Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [99]
“Hey, are you going out?” calls Mindy from the kitchen. “Dylan forgot his piano books. Can you drop them off at Janetta’s before his lesson starts?”
Is she serious? How can she not know what’s at stake here? “No!” I bellow, slamming the garage door behind me.
In the car, I stare at myself in the rearview mirror for a moment. What have I become? I’m yelling at my family and sabotaging their piano lessons, and for what? So that my signature will appear maybe one centimeter higher on a piece of paper that practically no one will ever see? I dutifully trudge back upstairs and grab Dylan’s piano books. Then I race back to the car and peel out.
It’s pouring rain when I arrive at the bike trail, and the spot seems deserted. The cache is now exactly four hours old—surely it’s been found once or twice by now. I’m drenched by the time I finally see the tiny pill bottle hidden in the tall grass at the base of a wooden post. I unscrew the top with shaking fingers, and I’m not sure if that’s from the cold or not. For some reason, I find myself thinking of the explorer Robert Scott. When Scott journeyed to Antarctica in 1911, he had high hopes of being the first to reach the South Pole. But on January 16, 1912, his team spotted a rock cairn on the ice ahead of them, and dog sled tracks heading north. The Norwegian expedition of his rival Roald Amundsen had beaten him to the Antarctic FTF by a matter of weeks. “The worst has happened,” he wrote in his journal. “All the day dreams must go; it will be a wearisome return.”* I’m expecting to read the name of some GPS-toting Amundsen inside the cache, but instead I find something I’ve never seen before in my geocaching career: a completely blank log sheet. It’s unspoiled territory, just like the white fringes on the edges of maps during the Age of Discovery, and I do feel like a pioneer as I proudly make my mark with the tiny ballpoint in my Swiss Army knife.
If geocaching really is a video game downloaded into our skulls, then the initials atop its high-score list are undoubtedly LVB, for Lee van der Bokke, a retired telecom engineer from San Francisco’s East Bay. In his eight years of caching, van der Bokke, aka “Alamogul,” has racked up a staggering 53,353 finds, more than anyone else in the world and almost 15,000 more than his nearest rival. That number is almost certainly on the low side, in fact; he’s probably logged three or four more finds while I’ve been typing this paragraph. He cached for many years as “Team Alamo” but grew tired of skeptical cachers assuming his unlikely numbers were being churned out by some massive conglomerate. “The ‘team’ is me and my wife,” he insists. “And she hates geocaching!”
Van der Bokke began as a casual cacher; he was stuck at home all day with a grumpy eightysomething father, and geocaching was a way to pass the time while walking his golden retriever, Casey, in the local hills. As his numbers grew, so did his intensity; he began to strip his caching runs of nonessentials: the dog, the wife, even left turns.* “I don’t cache every day,” he tells me. “I’ll normally go a couple days a week, somewhere with high numbers.”
“So you plan in advance? ‘Here’s the area we’re heading for, here are the thirty caches we’re going to get’?”
He laughs dismissively. “Oh, no. We don’t go anywhere for just thirty.” This must be the geocaching equivalent of Linda Evangelista’s famous dictum that supermodels “don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.” Thirty sounds pretty good to me—it would be at least triple my own daily record—but hundred-cache days aren’t unusual for megacachers like