Don’t Worry, “Blue Highways” Was Kind Of Disappointing Anyway

What ends up at the LIRR lost and found:

For instance, [Casey Arasa, Penn Station’s terminal manager] suggested, judging by the number of lost karate gis, interest in the martial arts and being properly uniformed for them is booming in the suburbs. Yoga, too — at least according to all the dropped mats — remains quite popular. But trend spotting gets more difficult when the items are bizarre ones, and there are certainly plenty of those.

. . .

All told, the lost and found collects more than 10,000 items a year (with a 50 percent return rate) and stores them for as long as 40 months on numerous cluttered shelves in a dingy warehouse space that is just around the corner from the men’s room. Lost cellphones are kept in plastic bins, according to their model (and with their ringers blissfully off). Cash, of course, is stored separately, and the fact that $19,892 has been returned so far this year suggests that people probably aren’t as grasping as you thought.

The biggest lessons of the lost and found appear to be: a) suburban women have a hard time keeping hold of their purses, and b) Long Islanders are waterproof, since why else would they leave behind so many nice umbrellas? Sub-lessons might include the fact that many commuters are technophobes (there are currently more than 60 laptops in the lost and found) and that, judging by how many Touristers are missing, a good piece of luggage just isn’t as valuable as it used to be.

Another thing you may not know is that the framed print of, say, the East River bridges that you accidentally left behind last year on the morning train to Babylon now hangs on the wall of the lost and found, which is furnished by commuters’ dropped objects. There is even a modest lending library of lost books that indicate the Long Island mindset: “Be a Real Estate Millionaire,” “Gross Anatomy,” “Blue Highways,” by William Least Heat Moon and Joe Torre’s inside-the-clubhouse tell-all.

See also, for comparison’s sake, the MTA lost and found (from 2006); prosthetic limbs there, too.