Flashes of Panic

I had a first yesterday: one of the Amherst high school cross-country runners recognized me and spoke to me on the street without A. around. (She’s the assistant coach, so I’m the utility chaperone and Allegedly Responsible Grown-Up.) She wanted to tell me how, on Friday’s run, they had stopped by one of my caches and done an impromptu geocache hunt. She gushed. “Now I’m going to need to get a GPS!” I explained about the guy out in Eastern MA who caches without a GPSr, using topo maps and aerial photos to get a good idea of where to look before going on-site and finding the caches with “the Force.” (More on that later.) Then I went in the post office and forgot to buy stamps.

The girls got interested in caching in August, when I was playing my utility-chaperone role at a weekend “camp” in the New Hampshire hills somewhere between Keene and Concord. They went for a run in Fox State Forest, and I went after Murphy’s Lookout. The previous afternoon, Sparky (not her real name, but that’s what the coach calls her) was inordinately interested in what I was planning to do, and made me explain it in detail.

I am, perhaps, overly sensitive to enthusiasm from high school kids; enthusiasm was something we made fun of when we were in school, and I’m cautious about displaying too much passion for something that might be used as a tool to mock me later. Still, it’s very hard to explain why I was planning on leveraging a few billion dollars worth of military satellite technology to locate a tupperware box full of plastic trinkets stashed under a rock without explaining that there’s a little emotional component in the satisfaction of hunting and finding. So when I found the box, I “traded” a pair of AA batteries for a bead necklace a bit too big for my wrist, and gave it to Sparky when we got back to the vans, figuring that would at least show I was in on the joke.

Apparently something about the idea stuck with them, because they talked A. into showing them the general area where I hid the Misty Bottom cache. They’ve never looked for one before, and from the sound of it they’re not yet tuned in to the sort of places a cache can be hidden (this is “the Force,” which I prefer to call “thinking like a cacher.” It amounts to asking, “If I was hiding a box around here, where would I put it?”) Still, yesterday, the one who stopped me outside the post office said they’re talking about putting it up as an activity for the high school outing club.

I am, needless to say, a bit surprised. Almost as much so as if they were professing a profound interest in, say, database normalization.

Now playing: Secret Agent from Sister (1998 Re-Release) by Letters To Cleo