Flashes of Panic

One of the topics of discussion on yesterday’s ride was geocaching. The illustrator had a GPS but hadn’t used it for much, and we rode near two caches (one I’d found, and one I hadn’t.) He hit immediately on the appeal of it: he wanted to know how many there were near Amherst. (It turns out there are eighty within fifteen miles of downtown.)

When I first started geocaching, it was fun to “discover” caches in places I knew; I’d look at the listings and say to myself, “Hey, that must be in…” and I’d go there.

Then, for a while, I thought it would be fun to look for caches in very different places. Whenever I traveled, I would print a quick list of possible caches to look for, and try to make time to hunt them. I managed to find every cache on the island of Bermuda last winter (at the time, there were only six,) and that took us to some interesting places on the island I might not have visited otherwise. But on some trips—to the marathon Trials, to Austin—I couldn’t get excited about hunting caches.

Since the summer, I’ve been working on finding the caches nearest my “home coordinates,” and I think that’s been more rewarding than anything else. When I’m in a new and different place, I have other navigational concerns. Here, I have a pretty good idea where things fit together. So when I set out to find a cache, what I’m doing is looking for a spot someone else thought was worth sharing; in some cases, like the “Stopping by Mt. Toby Woods” multi, an entire journey. I’ve been discovering my area through the eyes of others, a tourist in my own neighborhood.

There was an article a few months ago which included a cacher in southern New Hampshire telling about how he’d found everything out to eighteen miles from his home, a significantly tougher task in the Boston metroplex than it is around here, and another who recently found every cache in the state of New Hampshire. One quote from the article:

“People think going and sniffing around in the woods for a hidden box is kind of peculiar,” said Geiger. “The actual physical find isn’t so much what we’re looking for. Finding interesting places we haven’t been before that we’ve been driving past for 20 years, that’s the fun of it. We’re really discovering our own back yards.”

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