Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [96]
But other geocachers thrive on the density. They won’t rest until there’s a pill bottle Velcroed to the metal skirt at the base of every parking lot lamppost and a magnetic key container beneath every picnic table. The more the merrier! I think this is a telltale clue to what’s driving geocaching’s sudden popularity: the urge to fill an otherwise overexplained universe with mysterious secrets. Children intuitively believe that our gray everyday existence must conceal beneath its surface another world, brighter and more interesting, like the one in story books. But then they get older and gradually come to terms with the sad truth that there is no hidden world—no Confederate gold behind the bricks of the old fireplace, no genie in any of the glass bottles washed up by the surf. Geocaching restores those lost treasures by the thousands. It’s a way for acolytes to make the world feel a little more magical, one camouflaged Altoids tin at a time.
The Harry Potter books have sold six jillion copies by trading on this same fantasy: a secret world known only to a small coterie of insiders. In J. K. Rowling’s series, just as in geocaching, seemingly ordinary places and objects conceal numinous secrets: a blank brick wall might open onto a magical secret alley, an old boot or a newspaper might be an enchanted teleportation device in disguise. It’s no surprise, then, that geocachers have borrowed the word “Muggle”—a clueless nonwizard in Harry Potter’s world—to apply to clueless nongeocachers. This reflects both the satisfaction cachers take in their secret knowledge (they can walk along a busy trail with the confidence that they know something about that particular tree stump that nobody else knows) and the very real threat posed by outsiders. Cachers will go to great lengths to avoid being spotted while hiding or retrieving a geocache, because all it takes is one too-curious onlooker and the secret spot might be “Muggled” (plundered) and thereby ruined for future seekers. So there’s a clandestine thrill to the sport, almost reminiscent of Cold War–era double espionage: lots of long, chilly waits on park benches pretending to feed birds and cautious drive-bys of prearranged “dead drops” on lonely country roads.
Geocachers develop their own tricks to avoid suspicious looks (followed, quite often, by 911 calls—police interrogations are a rite of passage for prolific cachers*) as they lurk in shrubbery and poke around utility boxes. Some swear by a fluorescent orange vest and clipboard: you can apparently act as fishy as you like as long as you’re dressed like a city employee. Others, like David Carriere of Ottawa (geocaching handle “Zartimus”) go caching only by dead of night. “It was the only time I could find to go, with the kids and all,” he tells me, but I’m not entirely convinced by his innocent explanation. Zartimus, you see, is best known in caching circles for his eccentric uniform: a Batman cape and cowl accompanied by a ten-foot bullwhip. If Muggles approach, he says, “I kill the light by pulling the cape over my head and I just sit there. You can’t see me with that thing on because the cape breaks up the shape.” I prefer daylight caching (and don’t own a single superhero vigilante costume), so I develop a strategy of talking loudly into my GPS receiver as if it were a cell phone while searching, and I avoid caches near schools and playgrounds unless I have my kids with me. You may laugh, but if you’re a middle-aged man, just try spending twenty minutes carefully rubbing your fingers over every inch of a playground’s chain-link fence and see where you end up spending the night.
Geocaching and the law have had something of a