Healed of Gold

I lost my keys early Tuesday morning. Some friends and I had gone to some fields about 2 miles north of the dorm to watch the Leonid meteor shower. I got back to my door at 2:15 or so, reached into my pockets, and realized there were no keys present.

The next morning I woke up at 7:41 (though now I realize that 741 is not prime) because I wanted to get around campus before anyone else was awake and aware enough to pick up my keys and turn them in to the nearest "authority," which might make it harder for me to find them. Campus is very dead at 8:11.

After retracing all of my steps leading there, I finally made it to the field about seventy minutes after I started my search. I went down the hill to access the field, across the tire lines that I knew we had crossed, and looked around the general area of where I thought we had laid down. It was a large field, probably about 100 yards by about 300 yards. The grass was really thick and heavy and long and multicolored. I don't know whether that helped or not. It certainly wasn't as easy as looking through my yard at home, but it wasn't as difficult as looking through a cornfield.

I had no luck in the area where I thought we were. I remembered that Will and I had gone up to a 'clearing' up the field a little bit when we were trying to scare fellow viewers, so I did my best to trace my path up there and looked around. No luck. I took a different path back to the spot where I thought we had laid - there were some funny golden stalks in the middle that I know we didn't touch - thinking that maybe I dropped them on the way, but no luck.

I kept looking around. Eventually, after a couple minutes, I realized a pattern in the grass. It was exactly long and wide enough for the six of us to have laid out and pulled the grass downward in exactly the way that it appeared. So I had found right where we had laid. If my keys were going to be anywhere, it'd be there. They were probably in my left pants pocket or my right coat pocket, so I looked at the grass near where they should fall out if they were in those places. Nothing.

Extremely frustrating.

I would have to call mom and ask her to overnight my car key so I could drive home, and pay a lot of money for a new dorm key.

Just before I was about to leave, I leaned back in one last time, for pretty much no reason at all, at the same place horizontally as my keys should have fallen out of my left pants pocket, but much higher vertically - closer to where my arm would be. Through some crazy lucky, I just happened to see my keys poking out from behind a bit of grass.

It was the most satisfying personal victory I can remember in a long time.

Peace out.