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Sometimes the best things in life are free |
It's not everyday you find a wallet stuffed with $500 cash while sitting on the john. It happened to me as I was peeling back the tape which held a thick sliver of skin to the base of my finger. I looked up and was about to reach for the Charmin when I noticed a black leather bill-fold atop the dispenser. Credit cards, crisp new tens, twenties, and fifties, restaurant receipts from somewhere in Nevada, and one of the worst fake ID's I've ever seen. The first thing that crossed my mind ¾ well actually the second, the first being an expletive expressing my surprise ¾ was that the owner of this lost treasure was undoubtedly a climber, and doubtless, a frantic one having inadvertently parted ways with her travelling money. Only a road-tripping climber, one with the granite giants of Buttermilk dome and the finger-friendly huecos of the Volcanic Tablelands on her mind, would carry that much cash, in one place, and be so absent-minded as to leave it here in the bathroom of the Kava café, on what was turning out to be a beautiful morning in Bishop, California. My wife and I had arrived in Bishop three days earlier, but now on the verge of driving south for Joshua Tree, I found myself the victim of an ethical quandary much too early in the morning to deliberate over it or approach it with the slightest sense of clarity. I returned to our table and placed the wallet in front of Rebecca, took a long pull off my cup of coffee, and proceeded to wince at the sight of my mangled fingers. "Open it up," I said, placing my cup back on the table and raising my eyebrows in anticipation that she'd encourage my devilish side and decide to play that most juvenile and lucrative of games, "finder's keepers." I didn't have to tell her that the money would replace what we'd spent on our trip already, with some extra leftover, or that it would allow us to continue our trip in style, budget be damned. Her response was indicative of someone who had been sleeping in a cold gravel pit night after night, someone with sore muscles and scabbed fingers, and, faced with another dinner of chicken flavored instant noodles, she had a quite sensible reaction; she lifted her eyebrows, took a deep breath and sighed, nodding her head in contemplation. Looking up at me, she took a bite of her danish, and I watched her lips widen into a grin as she chewed, placed the remaining bit of pastry back on the plate, and slid it across the table to me, without saying a word. I realized I didn't need to remind her that just before embarking on our long awaited climbing trip to California, I had freed myself from the comfortable and bland life of a University administrator, one with a reasonable degree of financial security, a fine health insurance package, and the privilege of helping some of the most spoiled students in the city of Boston wipe their noses. With our little studio apartment costing more each month than Robert Downey Jr's cocaine habit, anticipating what the following months would be like caused the occasional churning of my stomach and an anxious feeling that I should be back in Boston sending out resumes by the dozen and slaving away over a keyboard to come up with new and exciting ways of selling myself to corporate America. But we had come to California to help me clear my head, hoping that the quiet grandeur of the high desert landscape, with its 13,000 foot peaks and sweeping hillsides covered with boulders, would help me center my life and put me back on the right track. "Think it'd be bad karma?" I asked. "Probably," she replied, smiling slightly, her head still nodding a slow affirmation, suggesting what I already knew, that I wasn't going to let one little wallet, stuffed full of cash, rattle my state of mind and erase everything we'd come out here to find. Bishop had been nothing but sheer pleasure since the moment we slowed from our highway's pace and pulled into town. From waking up with the oranges and the reds, the magenta hue of twilight breaking across Mt. Tom when the air is fresh and crisp, to throwing for that sloper just one more time even though your tips already feel like they've been run repeatedly over a wood rasp, because of the shouts of "go man, you got it" rising up from the people ten feet below, who you just met that morning. From laughing about the fact that it took thirty minutes to drive the three miles of grooved dirt roads between the boulders and camp, to slinking into the hot springs after a day spent wandering through the Peabodys and falling off almost every problem we tried. From the mountains of Mexican food that gave us that queasy yet comfortably full feeling, to the sight of the Sierra Nevada rising above the buildings of the town, a sight nearly sublime to eastern eyes. And if I'd been given a can of Hamm's beer anywhere else, I'd most certainly have told you it was water or worse, had it not been offered to me by the Canadians we met at the BLM campground who shared some of their supply with us by the hiss of a gas lantern. In Bishop, it tasted like the finest of ales. So, thumbing the worn black grain of the leather, I walked to the counter and stayed my hand for just a few seconds before I heard my voice saying, "somebody left this wallet in your bathroom," while at the same time thinking, "hey, what the hell are you doing, don't say that." I forced a smile, commenting unnecessarily to the lady behind the cash register that there was quite a bit of cash in it, as if its substantial bulk wasn't enough to show (even to someone ten feet across the room) that this was so. I think partly I was expecting to get something in return for my noble efforts, for fighting off the urge to pocket the dough and slither out the back door. But hell, I couldn't imagine cutting a road trip short because somebody made off with my hard earned money faster than Jerry Falwell from a crowd of NAMBLA members. And as we turned onto West Line street, heading for the Buttermilks one last time, I looked up toward the peaks of the Sierra and couldn't help but laugh when I thought of the lady behind the counter and her response to my somewhat sheepish show of honesty: "Oh that, don't worry, that happens all the time here." |
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