It was love at first sight and heartbreak at first loss. We had a three-year affair, my white third-generation iPod and me, until it slipped from my messenger bag last month somewhere between Reykjavík and Eyrarbakki, home of Litla Hraun, Iceland’s maximum security prison, 60 kilometers east of the capital, where I'd spent several days interviewing one of the prisoners.

This particular iPod kept me company on the New York subway during grad school, provided warmth during long walks in even longer Icelandic winters, and served as home to probably 80 hours of interviews, some containing very sensitive information, recorded in the States, Europe, and Iceland.

Luckily, I’d actually backed up the interviews and replaced this iPod a while ago – before I’d lost it – with a lovely black one, 80 gb. Yet for whatever reason, I continued using the white one because, well, it was so reliable and well-loved. And when I lost it, well, I had another one, much newer, stocked with even more music, but it just didn’t exude the same love.

I’d all but given up hope. I looked everywhere. I scoured my apartment and every drawer in my office desk. I retraced steps downtown. I made a couple phone calls to restaurants and bars I’d frequented to see if someone had turned it in – nothing.

The weeks continued to pass.

And nothing.

Until I received an email last week while I was in the States.

The email was titled “iPod” and was written in Icelandic. Since I embarrassingly still can’t read Icelandic I forwarded it to a couple Icelandic friends to translate, one of whom got back to me, stat, with the following: “seems to be a really nice guy who found your iPod and has gone through the trouble of finding you instead of selling it or eating it or something. The email says, “found an iPod and it’s called Sara Blask, I think it’s yours!” 

When I got back to Iceland last week, I replied to the guy who sent me the email and ten minutes later he called me.

Turns out his mom works at Litla Hraun and found the iPod amidst snow and garbage in the prison’s parking lot. After a couple of weeks no one claimed it, so she gave it to her son (the one who emailed me), who charged it up and saw that it was called “Sara Blask.” He plugged my name into Google, found my website, and emailed me.

He even dropped it off, explaining it was probably just a little good karma that his mom had found it. He’d left his wallet on top of his car a couple months ago and drove off without it. Several days later someone got in touch with him and returned the wallet with all its contents still inside.

Unless you live in small town America, you just don’t hear stories like these from where I come from. You lose an iPod and it lands on eBay. You lose a wallet and someone is a credit card and a couple bucks richer.

Finders keepers, losers weepers. It’s more of a hassle than anything else. I lost my wallet during a taping of The Daily Show at Jon Stewart’s studio in New York last year. Too bad the lucky finder only made twenty bucks and scored a few rides on my subway card. My wallet is not the one you really want to find.

But my iPod is. With its thousands of dollars worth of [legally] downloaded music and who-the-hell-knows how many hours of sensitive interviews, stumbling upon my iPod is kind of like finding liquid gold in a bottle of laundry detergent.

Thankfully in these parts, though, the principles of upstanding morals and good citizenry seem to usually reign. I may complain about the miserable vegetables in the grocery stores, but few can dispute the Viking integrity. Now that’s some good music.

SB – sara@icelandreview.com