Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [98]
“So you see the whole activity as a life-form that spreads on its own? Are we all little neurons in this big brain?”
“That’s right!”
But for all my absorption into the geocaching hive-mind, there’s one coveted caching honor I don’t have: an FTF, or “First to Find.” Some cachers specialize in finding virgin caches—being the first to sign a newly placed hide. If twenty-four-hour power cachers are the marathoners of the geoworld, then First-to-Find hounds are its sprinters. Bryan Fix, a Portland, Oregon, native who caches as “Scubasonic,” has a near-superhuman FTF track record: more than nine hundred FTFs notched, fully 14 percent of his finds. He once bagged ten in a single day, which is remarkable, since the Portland area sees only ten or fifteen new caches in a typical week.
Back in the day, when there weren’t many geocachers, the FTF was an achievement within the reach of mere mortals; even casual cachers would stumble upon one from time to time. But this is the steroid era. “Premium” members who pay Geocaching.com $30 a year can choose to receive instant notifications the second a new cache is published, and the hard-core types make sure those messages find them on their phones or PDAs.
“I actually sleep with my BlackBerry,” Bryan tells me from behind the desk of his Vancouver, Washington, real estate office. He’s a strikingly youthful-looking forty-nine-year-old, with a high, gleaming forehead that somehow makes him seem boyish, not balding. “I have it on the vibrate mode, and if it beeps, I jump up and I’m gone. I always have my clothes laid out next to the bed. I’m out the door in a minute, and I enter the coordinates on the way.”
“So you’re like a doctor.”
“Well, I don’t get the money.”
The FTF junkies are often the most social of geocachers, since they’re the only ones who so often converge on the same cache at the same time. Bryan knows and likes his nemeses, even though he’s not the most beloved figure on the local circuit. “I’ve been accused of cheating,” he sighs. “I guess they’re bothered that I get so many, but if you want to get ’em, get up off the couch and go get ’em! There’s nothing stopping you.” He’s seen cars squeal up to new cache locations only to have their angry drivers scowl at him or slam their fists on the car roof in frustration when they see that there are already flashlights combing the forest. No one, after all, remembers the second team to climb Everest.
He’s also learned over time where his rivals live, based on which geocaches they’ve beaten him to—FTFers, like street gangs, develop “turf.” So Bryan decided to broaden his turf by analyzing where new geocaches would appear and at what time of day. “I started seeing a pattern,” he says. “So I would actually drive over and sit centrally located, where I thought they were coming up.” He still spends some nights at his favorite spot, the Foster Road on-ramp to I-205, camped in his car like a cop on a stakeout, waiting patiently for new prey to appear on his BlackBerry or laptop. Most nights, sooner or later, one does. “And then I take off. I’m out of there.”
I don’t get instant notifications of new geocaches, so in my short geocaching career I’ve never even come close to an FTF. Then, one drizzly afternoon as I’m walking out of the grocery store, I idly pull up the geocaching app on my phone and select “Find Nearby Geo-caches.” I’m just blocks from home, and I motored through all the caches in my neighborhood months ago, so I’m not expecting to see anything close by. But there sits a blue question mark at the top of the list: a mystery cache I don’t recognize, just a mile or two away. I bring up its full listing, and it looks like a simple logic puzzle. Even better, it was published less than two hours