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I had spent a lot of the summer out of town, playing music at festivals. The day after I sent this initial inventory, I discovered the thief inside my house again. He had entered through a window and he escaped through the back bedroom's back door while I was unlocking the front door. I got a glimpse of his back as he ran downhill through the woods. Through what might be called a comedy of errors, it took the Sheriff's office over 24 hours to respond to my call for help, and the license number of the car that was parked on the corner when the thief ran out the door was never traced by the Sheriff's office.
Eventually, and almost entirely by accident, I discovered who was doing it, or at least I found his girl-friend's car full of my stuff parked next to a convenience store, and recovered a car-full of videotapes, the file cabinets that had once contained my business and tax records, and some other miscellaneous stuff, but none of the major items - the BMW motorcycle, the majority of my hi-fi gear and sound equipment, the boatshop that had been filled with hand and power tools, the stanley planes collection, the custom Binks spray-guns, the furniture and other family hierlooms, the antique glass, the thousands of Compact Discs - none of that has surfaced.
By the time the thieves stopped breaking in (exactly synchronous with the owner of that car going to jail on charges stemming from the search warrant that got my stuff out of the car, but otherwise unrelated to this case) there was almost nothing left worth taking. In all, between $70,000 (actual cost) and $140,000 (replacement cost) in stuff had been removed. And none of it was insured.
We have since elected a new Sheriff in Jefferson County, and I assume that things have changed for the better. But for me, this marked a turning point.
For the prior 10 years, my shop and my tools had been "open" and had been used by the community for many projects ranging from the Green Bicycle program that put free bicycles in racks around town so that people could borrow a bike instead of driving around in a car, to the Wooden Boat Foundation rowers club restoring a vintage George Pocock 8-oar rowing shell.
The most amazing things I realized in the aftermath of all this loss, were that nearly everything I had that was loaned out at the time of the break-in was still just fine. A lot of the sound gear that disappeared was normally loaned out and in use, but entirely by happen-stance it was back from a friend's 40th birthday party, and was locked up in the shop that weekend waiting to get reinstalled in a jazz club downtown.
The second thing I realized a little later: it was clear that this stuff was not supporting me, it was holding me down. Once apon a time this collection of stuff had appeared to fit together is some almost-planned way. The collection had evolved organically over 3 decades. A major source of pleasure in my life had been "having" exactly what someone else was looking for, having people in my community call me up looking for something and being able to say "Yes, I've got one of those. Don't buy another one - just use mine!" But with so many of the critical pieces missing (like the sails to the sailboat, or the box of objective and ocular lenses for the A-O Spencer microscopes, or the portable PA system) it just no longer seems to make sense. Hence, the decision to sell the rest of it.
Joe Breskin Port Townsend Washington November 2003