"I'm still worried about
those guys. They just frighten the daylights out of
me." The man
talking was a retired Reno schoolteacher. A fellow member
of the Silver State Treasure Hunters, a psychologist,
describes him as "one of the most law-abiding, nice,
people I've every met... He's very conscientious." Because of his continuing fears of
reprisals from U.S. Forest Service officials,
Electric Nevada agreed not to divulge his name. This
report will call him "John." "I don't feel comfortable
talking to anybody about it," he explains. "At
one time I did, and I was talking to everybody, and they
sort of blew me out of the water." It all began, for John, on a day
last year in late November. His hobby is gold detecting
-- searching for gold nuggets with a metal detector he
owns. On that particular day, he'd driven out on a road
up above Verdi. "When I got to an open spot
where I could pull my truck off, I just stopped there and
got out," he says. "This whole area was being
bulldozed and trees were being cut down.. "There were loggers all over
the place. I didn't think there was any problem at all.
They had bulldozed roads and drug trees, and they were
out there working at the time." So John put on his gear and set out
looking for nuggets in the area. "I had a small bucket, and I
had my metal detector, and I had a geologic pick, and a
little hand trowel, and I had those on a belt, sort of
like a carpenter's hammer-holder." Later, after having been
"detecting along" for some time, he says, he
was making his way back to the truck, ready to call it a
day. "I was just detecting along,
and this car -- a Waggoneer-type green Department of
Agriculture car -- came zooming around [the bend], real
fast, headed toward Reno. "They got about 200 yards past
me, and ...slammed on the brakes, and turned around, and
came back real quick and parked maybe 50 feet behind my
truck. "They looked over at me, so I
walked over to them." A woman was behind the wheel and a
man was sitting next to her. The woman rolled down the
window, says John. "They asked me 'How are you
doing?' "I said, 'Not too good -- all I
found was a piece of glass and a Seven-Up can.' "They wanted to see the piece
of glass, so I showed it to them. It was a piece of that
pink glass, about an inch and-a-half long, like the top
of a whiskey bottle. "The lady turned to me and said, 'Do you know it's a felony to pick up anything in a historic site?'
"'Felony?' I said. 'What are
you talking about? What historic site?' "She said, 'Well, you're near
one now.' And one of them -- I forget which -- said I had
to put it back where I found it." After he turned around and tossed
the piece of 
broken glass back into the forest, says
John, he asked, "What do you mean by a felony?"
"She said '$5,000 and six
months in jail,' or something like that.
"They really scared me, at that
point. I said, 'Well, what are you going to do?'
"She said, 'Well, we're going
to report it to our law enforcement officer.'
"What historic site are you
talking about?" asked John. "There's nothing
here."
The answer was straight out of
Joseph Heller's darkly satiric novel, Catch-22.
"'We can't tell you where the
historic sites are.'
"I said, 'Why not?'
"She said, 'Then people will
know and they'll come and destroy the sites.'
"I guess that logic kind of
evaded me," John told EN.
But John, over the course of the
next year, was to become much more familiar with Forest
Service logic.
Because a little over two months
later, a large, certified, manila envelope arrived in the
mail. In the corner was a Truckee, California highway
return address, but nothing else.
Inside was a citation and a cover
letter saying, "Mandatory Appearance Required in
Court." After giving the number of the "United
States District Court violation notice," it informed
John he was being cited "for removing any
prehistoric, historic or archaeological resource,
artifacts or property from National Forest system lands.
-- Title 36, Code of Federal Regulations, 261.9
(h)."
"On November 30, you were
observed removing artifacts with the aid of a metal
detector from National Forest lands by two Forest
officers," said the letter. "This is in
violation of the afore-mentioned section. You are
required to appear in United States District Court,
located in South Lake Tahoe at the address listed on the
violation notice. You will be notified of the court date
and time."
Five weeks later, in March, an
envelope arrived from something calling itself the
"Central Violations Bureau" in San Antonio,
Texas. The words "Notice to Appear" were on the
outside. Inside was the exact date, time, and location
for his appearance before the federal court magistrate.
John was being welcomed into a
select and almost secret circle of victims of a special
regulatory hell contrived by the U.S. Forest Service.
For not only does the federal agency
resolutely refuse to tell metal-detector hobbyists like
John what areas they should avoid, only to later legally
hammer them for conducting their hobby in those --
unposted -- areas.
The agency also later works,
Electric Nevada has found, to programmatically
intimidate into silence those so hammered, about their
being hammered.
The threat? Further hammering.
Next week: How government
archaelogical make-work is excluding Westerners from the
national forests.