Flashes of Panic

Family email this morning, originating with my cousin the cop, brought my attention to the geocacher who is wanted in Portsmouth. (I love how “geocacher” is in quotes in the article headline.) It seems he left a micro-cache made from an Altoids tin and a magnet on an electrical circuit box behind a grocery store. The store found it before anyone else did, and called the police—“suspicious item on our electrical box,” of course.

Overreaction, in the light of the lite-brite hysteria in this area last week? Not really; the store wasn’t evacuated, and the fact is the cache was on store property without permission. It’s a silly place for a cache, no better than if it was actually attached to something inside the store. Which has been done, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.

The thing that really frosts me is that the game (which, I’ll admit, I’ve had little to no time to participate in over the past year and a half,) doesn’t need another lame parking-lot micro-cache.

There are three of these in the Amherst area, which appeared either shortly before I left, or right afterward. They drive me nuts, because they fail on every point of what I consider fun about geocaching. The hunt should (a) take you somewhere you wouldn’t ordinarily go, or show you something unusual about a spot you do know, and (b) should include a hunt which requires a certain (perhaps low) level of dedication and involvement. A micro in a parking lot does none of those things; it’s just mindless thumb-twiddling, an expense of energy which could be better used in planning, preparing, and placing a good traditional cache, a challenging puzzle, or even a multi-cache. The lure of an easy find draws people away from the really pretty, rewarding locations and into a dash to find as many bits of semi-hidden litter as possible.

In the article, the hider is quoted saying, “[I]t’s hard, in an urban setting, to find good hiding places.” Right. That’s not an excuse for using bad ones, is it?

It also leads to negative interactions with the non-caching world, as this shows. Nice job, bub. Way to make us look good.

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