Oregon Trail - Part 9 - No good deed

I've been living hotel to motel for weeks, and I'm currently parked in a discount motel in Portland. The internet is intermittent, but otherwise it's as decent as it's possible for it to be. I go from apartment to apartment, one of which looks like a halfway house and requires the occupant to go down the hall and through the kitchen to reach the bathroom. In a way, I miss the road.

I get groceries and bring a plastic bag to re-use. I get offered a paper one, the clerk saying, "You want to use that? Shameful plastic!" Of course I realize later that plastic shopping bags are banned in the city, but really I'm following the spirit of the rule if not the letter, huh? What do you want from me? The ban goes on to recommend you line your garbage can with newspaper and wash it out regularly instead, which brings to mind: that sounds pretty unsanitary, who has the space/sink/time to wash out a garbage can, what the fuck kind of environmental activist still reads the news on paper? Paper bags are great, sure, and biodegrade easily, and in a city where it rains 96% of the time, maybe biodegrades even before you reach your car bike or mass transit.

While waiting outside one of those apartments, I go for a walk (it is not the first time my knock has gone unanswered), and find a wallet. I phone the police, unsure of whom else to defer to, since there's not obvious contact info and the license is from Washington. I wait with it for an officer for another half hour, but then call back and explain politely that I need to leave, to finally go look at this apartment, and nobody's been dispatched to pick this thing up. I offer to take it to a mailbox (USPS apparently mails wallets back to owners for free), but the dispatcher recommends against it. I try to explain that the only other option is for me to leave it there, because what the hell am I going to do, take it? Even if I dropped it off at the nearest precinct, that's across the river, and I'm trying to be a good Samaritan, not a civil saint.

Anyway, while touring the apartment, I get a call from an officer who's come to pick it up, and whom I can see out the window and play a sort of "you're getting warmer" game with him from my vantage point while he no doubt scans for a red laser bead and wonders just who the hell this 'grassy knoll' guy on the phone is. He finds it, I hang up, and eventually make it down the block to introduce myself, and evidently give my name and date of birth for his report, though why he didn't ask on the phone, who knows. I sympathize; clearly the PD is busy that day and I'm wasting time with a not-actual-crime, other than that there's no cash in the wallet, for which I am now undoubtedly the number one suspect, and this poor guy has to fill out a report for some citizen from another state who couldn't bother to keep his wallet in his pants.

I head back to the motel to simultaneously dry out and not dry out, as I make my way through the Sierra Nevada Beer Camp. I promise myself to publish my musings on it, as well as the Lessons from the Road which I have learned.