The Tale of the Missing Wallet

The events of this story took place from Friday, June 30, 2017, to the following Thursday, July 6. My family and I had been at Cape San Blas, Florida, for the entire week up until this point, and were planning on leaving by ten o'clock a.m. on the following Saturday. This day we spent time on the beach starting around nine o'clock in the morning. It was a perfect day at the beach; sunny, windy, waves rolling, and plenty of fun to be had, especially since the better part of the week saw mostly rain. We assembled our canopy a few days earlier in a spot we found to be ideal, and left it overnight, but always made sure to bring our belongings back to the condo for safe keeping. Cape San Blas has a rule against leaving things at the beach overnight because of baby turtles, but allowed tents and canopies to be left up.

About noon we decided to head back to our temporary residence to have lunch. Since we were leaving the next day and were not planning to come back to the beach for the rest of the trip, we began to take down the canopy. The legs of our canopy were weighed down by piles of sand and weights to keep it from flying away. As my father pulled up one of the legs, he discovered in the sand a wallet, a few inches below the surface. It was a large and dark leather wallet with an abundance of pockets, and the contents appeared to be completely intact, albeit covered in sand. Most everything inside was a card for something, but there was a bit of cash as well. We had every intention of finding the owner from the moment it was in our possession, so we began to look through the article to try to find some identification. After several minutes, we found the driver's license of a man whom I shall refer to as Guy, which revealed that he was from Kentucky, and worked for Cisco. However, any source of contacting him, be it a phone number or email, was nowhere to be found. Then, we all agreed to finish packing up and wait until after lunch to continue searching. Cape San Blas is a gated community that has what they call a "clubhouse", which is a place close to the beach where visitors can gather or stay until a condo is ready for them. However, most of the time there was nobody of governmental authority inside, and the nearest town was quite a distance away, making turning in the wallet a tedious process. This is why we took it upon ourselves to find the owner.

Cape San Blas is a very remote place on the coast of Florida; so remote, in fact, that in our research of deciding which beach we were going to go to, we found out that it was left off of some of the earliest maps of America. This made sense, as it is on a tiny peninsula on the Gulf of Mexico, exceedingly smaller than the rest of North America. In addition, it was not commercialized, which made it very calming and relaxing, as a beach should be. Nonetheless, it was not perfect. Due to its remoteness, cell phones often bounced their signals off of several different towers while in the same place, which made their clocks switch between different time zones. This also meant that internet connection was near impossible; while we did pay extra for Wi-Fi service in our condo, it was almost never usable. Data connection via our phone company was not an option either. This was very problematic for us, because while we never found any contact information on Guy, we did find a blank check in the wallet that told us which bank he was using, but had much trouble in contacting them.

After many, many attempts at trying to call Guy's bank, we finally were successful. It was a local bank, not a nationwide chain or corporation. We knew beforehand that they legally could not relay to us Guy's phone number, but they could give him our number if he wanted to call us. We told them that we were okay with that, so the call ended. Almost the exact moment after the call with the bank was up, we received a call from Guy. Again, contact with him was hindered, this time because of the cell signal. And again, after many, many attempts, we were finally able to speak with him. We later became aware that he too did not have good connection on his end of the call. He was a very nice man, and thanked us greatly for being so kind as to not take anything and seeking him out. He told us that he had left Cape San Blas four or five days prior, and called his bank to deactivate any credit or debit cards. He also let us know that his cell phone was lost as well (he was using a borrowed one), but we were not fortunate enough to be able to tell him that we had found it too. After innumerable thanks, he offered to give the cash inside the wallet to us, which amounted to $130. We appreciated the generous offer, but declined, because it was the morally right thing to do. He gave us his address, and we told him that we would ship it on the following Monday, seeing as we would be getting home very late Saturday evening. Guy agreed to this deal, and so the call ended, but communication was left intact through texting.

When we shipped the wallet on Monday as we had promised, we paid for two-day shipping. It arrived on Wednesday, July 5, but we did not get confirmation that it arrived from Guy until the next day. By this time, we were at my grandparents' house for the Fourth of July, which was a few hours away from our home, but not as far as the beach. My father had given myself and my two younger brothers credit for the find, and when Guy received the wallet, he asked for our ages, saying that he wanted to do something in return for us. We told him that he didn't need to do anything, but he insisted.

And that's about it.Since then and up until the time of writing this, we have not heard from himagain.