First Beach Treasure!

As kids my parents brought my siblings and I to the beach often. Living on Staten Island, NY, the beach was a great place for five kids to get some fresh air, run like crazy, and it was free!

We went to the beach in all kinds of weather.  There are super 8 home movies of us at the beach splashing in the waves in our bathing suits in the summer, galloping down the beach in our corduroy jackets in the spring and fall and even trying to maneuver walking in the sand in our snow pants in winter. For me the beach has always been a place that fueled my dreams and let my imagination run wild. Could you really see England? Find buried treasure? Or dig to China? No one told us we couldn’t do it, so we thought we could.  We just never had enough time before the tide came in or the sun went down.

One of my earliest memories is the day my parents piled all five of us kids into the car and drove to the Narrows. It’s the body of water that links the Upper New York Bay to the Lower New York Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.  This would become the site of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.  The bridge, when finished in 1964, would be the longest suspension bridge in the world, spanning New York Harbor to connect Staten Island with Brooklyn. The bridge was named after the first European explorer to discover New York Harbor, Giovanni de Verrazzano. When I was a child it was called the Verrazano–Narrows Bridge.  In 2018 the misspelling of Verrazzano was corrected to include the second ‘z’.

The dredging for the caissons that would support the suspension towers on the Staten Island side of the bridge produced large piles of black silt. In my memory, these dark piles of spoils were as tall as skyscrapers. My siblings and I spent the day as treasure hunters climbing high and searching for garnets.  Looking for the sun to glint on the smooth side of one of the multi-faceted stones, we felt as though were finding the most precious gems in the world.

We found deep red, almandine garnets. Garnets are a semi precious gemstone and are said to be talismans for protection, as well as enhancing creativity and manifestation.  I like to believe these talismans have worked for me through the years. Garnets are the birthstone for January. My older sister and younger brother were both born in January. She still remembers the thrill of searching for her birthstone.  Along with jewelry making, garnets are also used in industrial sanding and blasting.

We each found a handful of gems that day. They all went into a small white box, were they have stayed for all these years.  Every once in a while we would take out the box and examine our garnets. They are tangible mementos of one of the most treasured shared memories my siblings and I have of our childhood. It was the day we discovered there were real treasures to be found at the beach!

It is very interesting to me that the mudlarkers in England find garnets at low tide in the Thames. One of my favorite mudlarkers Jason Sandy @jasonmudlark wrote a wonderful article for Beachcombing Magazine called “The Mystery of the Thames Garnets”

Though garnets have been used in jewelry making for thousands of years, I have never made a piece of jewelry using one of our found garnets. In all my years of seaglassing I have never found another garnet on the beach. Diamonds? Yes, but that’s a story for another day.