Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [93]
But nerdy kids are often big geocachers. Imagine: a treasure hunt just like the ones in books, only there are hundreds of them within a few miles of your house! To an adult, the search is its own reward, but for a child, it seems too good to be true that the search’s end is often a trove stuffed with green army men, Happy Meal toys, plastic jewelry, and other priceless treasures.
My wife thinks it’s worth a shot. “Dylan will do anything if you give him a twenty-five-cent toy at the end,” she says. “That’s why he’s always asking when we can go back to the dentist.”
“Apparently it’s totally catching on now that so many people have GPS devices in their phones,” I tell her. “Look at this list of famous people who geocache. Mia Farrow, Wil Wheaton, Ryan Phillippe. The drummer from Poison.”
Mindy actually seems interested for the first time. “Wait, he goes geocaching with only one arm?”
“From Poison, not Def Leppard!”
A week later, Dylan and I drop sixty bucks on a kid-friendly Geomate.jr, which comes covered in pale green rubber and preloaded with a quarter of a million cache locations. We slip in a pair of batteries, and thirty seconds later its little digital-watch screen is telling us there’s a cache exactly 0.17 mile southeast of our front door. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. “It’s only nine hundred feet that way,” I say as we strike out down the driveway, with Dylan waving his GPS back and forth in front of him at arm’s length, like it’s Fisher-Price’s My First Dowsing Rod. “It must be on the back of that hill across the road.”
Geocachers always talk about how the joy of caching is in the journey, in the chance to stop and see the unexpected places right under your nose that you otherwise would have driven right past. In fact, it’s so axiomatic that geocaching will reveal the hidden secrets of your neighborhood that there’s even an acronym in the trade for it: YAPIDKA, meaning “Yet Another Park I Didn’t Know About.” This is the lasting appeal of the game to Dave Ulmer, who now spends the entire year motoring around the West in an RV. (When I spoke to him, he was camping in the Bradshaw Mountains just south of Prescott, Arizona.) He doesn’t log his finds anymore, but, he says, “The minute I get the slightest bit bored, I’ll bring up Geocaching.com and see what’s in my area. I don’t care about the box full of trinkets, but I might find an Indian corral or a fabulously unusual geologic site or lava caves or a beautiful forest viewpoint. You’re not going to stumble on that on your own. But with geocaching, you just walk right up to it.”
I’m not expecting the woods across the street from my house to hide any mysteries greater than a few broken beer bottles, but once Dylan crests the hill I hear him yell, “Whoa, Dad, come check this out!” The Douglas firs on the hillside—the same ones I can see out my office window every day—conceal an elaborate network of wooden boardwalks and ramps winding through the forest, sometimes as high as ten feet in the air. We’ve been living across the street from an Ewok village for three years and never knew!
“Some older kids built this to jump their BMX bikes,” explains a neighborhood girl, cutting through the woods with her friends. I’m trying to listen politely without taking my eyes off Dylan, who is running up and down the ramps making rocket-ship noises and—hopefully—not getting tetanus from anything rusty and pokey. “But they left and went to college, I think. Nobody uses them now.”
I look down at our toy receiver. My coordinates have “zeroed out”; I’m now standing on a uniquely specified point on the Earth’s surface, right down to one-thousandth of a minute of longitude and latitude. I’m unexpectedly awestruck at something I take for granted when I use GPS to navigate in the car: every time I take a few steps, the numbers change on the toy in my hand, and