Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [100]
So megacachers will cache long past the point of pleasure, because they know the withdrawal would be worse? It’s hard not to see at least a smidge of compulsion in their devotion to the game. When van der Bokke discusses caching, he has an almost Howard Hughes–like propensity to use the word “clean”—he’s motivated, he says, by the desire “to clean out an area. I wanted to keep a ten-mile radius around my home clean.” This very morning, he and a friend had been out “cleaning up” some new caches that had appeared within this ten-mile safe zone—and were unable to find just one. “That’s frustrating, because now it’s sitting there. I’ll sit at my computer being frustrated. It’s still there on my map.” You scrub and scrub and that nonsmiley just won’t go away!
But I understand that compulsion now; it bothers me too when I look at my neighborhood on Geocaching.com and there’s the little green box of an unfound cache tucked in amongst the smileys, taunting me. Oddly, the idea of unlogged caches doesn’t bother me much in real life; I’m fine driving past them and saving them for another day. But something about seeing them on a map makes their presence almost unbearable. I wonder if this is the dark side of maps, if their orderly authority can gull us into believing in the rightness and importance of all kinds of iffy propositions. In 1890, for example, the diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes was lobbying hard for Britain to connect her two territories in Africa. Think how great it would look on a map, he argued, if British imperial red ran all the way from Cape Town to Cairo! Luckily, Lord Salisbury, the foreign secretary, was no map buff. “I can imagine no more uncomfortable position than the possession of a narrow strip of territory in the very heart of Africa, three months’ distance from the coast, which should be separating the forces of a powerful empire like Germany and . . . another European Power,” he told the House of Lords. “I think that the constant study of maps is apt to disturb men’s reasoning powers.” Similarly, the maps made by the great Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijić after World War I showed the ethnographic divisions of the Balkan peoples in neat stripes and soothing pastels. But in practice, that beautiful map helped inspire a century of brutal ethnic cleansing, an attempt to make the region’s real-life ethnic borders as clear cut as they seemed on the map.
Whatever you think about van der Bokke’s obsession, there’s no denying the scope of his achievement. When friends or family scoff at the time he puts into his global Tupperware hunt, he asks them, “Do you know anybody that’s number one at anything in the world?” There was, perhaps, only one other geocacher who was ever in his league. Alamogul’s predecessor atop the caching leaderboard was one “CCCooperAgency,” the world’s most prolific cacher for most of the last decade. CCCooperAgency was Lynn Black, an insurance agent from the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area—by all accounts a popular and extraordinarily energetic geocacher but to me a total enigma. She walked away from the game in 2009 and now refuses to discuss the geocaching world she once ruled.
Most prolific megacachers are retirees with limitless free time, but Black was a busy business owner and mother of three. She hauled her family around on power-caching runs all over the eastern seaboard, but none of them quite had her boundless stamina for the game. She soon became aware that her geocaching obsession was becoming a problem. “I don’t do anything besides geocaching,” she told a newspaper in 2005. “You need to set up a clinic for Geocachers Anonymous,” her husband, Kevin, concurred. She tried to quit several times, telling an interviewer in 2006, “I started to miss my kids. They’re sick of geocaching. It’s just too selfish, you know what I mean?”
But each time she thought she was out, like Michael Corleone, she