At first, they thought the rings had slipped down the drain, but they watched the dash cam footage from their car and realised she was not wearing them on their way to dinner.
Back at home, they checked their outdoor cameras and narrowed the possibilities further: She had the rings the day before, on August 12, but not while watering the plants that evening.
Then it all clicked for the couple, who have been married for 26 years and have three children.
The night before, they got home from a movie with leftover popcorn for their daughter. As Jeannine Van Ysseldyk got out of the car, popcorn spilled on to the lawn. She scooped it back into the bag, then tossed the bag in the compost bin before heading out to water the plants.
“We had basically narrowed it down to the popcorn bag,” Steve Van Ysseldyk said, explaining that they were pretty sure the rings slipped off her finger and into the bag, which was compostable.
By the time they pieced it together, though, the compost was already collected and taken to the dump, which has a compost facility. Jeannine Van Ysseldyk said she was heartbroken.
“It was a tough night,” Steve Van Ysseldyk said. “It was lots of emotions.”
Steve and Jeannine Van Ysseldyk have been married for 26 years. Photo / Steve Van Ysseldyk, Washington Post
The solitaire ring was an upgrade he had bought his wife six years ago, and the thin white gold band was a 10-year-anniversary present.
“There’s a lot of sentimental value,” he said.
Steve Van Ysseldyk decided to go to the dump the following morning to find the rings. He felt confident he could pinpoint the bright blue-and-yellow popcorn bag in a sea of waste.
“I was pretty optimistic,” he said. “How many people throw out popcorn in a movie bag?”
When he arrived at the Mission Sanitary Landfill, Denny Webster, who runs the compost facility, said he thought Steve Van Ysseldyk was crazy.
“I thought he was nuts, and I was trying to think of a way to tell him to go buy his wife new rings,” Webster said. “I honestly didn’t think he’d find them.”
Still, he agreed to let Steve Van Ysseldyk take a shot sifting through 16 tonnes of compost.
The 16 tonnes of compost Steve Van Ysseldyk had to go through to find his wife’s rings. Photo / Steve Van Ysseldyk, Washington Post
“It’s about three dump truck loads of sopping wet, gross compost, mixed with grass clippings and food waste,” Webster said. “He’s lucky because the day before there would have been 50 truckloads to go through, but I had just finished processing the large amount.”
Webster helped Steve Van Ysseldyk by using his excavator to separate the compost into piles.
“I felt sorry for him,” Webster said. “He was panicking. He really wanted to find them, and I just thought I’d give him an hour of my time with my excavator.”
Wearing gloves and using a shovel, Steve Van Ysseldyk dug through mountains of rotten food.
“It stunk, but I could imagine if it was hotter, it would have been a lot worse,” he said.
He told Webster some of the items in his compost to look out for: watermelon rinds, cauliflower, a doughnut box, some hotdogs and, of course, the bag of popcorn. After about an hour of searching, they spotted something blue and yellow: half of the popcorn bag.
Inside was Jeannine Van Ysseldyk’s anniversary band.
“I was totally shocked,” Webster said. “All I was expecting was for him to go home and tell his wife he made an honest effort.”
Denny Webster, a subcontractor for the city of Mission, used his excavator to help find the rings. Photo / Steve Van Ysseldyk, Washington Post
But there was more work to be done. One ring remained missing. Steve Van Ysseldyk struggled to find the second half of the popcorn bag. He decided to look in another area of the compost pile, and within a few minutes, he found it.
“I gingerly went through it, and there was the other ring,” he said. “It was just pure happiness and relief that we found them.”
Jeannine Van Ysseldyk could barely believe it when her husband returned home with both rings.
“I thought they were lost forever,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “They are now back on my finger.”
She praised her husband for his determination.
“You are an amazing man and husband,” she wrote.
Steve Van Ysseldyk said he couldn’t have pulled it off without Webster’s help.
“I was so appreciative for his time,” he said.
Steve Van Ysseldyk posted the story on Reddit, and it was picked up by local and national news. He said people have been stunned by his needle-in-a-haystack success.
“It’s the impossibility of finding rings in a dump,” Steve Van Ysseldyk said. “We were lucky.”
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