Was cut finger and 75 cents worth it?

Now I know what to look for in the Centennial Trail parking lot gravel: the telltale scatterings of broken glass.

Not daggerlike shards of glass from a beer bottle, but those pebble-sized glass piles that can come only from a car’s safety glass. If you see those little cubes of greenish glass, then you know – some jerk has been doing the old smash-and-grab.

Yeah, I’d heard the stories about the problems at Rimrock Park, the Centennial Trail trailheads and just about every park or trail in the region.

But last week, I found out the hard way (although it could have been a lot harder).

On that evening, I had decided to head down to the Spokane River to scare up a rainbow trout during the evening caddis hatch. I’ve done this dozens of times without mishap.

So I guess my guard was down. I pulled into the Centennial Trail trailhead at the Fort Wright Military Cemetery, just north of Spokane Falls Community College. There were six or seven cars in the parking lot, most of them probably driven by people who were out for their evening bike ride along this beautiful part of the trail.

There were also a few people sitting in cars, just, you know, hanging out. That’s cool. Hey, the parks are for everybody.

So I opened my back hatch, wrestled my way into my fishing vest and slung my rod over my shoulder. Then I locked the car – I’m not stupid – and sauntered my way down to the river about a mile to my favorite fishing hole.

I fished for about two hours, and when dusk began to set in, I headed back up the trail. There was only one other car in the parking lot by the time I got back, parked right next to mine. A little alarm bell went off in my head – it was starting to get dark by this time – but then I saw that the car was occupied by a mom and some kids.

I opened the back hatch, put my stuff away, and noticed nothing amiss. Then I opened my driver’s door and saw piles of glass all over the front seats. Then I noticed that my glove compartment and center console was open. Maps and broken CDs were scattered about. Then I noticed that the passenger side front window was gone, except for a few cracked patches, still clinging to the sill.

I walked up to the people in the other car and said, “Did you see who did this?”

“Did what?” said the mom.

“Broke into my car.”

“No,” she said. And I believed her, because whoever did it surely wouldn’t have done it when a family was around.

I did a quick mental inventory of the car’s contents and realized I had come away relatively unscathed. I had left nothing of value in the car. As far as I could tell, the thieves took one old blanket and maybe 75 cents from a coin tray.

Oh, and they also broke two Tom Petty CDs. Apparently, these guys are music critics.

So you can see why I count myself fortunate. There was no wallet in the car, no cell phone, nothing important at all. If we had been, let’s say, on vacation and stopped to take a hike, thieves could have stolen a purse and all of our luggage. That would have really complicated our lives.

Yet the fact that the car was practically empty just ticked me off even more.

“Didn’t you idiots even look in the car before you broke my window?” I barked to no one in particular as I drove home. “Do I have to put up a sign: ‘Nothing to steal here’?”

And then I became even more ticked off when I realized that my maintenance folder, which contained my vehicle registration and insurance information, was also missing.

“My maintenance folder?” I said to no one in particular. “What? You gonna try to pawn it?”

So I spent the morning getting a new registration certificate, a new insurance certificate and a new window. I was out nothing more than a $100 deductible and a half-day of running around.

So you can see why I feel as if I got off easy.

Nevertheless, I was delighted to find a couple of small bloodstains on my upholstery.

Too bad. Someone cut themselves on my car window. Here’s hoping it gets infected.