Everyone who loves mysteries secretly hopes that one day life will drop an intriguing puzzle into their lap for them to solve. Maybe not an Agatha Christie-type crime, but something that will send them on a real-world chase to connect the dots and land at a satisfying conclusion.
That's exactly what happened to Katie Elkin, a retired teacher with a penchant for mysteries. "I'm 84 and I have lived a full, wonderful life," she tells me over a video call from her home in Prescott, Arizona.
Until now, Elkin's mysteries have largely been genealogy-based. She recounts an extraordinary story about making friends with a woman from California and discovering that their grandfathers had trained together in the Army and then shipped out to France in World War I on the same day. "That's my whole life," she says. "It's coincidences."
On this Friday in February, we're talking about another coincidence in Elkin's life -- one of finding a phone, lost for a decade in the desert, and Elkin's attempt to reunite it with its owner.
Our phones are immensely personal items, serving both as memory banks that store our most precious data and as portals that connect us with every important person in our lives. These days, if we lose them, tracking technology means there's every chance we could be quickly reunited with them, but that hasn't always been the case.
Those disappearances can be high-stress moments for anyone -- just ask Apple about the unreleased iPhones it lost back in 2010 and 2011, which, coincidentally, were around the same time it introduced the Find My iPhone feature. But even today, recovering a lost phone means relying to an extent on the goodwill and honesty of the person who found it. Many people will choose to do the right thing in this scenario, and some -- like Elkin -- will go above and beyond to help out a stranger.
On a sunny day just before Thanksgiving, Elkin and her husband drove about 10 minutes west of the city to spend some time outdoors. Prescott is surrounded by national parks and ponderosa pine forest, but on this day, Elkin was headed to the desert -- not for a hike, she says, but an "amble."
Rather than taking the well-marked trail popular with hikers and ATVs, Elkin instead split off onto a lesser-known path "obliterated by the grasses and the weeds."
It was Elkin's dad who taught her that if she wanted to spot something, she should look for it -- sage advice that's served her well over the years. "He was always finding change," she says. "And I can do that too. I always find animals. If we're driving, I can see them in the woods … I'm always looking for something."
The phone found by Katie Elkin. Katie Elkin/Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET
... continue reading