The New Yorker - USA (2020-11-16)

THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 43

torists who are reluctant to surrender
exciting discoveries, sometimes for
reasons more emotional than mone-
tary. Ian Richardson, the treasure
registrar, told me, “Obviously, people
make a personal attachment to an ob-
ject.” The elasticity of the law’s dead-
line is intended to encourage compli-
ance. Historically, even in cases where
a finder mistakenly strayed onto ter-
ritory where he lacked permission to
search, the Treasure Valuation Com-
mittee, which decides the apportion-
ment of a reward, has been forgiving,
with the finder dividing the prize
equally with the landowner. Davies,
in particular, might have been ex-
pected to respond to Reavill’s prompt:
over the years, he had brought more
than a hundred detecting discoveries
to his local Finds Liaison Officer,
Mark Lodwick, an archeologist at the
Museum of Wales, in Cardiff, who
regarded him as a responsible detec-
torist. But Reavill didn’t hear back
from Davies and received only an
affronted e-mail from Powell—who

claimed that he didn’t know what

Reavill was talking about, and warned,

“I won’t tolerate any slander.”

I

n fact, the coins were already being

quietly sold off. Two days after mak-

ing the find, Powell and Davies met

with an acquaintance named Paul Wells,

a retired builder from Cardiff who

traded coins. Wells had asked a friend

with whom he sometimes did business,

Jason Sallam, to join them, and the four

men met at the café of an antiques mar-

ket in a repurposed Victorian munici-

pal building in Cardiff. Powell and Da-

vies took about a dozen coins from

their pockets and explained that they

had found perhaps two or three hun-

dred more—though it was hard to tell

how many, because they remained

clumped together in the exhumed earth.

Wells was astonished by the coins. “It

was as if they had been put in the ground

on the day they were minted,” he later

said. “They had never been used to buy

a loaf or a pint of beer.” When Powell

brought out the gold jewelry, which

he’d wrapped in tissue paper, “my eyes

nearly fell out of my head,” Wells said.

Powell became so excitably loud that

Wells told him, “Shut the fuck up, and

go out and have a fag!”

Sallam, who owns Antiques at the

Green, a shop in the harborside Welsh

town of Tenby, told the detectorists

that they had to report their find to

the authorities, but he agreed to take

the items to be seen by a more knowl-

edgeable numismatic colleague, Lloyd

Bennett. A few days later, Sallam went

to Bennett’s home, in Monmouth, for

a consultation. Bennett, pointing out

the pair of kings depicted on the coins,

identified them as dating from the late

ninth century, and said that they were

in very good condition. He then told

Sallam that he didn’t want to see any

more of the hoard, and that the detec-

torists needed to declare it as treasure

as soon as possible. “Everything here

needs to be in a museum,” Bennett

warned. Sallam returned the coins to

Wells and repeated Bennett’s injunc-

tion, adding, “Get in touch with these

tectonic slipping, lava fissures,

ship propellers drilling,

the human croons of whales.

There is slave in me, fat heritage,

no fluke I’m invested with hurt,

echo of the hunted, located, natural

rights redacted, meagered to resource.

All is flux as I’m collapsing

love and distance, moving through the gel,

my life, edging the canals of my city,

clomping up its hills, memory aerosol,

head in self cloud, getting Melville

as I should have, watching at him

contemplate the vista from a landlocked house,

hills becoming pods of transmigrating giants:

Greylock. Berkshire range.

There’s thirst for music in this less than solid

state. Ampless back in my office,

I knee-prop my Fender, ancient black thing.

Strum it casual, weep;

suck salt in darkness, fingers guessy,

lazing up the sound. Still, something

brusque runs up me: shuddered

wood, that deep flesh shook

that makes string music fuse to you.

The thumbing further breaks the thing in me.

I know what now love is,

know tentative for sure its

incoherence, jelly analog, is mine for life.

The windows stay black and phlegmatic

as the air outside begins to heave with rain.

I hum, thumbing, fashion something of a home,

some succor, pulse quick but steady as I deep dive

to dub. With it comes the baleen

wheeze of mouth organs, plangent blue whoop.

I am dub and dub is water.

Exile, I wish you could have lived in me,

plunging, life spumante. I’d slip my hold

on you like magma shot for islands

every single time you breach.

—Colin Channer