Wandering Aimlessly With High Precision

While I was at the park with the family last week I found myself waiting for the boy to get off the jungle gym, so I decided to kill some time by downloading and playing with a geocaching app by Groundspeak. A friend of mine told me about geocaching a while back but I had never really considered it - too many other things to do, I guess.  

If you don’t know, here is geocaching in a nutshell.  You get some GPS coordinates that direct you to the approximate area of a hidden container (cache) and you go and find it.  The sizes vary, but they usually contain a log for you to sign to prove that you were there, and sometimes there are neat little (read: worthless but interesting) trinkets you can trade, assuming you have something of equal or greater value with you to leave.  

Some people refer to Geocaching as “using a multi-billion dollar satellite system to find Tupperware in the woods”.  Also a fair summary.

Around the world there are over 1.8 million hidden caches, so chances are there are several near you. For example, there are two in my neighborhood, one in a baseball field about 600 feet from Agmorion’s house, one in an old vineyard close to a sister of mine, and one in a tree about a third of a mile from Jimmydunes.

No, you’re creepy...

I started up the app, not really knowing what to expect and lo and behold there were about a dozen in the very park I was in, the closest being a mere 230 feet from where I was standing!  Neat!  

I told the boy what we were going to do next because what could be more exciting to a four-year-old than looking for hidden treasure in the woods with his family?  Nothing, probably!  On the other side of that coin, what could be a bigger letdown than failing to find a plastic box filled with trinkets in a mosquito-filled woods after searching for what seemed like forever?  Nothing, probably.

Firmly on “the other side of the coin”, we gave up after “forever” had passed (roughly five minutes).  I told him we would find it the next time we were there.  He seemed cool with that.

Later, I noticed that there were two in our neighborhood, one near a park.  Surely, the boy and I could find that one, right?  Nope.  Same deal.  Dad says “let’s go look for treasure in the woods”, kid says “Ok”, kid walks away dirty, scraped up, and harboring the feeling that his father comes up with the stupidest games to play, ever.

I guess I could hide behind excuses like “I had no concrete idea of the size of what I was looking for” or “my GPS in my phone isn’t really great in trees” or “I was limited by my kid’s lack of desire to walk through the mud and headlong into a row of thorn bushes” but it really came down to the fact I had no idea what I was doing.  I needed advice.

That advice came from a geocaching co-worker who agreed to go and look for an allegedly easy one near where we work.  It took the entire lunch hour but we did it - he nearly lost his security badge, but we found it.  It was a waterproof container about half the size of my thumb.  Signing the tiny log inside felt awesome.  

Armed with the tips and pointers I picked up during this hunt I headed back to the park near my neighborhood with the family in tow.  This time, the wife would watch the boy, I would search to my heart’s content, find it, sign the log,  put the cache back, rejoin the family, then “find” it with the boy.  Redemption, here we come!

A quick aside here.  Non-geocachers are called “Muggles” after the non-wizarding folk in the Harry Potter series.  You need to be kind of stealthy regarding them because nothing quite raises the alarm in folks in this post 9/11 world than watching some dude circle a tree (or a fire hydrant or a fencepost or whatever) for fifteen minutes then place a mysterious package nearby and leave.  Also, part of the game is to keep the caches in good shape and that includes not inadvertently turning them into an “attractive nuisance” to curious passersby.

The wife runs into a mom and her kid in the park, she becomes best buddies with the woman in that way my wife has, and the kids go off to play in the sand near the swings while the grownups chat.  After a while, the third kid (me) traipses off into the ditch behind the park to give the cache a second go.  It took me fifteen minutes, but I found it!  Sweet!  I signed the damp-but-usable log, noted the little chain-restaurant-vestibule-coin-machine trinkets inside, and closed the box.  

Just then two ten-year-old girls appeared on bicycles and started orbiting the basketball court near the cache.  I couldn’t put the box away without risking that my first solo find would be “Muggled”.  So I had to wait.  After about five minutes standing there in the ditch half-hidden by trees, not moving as to not attract attention to myself, wondering why my wife has not at least come over to see if I was ok, and wondering how long it took to contract Lyme disease, I hear one of the girls pipe up in alarm and say “Oh my God, there’s somebody back there!”

Well, that’s just super.  Now I’m the creepy guy in the ditch behind the fence in the park.  Any number of horror movies start off this way...  I can’t run away, and I sure as hell can’t approach.  My wife is just behind the jungle gym - from her vantage point she can see the boy, but she can’t see me.  I can’t see her, but I can kind of hear her talking to her new friend.   But, hey, no worries.  I can just call the boy over and all will be well.  Out of my mouth I hear the following horrifying words boom toward the park:  “HEY, BIG GUY!  WHERE’S YOUR MOMMY?”  

He stops playing in the sand, looks over in my direction and says... nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  Then he went on playing “I Said Stop Destroying My Sandcastle!” with his new playmate.

At this point I was pretty sure I was going to jail.  

“Well, enough of this,” I thought, “Time to take action.”

I approached the fence and yelled louder, figuring if I did so with enough confidence that  it might make me look less serial-killer-y.   This time the wife heard me and yelled back across the park the third worst thing she could have (the first being “Stranger Danger!”, and the second being “My husband is unarmed, can’t fight, and has twelve-hundred dollars in his wallet!”): 

“DID YOU FIND IT?!!?!”

The girls stopped and stared at me and at the wife.  I paused for a while, not sure what to do.  Maybe if I don’t say anything she will get the hint and...

“DID YOU FIND IT?!!” she repeated.

“Yes!” I yelled as quietly as I could while hiding the box behind my back.  

“WHAT’S INSIDE OF IT?!!”

“Ummm.  I’d rather not say!” I yelled with as much please-understand-my-tone-I’m-begging-you as I could muster.  At this point, I was told later, the new friend (who had never heard of Geocaching) asked my wife if there was something unsavory in the box (like drugs or a human head, I guess) and that’s why I didn’t want to say what it was in front of everyone.  

Well, that’s me all over: Super Awesome First Impression Man.

The girls took off at a slightly higher speed than was absolutely necessary and I was able to return the cache to it’s hiding spot.  I went over and explained things to the friend.  She was courteous but clearly non-plussed. 

Meh... At least I didn’t get maced.  I’ll chalk that up as a “W”.

After the woman and her kid left we all went to the pavilion and I told my son I found the hidden box.  He looked up from his chalk drawing with what appeared to be interest but said nothing.  I asked him if he wanted to go and see it - it had some cool toys in it, I told him.

“No.  No thanks,” he said, going back to his work.  Now, I know that “no thanks” reads all cute and polite but, trust me, it was sooooo dripping with “Fool me once, Old Man, fool me once...” - I totally can’t blame him.

After the park it was time to head home but I wanted to try my hand at another cache a little over a half-mile away in the opposite direction from home, apparently because I lack any sort of pattern recognition or short-term memory.  After whining at the wife for a while she agreed to pick me up in thirty minutes near that area.  I got there and found the cache (an easy one badly covered by branches near the base of a tree) just before the setting sun made things too hard to see.  This find was mercifully uneventful.

During the car ride back I made peace with the fact that I was hooked on this new hobby.  It’s free (well, the app was ten bucks, but it’s a one-time thing), it’s excellent exercise, and may or may not be fun for the whole family.  

So just remember: If you see a guy repeatedly wandering up and down the treeline behind the Wal-Mart with a confused look on his face, he may not necessarily be a meth addict looking for a place to crash for the night.  He might just be a dude harmlessly searching for a plastic sandwich container full of toys to sign so he can prove to other people that he can find a plastic sandwich container filled with toys armed with nothing more than his wits, a three-hundred-dollar smartphone, and several billion dollars worth of military technology.  

You know... you might want to call the cops, all the same.