Last year our family was preparing to head out on
vacation. The night before we left, I
was up in my office gathering some things I was planning on taking with us.
I picked up our digital camera – it is one of the fairly inexpensive “point and
click” Samsungs, but takes great pictures. When walking out to put it in
my bag, I saw my daughter’s bedroom door, which she had very tastefully adorned
with a collage of her life, and spontaneously took two pictures of it,
figuring she would like them for Facebook or for her friends. This turned
out to be serendipitous…
The following day, on a Sunday, we traveled up to Maine to
visit Acadia National Park. On Monday my
daughter and went on a hike to Sand Beach, the one swimmable ocean beach within
the park. It was a beautiful mild April
day, but it was off-season and there were not many people in the park. Upon arriving at the beach, there was no one
there and we had the beach to ourselves. There were a few people hiking
on Great Head, a nearby peninsula, and there were some workers working on the
path from the parking lot to the beach. My daughter and I took our shoes
off and waded around in the ice cold water. I took some pictures of her
and the empty beach. Just above where the waves were washing up on shore,
I noticed that someone had left their belongings. All of a sudden, a large wave came in, so I
ran over and moved their things further up the beach. One of the items was an expensive single-lens
reflex digital camera; if we had not been there, the camera would have been
lost. After hanging out on the beach a
little while longer, we put our shoes back on and headed back. At that
point, there were a few other people walking around on the beach.
We get back to where we were staying and after settling
down, I realized I had lost track of the camera. I thought I had absent-mindedly
put it down somewhere, but after looking around for a while, I gave up, hoping
later that it would turn up. Of course,
it didn’t, so I came to the conclusion I had either left it on the beach or it
dropped out of my pocket. The next day, we went on the same hike, looking
thoroughly along the trail as well as on the beach, failing to find the
camera. At that point, I believed that
it had washed out to sea and, even if it didn’t, it had rained hard that
morning and I likely dropped it well below the high-tide line, so the water
would have ruined it. I was disappointed – I had some good shots
including some amazing sunset pictures from two nights ago, but all in all, it
was not a big deal and I wasn’t going to let it spoil our vacation. The irony in the whole affair was that I had
saved someone else’s camera; then I manage to lose ours. My wife and I
had a chuckle over that and forgot about it.
Later that week, after we had returned home, my wife and I
went out on a walk, at which time I told her I would pick up a new camera in
the morning. Upon arriving home, there
is a message on the answering machine from a woman who lived in Bangor,
ME. She said that she found a camera on the rocks on Sand Beach last
Monday, looked at the pictures in the hopes of finding something identifying
the owner, apologized for snooping, and came to the conclusion that the camera
belonged to my daughter. She looked for
my daughter on Google and found a matching picture of her which identified the
town where we live. Knowing our last
name at that point, she called several people at random with the matching last
name. (there are a lot of people in our
town that share our last name, none of whom are relatives) She confessed she was looking for a needle in
a haystack, but wanted to try to return my daughter’s camera.
At that point, all I could say was “wow…”
How did she find us? It was the picture of my
daughter’s door that I took the night before our vacation. On the door, she had a card on there with her
full name written in yellow highlighter. I have no clue how the woman
could have made that out on the picture – I could barely make it out by eye! Out of curiosity, I looked for my daughter on
Google. The first positive hit was on
the third page, which showed her name on a church schedule. The next positive hit was an article in the
local newspaper where she was featured as one of the students of the month at
her school. None of us realized that she
was even in the newspaper! It was clear
at that point that the woman had gone to a considerable effort to find the
owner of the camera. She searched on Google
until she found a hit that had a regional match; then she successfully found a
confirming picture. At that point, she
looked up our last name in the phone book and patiently called several phone
numbers hoping she would find us. As it turned
out, I was very lucky to have taken the photo of my daughter’s door.
I called the woman to arrange shipment of the camera. She graciously refused my offer to cover the
shipping. We sent her a thank-you note
with a nice gift for her good deed.
“The irony in the whole affair was that I had saved someone
else’s camera; then I manage to lose ours. My wife and I had a chuckle
over that and forgot about it.” I’m sure
many people have heard that sarcastic saying "no good deed goes
unpunished." Well, I knew the
people who left the camera too close to the water would have been grateful that
I moved it, so I looked at that action as opposed to the irony of losing our
camera. Every good deed indeed reaps a
reward, even if not visible to us. Additionally,
I received reassurance that there are very good people out there who will go
far out of their way to do someone a favor and to do the right thing.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
