WORDS & PHOTO BY LUKE PHILLIPS
If you've lost anything in Holtville in the past couple of decades, there's a pretty good chance that Pine Avenue resident Helen Wilson might have found it.
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| Helen Wilson |
For the past 22 years (since 1990) Wilson has been walking the streets of Holtville every morning, up to eight miles a day, and almost every time she leaves the house she finds something of value. Cash, cell phones, jewelry, keys, knives, blank checks, $100 bills, wedding rings and just about anything else you can imagine too. Anything valuable that she find in Holt Park she turns in to City Hall and the rest goes to the Sheriff's Office. Except for small amounts of change which she keeps.
A couple of years ago Helen decided to save all of the cash that she found for a one-year period, from January 2011 to January 2012. At the end of the year, she had found $140 mostly in coins, but a couple of larger bills as well.
"I find money almost every day," she said. "People don't look for money, but it's there. I've found a lot on Holt Ave."
Helen says she finds the most coins just after dawn when they tend to shine in the bright morning light, especially on mornings when the street cleaner is running.
"The street cleaner can't pick the coins up so it just cleans it and spits it out and I walk along and pick it up," she said with a laugh.
She also once found two $20 bills in the same day independent of one another, one on the sidewalk and another several blocks away in a gutter.
Wilson can be seen walking the streets of Holtville nearly every morning, her gaze turned downward as her eyes search the sidewalks, gutters and streets for whatever they might find. She says she learned the habit of looking things when she was a young girl and her father would take her to the desert to search for screws and other scrap metal. From that point on, she's been finding all types of different things.
And it's not just money and valuables that Wilson finds either. She says she routinely removes nails and other debris from the streets of Holtville and also uses a stick with a poker to pick up trash when she finds it. She's also turned in lost dogs and cats and even removes the bodies of animals that have been hit by cars.
"I don't want to let people just keep running over them and running over them. I hate that," she said.
And once when a pet owner wouldn't let her remove the body of their dead dog, she stood in the street and guarded the body until the police arrived.
"I just said I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone run over that dog again," she said.
Helen is so good and finding things that her friends and co-workers often recruit her to look for their own missing items. She works at the Finley Elementary cafeteria where she once found her boss, Isabel Jesse's lost diamond earring and also once found co-worker Kimmy Lee's lost antique ring pressed into one of the cafeteria's rubber floor mats.
She's also found her own lost items. Once when she arrived home from a walk, Helen realized that her earring was missing. She began to re-trace her steps and found the earring on the sidewalk after walking about a block.
Helen says her main hobby now is hunting for interesting rocks and old railroad spikes in the empty lots on Fourth Street where the old railroad line used to run through Holtville which she uses to make wind chimes.
