination opens a door on the owner's long lost world. The copper coin is imprinted with King William III's face, rubbed blurry and blobby.
When Burton looks at it, he sees 18th-century Charleston when people ate what they grew or hunted and bartered for goods. Coins were rare, alien and normally for a unique purchase like securing a room in a clean, safe inn rather than sleeping in the wilderness on a business trip.
"Always, I want to know about the person who lost the item, how he felt when he noticed it was gone," Burton said. "If I find an antique button, I always try to imagine how it was torn off."
Then his boss, Bobby Harrell, invited Burton to explore his beautiful 16-acre pecan farm overlooking the Wadmalaw River and Oyster House Creek. Historic Harrell Farm, near the tiny town of Meggett, was once a cattle ranch. Deer and wild turkeys wander through its meadows and pine forest.
And that's where Burton found an adventure in the form of a gold-plated Class of 1972 St. Paul high school ring with a sapphire blue stone.
It was big enough to be a man's with initials engraved inside.
"Right away, I wanted to know who it belonged to, and I wondered what he was like," Burton said.
Burton is a member of a Reddit community of metal detector enthusiasts who enjoy helping him with research. But this time, "given that the ring's owner would be over 70, I figured he would be on Facebook rather than Instagram or Reddit," said Burton. He found the Facebook page for the school's Class of '72.
His post about the lost ring immediately got answers.
Respondents said the ring must belong to a man they loved dearly: a tugboat captain nicknamed Big Mike.
He died of pancreatic cancer three years ago, leaving behind a widow, Renae Sistare, and two daughters, all who adored him.
Burton and his girlfriend, Aimee Intagliata contacted Sistare, who said she had no idea how Mike's ring got lost on Harrell Farm. The three gathered for lunch. Then they all visited visited Mike's grave at the family's Ravenel church. Mike volunteered to tend to the cemetery until his illness made it impossible. Sistare said she first saw Mike when he drove to a high school football game in a red sports car. It may have looked like a classic bad boy vehicle, but Renae said Mike was undeniably a good guy: "sweet, kind, funny and always making the day brighter."
She pondered the timing of the discovery.
"This year is hard emotionally because this was the year Mike planned to retire so we could finally spend our days together and travel," she told The Post and Courier.
As a captain who could operate tugboats in the port and on rivers, Mike would work one week in Charleston, sleeping in a tugboat cabin. He would get the next week off to spend with his family.
"He always made it to our daughter's special school events, no matter what," Sistare said. "But we were looking forward to this year when he would have turned 70 so we could spend every day together."
She said the ring's discovery feels like a "God wink."
The term refers to a coincidence that occurs against such great odds and with such keen timing that it feels supernatural, as if it is a message from a realm beyond this world.
Next month, Mike's high school class holds its 52nd reunion. For Renae, the return of his ring felt like a reminder that although her husband was no longer able to share their dream of golden years, he loved her and wanted her to have a happy life.
Mike had bought a replacement ring for the one he lost. Now, both of his daughters will have a ring worn by him to keep as a memento.
Mike and Renae's daughter, Holly Chesser, saw the ring as a reminder of her father's compassionate, healthy view of the world.
When her father got his initial cancer diagnosis, Chesser said doctors expected he might have only months to live.
"We got three years; he was a strong man who loved life and fought hard for his life," Chesser said. After his diagnosis, father and daughter would bundle up in cold weather and sit outside while he would tell her stories about his life that Chesser now shares with her children.
"My son was the first boy born into the family; my dad loved his daughters, but he was ecstatic to have a grandson," Chesser said.
The little boy often went on the boat with his grandfather. Now at age 13, "he wants to follow in his grandfather's footsteps and be a tugboat captain."
He would have an ideal role model. Mike's boss, McAllister Towing vice president Steve Kicklighter, recalls Mike as a smart, skilled captain who could shepherd huge freighters, tankers and cruise ships safely to port. Kicklighter said that Mike tackled long trips towing barges up the Atlantic coast.
Ashley McMullan, Mike's other daughter, remembered how her dad took his family out on the water in his tugboat on several July 4 holidays to see the fireworks burst against the backdrop of the Ravenel Bridge.
She loved her dad's gift for planning family trips to Maine, San Antonio, Tennessee's mountains and Disneyland.
But remembering his everyday kindnesses as a dad hits her hard.
"He loved his girls and he'd pick us up from school and say, 'Let's do something fun today,' like take us to the mall, where he would sit there so patiently while we shopped and never complain," her voice breaking as tears came. Then she continued, explaining how her mom and dad definitely shared the parenting, "If one of us were sick, he would get up in the middle of the night to sit with us. He gave the best advice, and I never worried that he would make me feel dumb or embarrassed if I came to him with a problem."
Big Mike was kind, but not saccharine. He could silence a jerk or a bully with a quick retort. When he saw someone behaving like a jackass, both daughters remembered his quip, "That guy is mad so he can look forward to being glad."
Neither daughter knows how his ring was lost on the farm. Before he was married, he and his friends loved camping, so perhaps they made a campsite there.
But Burton has decided that learning about the man behind the relic is more important than solving the mystery of how the ring traveled from Mike to a riverside pecan farm.
Burton continues to unearth intriguing relics on the farm, but he feels a clock ticking now that his boss plans to sell the property. As Charleston continues to boom and develop, Burton said there will be fewer places he will be allowed to explore. He is careful not to damage grass or flowers when he digs for a relic. But he said most developers simply ban relic hunting from their land. The farm may soon be inaccessible to him, so he relishes his latest discoveries even more. Recently, he found an 1820s diplomatic cuff button worn by a federal official on a mission in Charleston. The button is rarer than a class ring, of course. But that ring brought Burton, Intagliata and Sistare something valuable that a relic hunter doesn't typically expect to find.
"After we spent the day together, we decided that the three of us are family and the ring is what brought us together and helped us find each other," Burton said.
