Lost & Found

It was cold, but not bitter, and the ground was wet because it was still in the process of thawing on May 7, 1984, when we stopped at the roadcut near the "suicide hill" ski jump that Eiler (Henrickson '43) liked to tell stories about. An overcast day, one of those days when the temperature at noon (about 48o F) was exactly the same as it had been at breakfast time. As the day wore on it began raining. The Upper Peninsula was treating us to another one of its dreary days.

We pulled up to the outcrop and began our bleary-viewed examination of this, another of the dark gray dimly bedded metamorphic rocks the area around Negaunee, Michigan, is so well known for. Pulling on your rain suit and closing up the cracks in the protection against the drizzle after you get out of the van takes several minutes under such conditions; when you climb into the vehicle it's never certain how long you will be in there so you tend to shed a few layers.

Soon it was clear this stop would be unusual. Eiler had not more than gotten out of his van and started walking around than he saw, and reached down to pick up, a brown leather wallet which had been hiding in the sandy mud by the side of the pavement. A quick look inside revealed an impressive sheaf of dollar bills. How does Eiler manage these finds? It looked like hundreds of dollars in there!

Well, it was. $834 to be precise. Also, there was a driver's license, social security card and some other wallet type items. The outcrop slid to the rear of our collective consciousness.

After some consultation among the group we decided to check with the authorities and see if anyone had reported it lost or stolen (no one had), and then see if we could find the owner to return it. We knew nothing about the owner except that it was a man whose address was a place not too far from the town of Gwinn, where we were staying at the Girl Scout Camp Pow-Low.

If you don't know where you are going, the woods in that part of Michigan are deep and dark. They are riddled with small jeep trails and other distractions which are the landlubber's counterpart to the hazards and distractions Odysseus encountered while he was trying to get back home to Penelope. So we thrashed around the woods for a while, here and there stopping to ask if anyone knew this man or where he might live.

Finally, at the end of the smallest dirt track in the deepest part of the woods, we crept into his, well, yard. I can hardly remember the house, but the image that comes to mind is that of a dark colored two story structure, so it may have been covered with tar paper. At any rate, the yard was an incomprehensible jungle of old appliances and machines through which the driveway threaded in a sort of circle. There must have been as many machines in the yard as there were dollars in the wallet. Our two vans timidly crept in and stopped near the house.

We called the man out of his house and Eiler made the presentation. We must have been somewhat shocked by the scene, because no one felt like getting out of the vans. A quick-thinking person thought of asking the passenger in the front of Eiler's van to hold the microphone of the CB radio up so the conversation could be broadcast to the other van; it was one of the most bald faced cases of group eavesdropping ever.

The man couldn't believe his eyes. Here was his wallet with all that money inside. He told us that months ago he had taken the money out of his bank to go Christmas shopping, and had lost it that night when he "stopped by the road to take a pee." He said he'd gone back the next day to look for it without success, and that he had written off ever seeing it again.

"I didn't think there were people like you left anymore," he stammered as he tried to collect himself, partly beside himself with amazement and partly intimidated by the 20 or more people in the two large vans filling his normally uninhabited driveway. He blessed us and thanked us, and without questioning his story we departed.

The outcrops Eiler led us to were always of great value, but this time he had outdone himself.