Date: Fri, 18 Mar 1994 11:47:01 -0500
From: hobbit@ftp.com (*Hobbit*)
Subject: the Wallet Saga, finally

Now my wallet's better-traveled than I am.

A couple of Thursday nights ago we were on our way to Waitsfield VT to spend a
nice snowy day at Mad River Glen.  I was riding shotgun in Cgull's car.  I
pulled out my wallet to supply a buck for the NH liquor store toll, and since I
was belted into a car seat I probably just laid it down on my lap, anticipating
another toll.  We drove and drove through the snow, on up I-89, and were just
getting near our exit for 100B when we came up against a police roadblock right
in the middle of the highway [and less than half a mile from our exit, grumble,
bitch].

Apparently a semi had gone completely wacko up ahead and was jackknifed across
our side of the road.  As we waited and it became more apparent that cleaning
the mess up was going to take a while; Phil asked about using the U-turn that
was right there to find an alternate route to Waitsfield and got an unequivocal
NO.  The cops were surly.  So we waited some more, for a total of an hour and a
half or so.

But during this time we were bored, of course, and kept hopping in and out of
the car to wander around.  I was scanning around for the cop frequency on
cgull's Alinco when I wasn't wandering up and down the road.  *Finally* they
got the truck off the road and let us proceed, and we got to the little B&B
very much later than we anticipated.  It was there that I noticed that my
wallet was missing.

I figured I'd just left it in the car, and it was still cold and snowing
outside, so I went back out for only a cursory search of the passenger side,
and gave up.  I figured I must have crammed it into some other place in my pack
or it had migrated to the back.  Maybe the poor thing was cold, and had crawled
up into the dashboard for the residual heat.  We were tired and cold and hungry
and on the edge of cranky, so I gave up and we went to sleep.

A much more assiduous search happened the next morning, and I reached the
conclusion that it really was gone.  The nearest thing I could figure was that
it had been on my lap the first time I got out of the car, and since we were in
the breakdown lane right next to a rather soft ridge of snow, I must have
launched it into the pile and not noticed.  By now, of course, it would have
been plowed even farther under and maybe hundreds of feet along the road, and
the vaguest chance I'd have of finding it might come in the spring after it all
melted.  Which wasn't very useful for the time being.  I started taking a
mental inventory of what was in it and realized that most of the fuckage was
vehicle stuff -- my NJ license, which expires this coming May anyways,
registrations, medical insurance card, random and mostly useless but vaguely
sentimental cruft, and my PICKS -- my fifteen year old tensioner, the one with
many many miles on it, finally GONE.  It would probably be a small mound of
rust if it sat in a snowbank for the rest of the winter.  Ack!!  Yes, it could
be replaced, but it had always been a point of pride when discussing lockpick
metallurgy to hold it up and say "I've had this for fifteen years and it ain't
bent yet".  *Now* I was gonna be depressed.  Oh, and of course I was suddenly
broke.

Fortunately other folks could front my ski ticket and food, so we headed on
over to Mad River and had an absolutely *AMAZING* day.  There was plenty of
deep untracked stuff, but it was a little on the sticky side, so we found
ourselves going off into it and just stopping dead even on a noticeable slope. 
The places that were getting a little more tracked up on the steeper bits were
amazing fun, though, and a lot of work, since we were trying to do those quick
in-the-bumps turns in soft squishy stuff.  Serious bedding-department type of
snow.  One nice thing was that after we warmed up and got a little more daring,
we could go down the bump slopes pretty fast because in that stuff it didn't
*matter* if anyone took a fall.  The moguls kept trying to eat one of my
skis, so eventually I tweaked the binding a little tighter.  Phil and I even
went down their pride and joy Seriously Gnarly Slope, which is ill-documented
by design and at the other end of this tiny little path through the woods
with a big "DANGER" sign halfway along it.  As corwin mentioned, this trail
starts off with a jump off an 8 foot or so frozen waterfall and goes down
through lots of trees.  There was probably no way I'd have done it if it had
been icier, but this particular day it felt much more doable by being heavily
padded.  We slammed bumps all day, and were complete TOAST by closing time.

So after driving 200 miles and beating the crap out of ourselves, it was time
to drive another 200 miles back.  We stopped halfway back at a very nice
Italian restaurant, and cgull and I finally arrived back at FTP around 10.  I
gave Rob [who didn't know about the wallet fiasco yet, of course, since I
hadn't told her] a "we're back" holler from there, and the first thing I heard
was something like "call your mother about your wallet".

			??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!

So I did.  And here's where it gets weird.  It had been picked up off the
highway that same evening as the roadblock by a French Canadian couple who were
stuck about four cars ahead of us in a small red minivan even before the
roadblock was released.  They had even walked around several cars in the
immediate area asking if it belonged to anyone, but apparently they didn't get
back as far as where we were.  So they took it to Montreal with them.  Inside
they found a card with my parents' address and fern on it, and called, and
explained to my mom in somewhat broken Frenglish that they'd found my wallet on
the road near the scene of a big hairy accident.

You don't tell mothers this.  You just don't.  If you do, they have this
tendency to start calling state police departments asking them if any John
Does, sans wallets,  had just recently been fished out from under the remains
of mangled semis out on the highways.  This is why I was immediately told to
call her and reassure her that I *wasn't* a half-mile smear of gore on I-89
someplace, and had been in much graver danger while skiing Paradise than I had
been on the trip up.  This accomplished, she then forwarded the details of how
I was going to get my wallet back.  The Canajuns were going to be in Lynn on
Monday morning, and I was supposed to call them in Montreal the next morning
for details on where and why.  Which I did.  It turned out that they work for a
transport company, and they were going to the GE Aircraft Engine plant in Lynn
[the big one out on the spit of land] to pick up a couple of engines.  

I called the given number the next morning, and spoke to the woman, who stated
among other things that god had willed that she find my wallet and get it back
to me.  Whether or not divine intervention was relevant, she had also lost her
wallet once and knew how royally screwed this could cause its owner to be.  And
they were indeed due to be in Lynn on Monday morning, where I could meet up
with them at 7AM [augh!] before they departed for Montreal and recover my
wallet.  She gave me the address of the plant; I said "I'm there."

I was only about ten minutes late that morning, and pulled up to the guard
house at the gate amidst a steady stream of cars entering the plant, expecting
the Canajuns to be there cooling their heels wondering where the hell I was. 
The guards told me in a rather abrupt way that they didn't know from C.A.T. 
Transport, and had not received the promised notification that I was coming. 
At least in guard house A.  I wandered over to the bigger guard house on the
other side of the road and started to get the same story, but then the guy
picked up a piece of paper and there was a note that they were supposed to have
read.  We checked the log and found that C.A.T. had checked in but not out yet,
so they must still be in the plant someplace.

They gave me a visitor pass and sent me in to building 63, which is a long
thing with receiving at one end and shipping at the other.  I of course went to
the wrong end first, where they told me to try the other end [logically
shipping, since these folks were there to pick up engines]; I finally found not
their minivan at the shipping end, but a large red semi sitting idling in the
loading dock with bedding stuffed in around the windows for privacy.  The
shipping guys told me that was the only C.A.T. truck around, and I saw someone
moving around inside the cab, so I reached over from the wall next to the pit
into the loading dock to knock on the window.

It was the right people.  They were this very nice fiftyish pair of folks, not
married but clearly longtime partners.  I felt much better having learned that
they were having trouble getting going at that hour of the morning too, but
there was my wallet on the dashboard, contents intact.  We sat there and tried
to communicate pleasantries for a while despite a bit of a language barrier. 
She held forth once again about divine intervention; I could only smile and
nod...

Eventually we all had to get back to business, and we parted ways.  I didn't
run across any freebies while I was at the plant.  For that matter, I don't
even recall seeing any notable dumpsters.  Perhaps all their garbage goes
somewhere else...

_H*