What's around the next corner? In the next bay? Up the next river?
Some people are happy where they are, and don't need to know what's down the coast around the point.
Some people are curious, but don't want to actually go in, there might be rocks, or shoals or a bad current.
Some people have to know.
Here's another long, strange tale
She Just Has to Know
"It's eight o'clock at night. It's dark. And you're going to go climbing down a weed-filled culvert between the Fresh Market parking lot and an piece of pavement that no longer connects to anything?"
"Yes," she said. "I've got to look."
"Okay, but don't call attention to this. No shrieking."
"I won't shriek."
She jumped out of the car, and jogged to the apex of the parking lot. A corner that jutted into the weeds and bushes. The headlights picked out a four-foot-tall tree stump as white as a ghost, frozen in time, waving people away from this forsaken patch of tarmac, drain tile and trash.
She looked around, one side of the stump and the other. She teetered at the edge of the drainage culvert, peering down into the darkness. Then, like she knew where it had been all along, she picked up an ammunition case and set it down in the bright glare of the headlights.
She popped open the clasp, peered inside and then shrieked. "I don't believe it! It's here!"
Years ago -- three at the most -- she'd seen a quick demo of geocaching. Will had brought a GPS to a picnic. He'd hidden a few boxes in the woods within a quarter mile of the pavilion. When the kids got rambunctious, he took them off on a treasure hunt. He showed the her -- and the kids -- how the GPS coordinates of the find could be used to tell you how far away and which direction to walk.
Her sister-in-law, Nancy, had picked up on the delicious combination of "high-tech" and "walk in the woods." So there was precedent and history -- and mystery. It was really the sister-in-law that caused the worst problems.
"Take this ‘travel bug' with you," Nancy said one day. "Put it in a geocache."
It's a fine sentiment, until you have to actually find one. On you own.
She'd seen Will do it. She'd heard Nancy's stories. But geocaching -- by itself -- isn't something you shriek about. It's just a walk in the woods. With an expensive GPS for a compass.
There she was, wandering around a park in North Carolina. She'd read a little story about the 4H group. There were coordinates. And there was the park. Walk this way. Walk that way. Following the carefully deduced pointer -- mountains of computing power reasoning out latitude, longitude (and elevation) from tiny errors in the arrival time of clock signals from space.
At the "extension building" the little back story started to make sense. The "Cooperative Extension" building. The 4H club. The master gardeners. Pots and equipment laying around. Shrubbery everywhere.
It was her first "find". A small lock-n-lock box filled with worthless trinkets, and a small log book. But most importantly, it was both hidden and visible. It was hidden from the casual passer-by. But, on the Internet, it was a target destination. A pair of coordinates and a back-story. A cache, hidden but advertised. A destination to be reached in spite of obstacles, a puzzle to be solved.
The code, GC12N4X, doesn't mean anything. The location, N 35° 18.879 W 082° 26.702, similarly, is meaningless. But there was a box of trinkets. Right where they said it would be. While exciting to actually find something hidden, it was hardly worth shrieking about.
"This," her mother -- always the teacher -- said, "is the place to put the watchacallit. The bug. It would be great for the 4H club to have something added to their cache."
"Perfect," she said. In went the Travel Bug, tag TB2JN7T, "A Cowboy's Friend." It was just a dumb little cowboys and indians figure; an inch tall at most. Bright yellow. Holding his rifle. Helping his friend -- the cowboy -- hunt, maybe. Wearing something on his head that might have been ceremonial feathers. At an inch and change tall, how could you tell? But he -- like the geocache -- was now hidden in a box somewhere and completely exposed on the Internet. A puzzle to be solved, a destination.
There was another find that day, elsewhere in the Park. The kind of find that says "there's a whole world of caches out there." But that wasn't worth shrieking about. None of this was worth shrieking about.
Here's what was worth shrieking about.
At eight o'clock, somewhere else in North Carolina, looking at another new cache, there's something worth shrieking about.
It was the parking-lot cache -- GC1QZ7D -- miles from GC12N4X in the park that was an amazing find. In the box was the Cowboy's Friend. Dumb little yellow indian. Tag TB2JN7T.
Someone -- someone -- had found the other cache. Found the travel bug, and moved it.
It's not that there's a world of people hiding something for you to find. Nothing that simple. It's a vast culture of hiding and finding going on all around us. Something we never knew existed. Every bush. Every bench. Every log along every hiking trail everywhere is a possible cache. Something to be found. Something to be picked up. Something to be dropped off.
Where does the Nevada Sage bug want to go? Alaska? Around the world? Where has this bug been since it was launched in 2007? Europe? Really? Dozens of states in the US? Amazing places for a keychain to visit. Where will A Cowboy's Friend go? Will it -- like Nevada Sage -- wind up in a cache in Europe somewhere?
She found another, parallel universe, seen and yet unseen. Clearly specified on the Internet, yet unfindable without care, patience and a fair amount of luck. She joined the ranks of these surreptitious couriers, moving little toys from hidden caches here to hidden caches there. Carefully recording the journey on the Internet, yet concealing everything from observation.
It's another road to travel. Another horizon to see. Another bay to sail into. Another point to round. And it can't be left alone. What's out there? She has to know.
