Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [94]
But where’s the cache? I have yet to develop what cachers call “geosenses,” the seemingly extrasensory ability to get inside the head of the hider, to look at a landscape and spot the likely hiding places of the “geojoy.”* No GPS locator is correct down to a single foot, of course. My readings are dependent on the time it’s taking signals to bounce off a constellation of six overhead satellites, and if signals start bouncing off of other things—these tall trees, for example—rather than traveling into space in a straight line, small errors will creep in. I know the cache is somewhere in a tight radius around these coordinates, but Space Command can’t actually tell me, “It’s in that hollow log, dummy!”—I have to look. I kick through leaves, I lift up rocks, I reach under tree roots. It’s exactly as much fun as looking for your car keys or searching for your retainer in a cafeteria garbage can. People do this for fun?
But then comes the epiphany. I’m standing at the base of the highest dirt-bike ramp when I realize: geocaching coordinates include only latitude and longitude. What about the Z-axis? What about height? I inch my way up the rickety wooden track. Dylan wants to come too, until he gets halfway up and then realizes he liked it just fine on the ground. At the highest point, where the teenagers used to turn their bikes around, I reach my hand under the platform, and there’s something square and metallic. “I got it! I got it!” I shout, euphoric with the unexpected endorphin rush of finding. Aha. That’s why people do this for fun.
Dylan opens the little box and it’s love at first sight: a Cracker Jack carton without any of that stupid popcorn or peanuts, just cheap toys. To a six-year-old, it might as well be diamonds and rubies. He spots a plastic sheriff’s badge he wants, so he digs around in his pocket until he finds an unused Chuck E. Cheese token and leaves that in its place. I sign the log, carefully replace the cache in its perch, and we head for home as Dylan babbles cheerfully. “Dad, when can we come back and play on the ramps? Dad, are there any more geocaches on our street? Dad?” Score: geocaching 1, video games 0.
Somewhere in the vicinity of five million people are active geocachers, and the rules of the game are scanty enough that no two people play it quite alike. The vast majority are casual cachers, who might occasionally spend a sunny afternoon driving around town with a spouse or kids in tow, looking for a few easy grabs. On a road trip, or with time to kill before an appointment in an unfamiliar part of town, they might think to pull out their smartphone to see if there’s a geocache nearby. They are sensible, temperate souls, not prone to crazy obsessions of any kind, and so they are deeply respected by their neighbors and community. Let us speak no more of them.
But some geocachers are more obsessive and their quarries more elaborate. “Extreme cachers,” for example, literally risk life and limb for no other reward than an elusive “smiley”—the happy-face icon that signifies a successful find on Geocaching.com. They’re not going to waste their time on any cache that’s not hidden over a cliff or in an abandoned mine shaft, up a forty-foot oak tree or at the bottom of the Great Salt Lake. They speak in hushed whispers of great white whales like Psycho Urban Cache #13, a legendary West Virginia cache that was dropped via helicopter atop a seventy-foot pylon in the middle of the Potomac River.* Some of these caches are so extreme that they’ve never been found, like Gokyo Ri, left on one of the highest peaks of the Nepalese Himalayas in 2004, or Rainbow Hydrothermal Vents, left by a Russian Mir submersible at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 2002.†
“Puzzle caching” is extreme caching for the mind, and its devotees forgo scuba or rock-climbing gear in favor of a simpler piece of equipment: the sharpened pencil.