Ray Meek and his four children were enjoying a nice fall day in 2008 at Harmon Park in Bend when they spotted an unusual sight: a canoe floating downriver, with no occupants.

“My daughter says, ‘Look, there’s a boat floating down the river,’ ” Meek said.

Meek grabbed a stick.

“I caught the end of it and pulled it in,” he said. “There were two life jackets and two unopened Pabst Blue Ribbons. And there were lots of leaves in it, like it hadn’t been used in awhile.”

Meek took the aluminum canoe home, and called police. No one had reported the boat lost or stolen, and a Bend officer told Meek to file a report with the Deschutes County Clerk.

Meek filed the report, which started a process under state law that rewards people who report lost property worth $100 or more by giving them ownership of the item if the owner never turns up.

To preserve a right to the property, Meek and other Samaritans must publish a notice of the found item once a week, for two weeks, in a local newspaper. If no one claims the property within three months of the initial report to the county clerk, the finder gets to keep the item.

The finders of lost or abandoned items filed 58 reports in Deschutes County over the past 10 years, according to county clerk’s records.

The found items included wedding rings, guns, cash and snowboards. Bikes were the most common item reported. What the clerk’s records don’t show is how many items were reunited with their original owners.

One man found two pistols in a dumpster in Bend, while a woman discovered a pistol left on Tumalo Mountain. A trial assistant found $350 at the District Attorney’s Office, and a man found a purse with $100 outside Mountain View High School in Bend.

In 2003, Lucy Borne was walking past the Pine Tavern in Bend when she spotted a sapphire and diamond ring in the street.

“It was a little bent,” Borne said, but a jeweler confirmed the stones were real.

Borne called police to report she had found the ring and filed a report with the county clerk.

No one ever claimed the ring and because of the downtown Bend location where Borne found it, she thinks it might have been lost by a tourist.

“If somebody said, ‘Hey, I lost this, it’s really special to me,’ I’d be happy to give it back,” Borne said. “Obviously when you find a piece of jewelry that’s a ring, you hope you find the owner because if it’s something sentimental, you want it to be with the owner.”

One of the people who found cash was Glinda Zumwalt, of Bend, who came across $1,001 in 2002, in the parking lot of a Shari’s restaurant in Bend.

Zumwalt said she’s 64, and her generation grew up knowing that reporting a found item was the right thing to do.

“I would just do that because that’s just what you do,” Zumwalt said.

Still, the event was significant for Zumwalt. In 2002, her daughter was about to get married and Zumwalt didn’t have any money to help pay for a wedding. One day, she prayed for money for the wedding, then took her father to lunch at Shari’s. When they came out of the restaurant, they found a money clip with cash on the ground near Zumwalt’s car.

Zumwalt turned the money over to the police and waited three months for someone to claim it, but no one did.

“I knew in my heart that God had given me the money,” she said.

Deschutes County Clerk Nancy Blankenship said she believes most people do not know of the state law on rights and responsibilities of finders, and people who file reports probably learned of it from law enforcement.

“I’m sure there’s a lot more out there than what comes in,” Blankenship said. “As far as I can tell, a lot of these people wouldn’t even know to do this unless they contacted law enforcement.”

The law was enacted in 1973 and amended in 1989. Blankenship said she does not know the reasons behind it. Deschutes County Sheriff Larry Blanton said the law was written to require finders to attempt to find the property owners, and it also resolves the question of ownership so items do not sit unclaimed forever.

Meek, the Bend father who found the canoe, said no one ever came forward to claim the boat. And he and his kids have enjoyed it.

“I was stoked on it, the kids were stoked on it,” Meek said.