Lost Poles, Found Souls

Millicent Maria Rogers has overseen Sugarbush Resort’s Lost & Found room for more than two decades. When she started the job, she was just concluding her second week of retirement as head librarian at the local high school and had decided that 10 days of retirement was plenty.

Back then, the Lost & Found room wasn’t a room so much as a ratty old basket that sat in the corner of the ski rental shop. As the resort expanded and the crowds grew, so did the basket. A countertop came next, with bins underneath for organizing and storing the variety of items that got turned in on any given ski day: single gloves, face masks, cell phones that had dropped from pockets, ski poles that had dropped from chair lifts, and sweaters and vests that had been shed as temperatures rose. Into the bins everything went, carefully sorted and logged by Millicent. Over time, the bins overflowed, and it became clear that a new solution was in order. Millicent suggested repurposing an oversized and underutilized utility closet, and that has been the Lost & Found room, and her office, ever since.

Every day, Millicent has the joy of reuniting objects with their owners. A child’s bright pink “My Little Pony” mitten found underneath the beginner chairlift gets reunited with its teary owner and grateful mother. A green Dartmouth hoodie, well-worn and softened with time and wear, sits in a bin for months, until one day Millicent picks up the phone to hear someone inquiring if possibly, just maybe . . .”

On its face, the work is simple enough: answer the phone when it rings, accept all the items that flow into the room at the end of the day, and reassure those who feared ever again being reunited with their lost object. It gave Millicent great comfort knowing she could be of service to others, seeing how with just one reach under the counter she could pull out the missing item and bring someone great joy. It was a job for which people said she was uniquely suited. On the days Millicent worked, an unusual number of lost objects were reunited with their owners. But as Millicent has always been quick to say: she was good at making matches.

As talented as she was at reuniting ski poles with people and mittens with little munchkins, Millicent was best of all at matching people—singles who didn’t even know they were lost found their match thanks to Millicent.

Here’s how she did it:

Millicent had a sixth sense, an intuitive knowledge of who was on the mountain and, more critically, the state of their relationship. Just as an air traffic controller has a complete view of the status of the airplanes in the air at any given time, Millicent would scan the mountain upon her arrival at the resort first thing in the morning and know who was lonely, who was in love, and who was just recovering from a break-up. She didn’t know how she knew. She just knew that as she stood at the base of the mountain surveying the skiers crisscrossing the slopes, she could pinpoint, to the person, who was in need of her services that day. Sometimes weeks would pass before her services were needed. But then she would get the tingling feeling in her scalp and the flutter in her heart that told her in no uncertain terms that there were at that very moment two people on the mountain who needed to find each other.

One could be a beginner cruising the bunny slope off the Valley Double chair lift while the other was over on the expert slopes at Castlerock, bombing down steep trails. Once could be at Lincoln Peak and the other a 15-minute chairlift ride away at Mount Ellen. It didn’t matter. Just as all the lost and found items, across the entire resort, flowed downhill like water to arrive eventually in Millicent’s trusted hands, so too did the people in need of a match.

The key to her magic was making sure the people who needed to be united wound up in the Lost & Found room. For Millicent, this was not a problem. A few moments of concentrated focus and a wink of her right eye and a skier who had sworn she’d zippered her pocket would suddenly be missing her phone. A little more concentration and a quick snap of her fingers would send an otherwise securely held ski pole tumbling from the chair lift. Once these items arrived in the Lost & Found room, as they inevitably did, she no longer needed to rely on magic. She knew their owners would soon follow.

Rather than explaining the process further, it’s probably better if I simply share with you what happened this very afternoon.

Nicola entered the Lost & Found room breathless. Brown curls escaping from the ski helmet perched on her head framed her pixieish face. Her cheeks were flushed a deep pink—partly from the cold and exertion of getting herself down the mountain at a speed all too uncomfortable for her and partly from anxiety over losing her new iPhone—a recent birthday gift from her parents.

“By any chance has anyone turned in a cellphone,” Nicola asked Millicent the moment she entered, hoping against hope that Millicent would nod in the affirmative.

Of course Millicent had the phone. It had been turned in 20 minutes earlier by one of the ski patrol volunteers. She had it safely tucked underneath the counter, within easy reach. She needed only bend down to fetch it, but she needed to stall for time.

“What type of phone was it,” she asked, feigning curiosity. “Did it have a unique case or any distinguishing features?”

This led Nicola to wonder just how many phones got turned in on any given day. She sheepishly described her iPhone case covered in pink hearts and the screen saver photo of her rescue puppy.

“Let me just take a look,” Millicent lied, giving the impression that with those details she’d be able to find Nicola’s phone amidst the legions that had already been turned in. It was a performance worthy of any classically trained Shakespearean actress, and Millicent pulled it off with ease.

“Oh, thank you so much for checking. It was a gift from my parents. I’d just die if I lost it after only one day.”

Millicent continued the charade of looking through the bins before standing up, pressing one hand against her back to emphasis the concerted effort she’d just made.

“I’m afraid I don’t see it,” she said. And then, noting Nicola’s crestfallen face, added. “Please don’t worry. It’s still early in the day and things get turned in all the time. Can you wait just a bit, Miss …?”

“Nicola. Nicola Grant,” Nicola said, pulling off her mitten and offering her hand.

No sooner had Millicent grabbed her hand than she felt it again, that telltale tingle. In through the door burst a lumberjack of a man. His oversize build filled the doorway and he shed snow from his beard and his clothes as he entered the room.

“Hi there,” he said, with a lilting voice and winning smile that immediately quashed any fright over his size. “I seem to have lost my googles. Any chance they’ve shown up here?”

Millicent wasn’t about to fess up. For her scheme to work, she needed more time. Or, more specifically, they needed more time.

“Hmmm. Goggles? I’m not sure. I tell you what. I need to step away to make a call. Why don’t you two take these bins over to the table and look through them yourselves?”

With that, she pulled out two decoy bins filled with abandoned items kept for just this purpose.  Their lost items weren’t in there, but standing side by side, sorting through the bins would give the two the precious minutes together necessary to light the spark between them.

Millicent started to leave and then paused and turned back. “Where are my manners? Nicola, meet . . . ?” She raised her eyebrows quizzically at lumberjack man.

“Nick, I’m Nick,” the man said, grinning a mile-wide grin and lunging his hand toward Nicola’s outstretched one.

The two stood together for a beat and Millicent knew it was time for her to exit.

She returned ten minutes later to find them standing by the table strewn with lost objects.

“No luck” she asked, full well knowing the answer.

“No,” they replied in unison, though neither seemed as downhearted as one would expect.

Millicent’s eyes twinkled. “You know, one of my colleagues alerted me to some items that had been turned in while I was out at lunch. He said he put them in the cupboard. Let me just go check,” Millicent said, speaking as much to herself as to the two of them as she reached deep into the wooden hutch behind the counter.

“Oh look,” she said with all innocence as she pulled out goggles and an iPhone with a hot pink case. “It looks like this may be your lucky day after all.”

Nick and Nicola thanked her profusely and gave each other high fives.

“Castlerock Pub for a celebratory beer?” Nick asked.

“Deal,” Nicola replied, tucking her phone into the pocket of her ski jacket and zipping it tight.

Millicent looked at Nick and Nicola standing side by side and had to admire her handiwork.

Yes, these two belonged together. Every bone in her body and tingle in her forehead told her so. She bid them goodbye and turned back to sorting that day’s offerings: more gloves and mittens, a wristwatch, and two ski passes. She knew their owners would show up soon enough. Some of them would merely leave with their retrieved item and think not another thing about it. But a lucky few others would leave with so much more—the item they had lost and the person they had found.❤️