Day One: Mile 2.6

My first 2.6 miles of walking the country, and I unknowingly fund a pickpocket.

We will soon be crammed onto a trolley car that shuttles sardine-like passengers from old town to new town. We wait at the platform for passengers to get off. Once a handful of them squeeze from the human confines of the trolley´s innards, a flood of bodies behind us force us forward into the waiting wall of standing bodies which are already too saturated in human contact to move any further in any direction. The conductor attempts to close the doors that will serve to keep us all from being inadvertently pushed out. His efforts are to no avail, human bodies block the threshold, and the swinging doors are muted in movement against the force of a mob. I´m sure that´s when it happened. A crafty pickpocket, who knew her craft well, freed me of the burden of carrying around my wallet.

Unfortunately for the traveler, it takes a while to adjust to their new environs. For me it happened 2.6 miles too late. I was naive to think the buttons on my pockets would be an ample deterrent to thieves. I had inaccurately assumed the buttons would be like kryptonite to the would be thief. While pressed chest, to arm, to back, to shoulder with the trolley riders, my wallet had been liberated from my back pocket. My wimpy defenses were no match for the savvy of deft fingers and an opportune moment.

I noticed almost immediately, but still too late. Two women behind me disembarked so the doors would close - or so I thought. A few seconds later I felt myself up, searching for my wallet out of habit. A few seconds too late. I turned to my girlfriend Michelle and asked her "how do you say ´have you seen my wallet?´" Having my answer I turned to the people around me and asked "¿han visto mi cartera?"' I was desperate. I had an inkling that none of them had actually lifted my wallet, and if one of them had, I knew they would not offer an honest answer. "Yeah, I took it. Sorry about that. Pretty funny though, huh?" And we would laugh and he/she would hand my wallet back to me with my credit cards, Oregon driver´s license, social security card, debit card, International Youth Identity Card, and twenty bucks in cash still there. Instead I got dirty looks, rightly so for assuming the honest people around me were crooks (but still I had to ask). Two stops later, Michelle and I squeezed ourselves out from the people who enveloped us. Even though my chest was no longer restricted from cramped bodies, I still found it harder to breath that when I first boarded the trolley. I felt violated. Taken advantage of, and it left a bad taste in the back of my brain. Now what?

Luckily Michelle had the clairvoyance to write down our credit card numbers and credit company phone numbers, in the event of just such a circumstance. We cut a path through busy streets to the nearest calling center.

We took out the little book Michelle had entered our credit card vitals into and began the process of canceling all my credit cards. An hour and fifteen dollars later, we had suffered through the absurd hold music and confused credit card workers on the other end and succeeded in canceling everything that might have made my wallet valuable. In the end, no more than twenty bucks, a few pieces of ID, a wallet my sister had given me, and my naivete had been stolen. The latter the thief was welcome to - my naivete is something I was happy to part with.

And so, on with the vacation!