This photograph was not manipulated. The motorcycle really is that high off the ground.
My Uncle Arnie Cooper is cool like you and I will never be. His Facebook vacation photos eschew Disneyland for backcountry America: here his family coasts through the red rock arches of Bryce Canyon on bikes, there they huddle inside a tent deep in the High Uintahs on a 20° night, two days into a weeklong adventure.
I have always wanted to be a smidgeon more like him, so I was all ears last summer when I heard him explaining his newest hobby over breakfast---geocaching.
Geocaching is first cousin to the 150-year-old game of letterboxing, in which gamers solve riddles---the most difficult can take months---to make their way to a final “treasure.” Once found, they imprint the letterbox's logbook with a handmade stamp, and use the letterbox’s stamp to ink their own autograph book.
In Geocachers' hunts they rely on something altogether more 21st century than innate puzzle-solving ability. The precise locations of their caches are recorded online at websites like Geocaching.com via their longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates. GPS devices then hone in on the spot. Caches range in size from micro nanos (the size of watch batteries) to old-fashioned extra-large (the size of five gallon jugs). Gamers sign or sometimes just initial the logbooks (the micro’s logs are shredder-sized strips of paper rolled into scrolls) and they record quick notes about their experiences on associated online pages as well.
The caches are stashed in every gap and crevice of the globe. They are tucked into Antartic ice, submerged below Caribbean waters, and hanging in buckets high up in the branches of trees on remote mountain trails. And they are here in Houston: urban and suburban caches hiding amid magnolias at the Menil and beneath the skirts of light posts in Katy parking lots. There are caches in Fleming Park and Bush Intercontinental Airport, caches beside “Pasadena's own river walk” along Vince Bayou, and some amid the crowing roosters and barking dog of North Houston's Independence Heights. No matter who or where you are there's probably a geocache within a few miles.
Case in point: after breakfast with my Uncle Arnie last summer, we drove fifteen miles back to our shared hometown, Myton, Utah.
Myton basks in relative seclusion from the world, two hours away from interstate highways, and ten miles from the nearest grocery or bank.
“There should be a geocache close by,” Uncle Arnie announced nonchalantly. I arched my eyebrows, but then sure enough his computer confirmed his suspicion. We were .6 miles away from a cache. He downloaded its location to his Gorman GPS machine---a device that looks like a walkie talkie---and our families hopped into separate cars, and followed Arnie and his Gorman to the highway bridge over the Duchesne River.
Myton Bridge
In less than a minute Arnie's son Haydon, a veteran of this business, found a tiny pill bottle wedged beneath a boulder. Inside the cache: a tiny log book with no booty---people often leave trinkets like silly bands or dollar store toys for the younger geocachers, who replace the toy they take with a new one. This lack of booty annoyed Arnie since the kids like treasure, but he signed the long scroll of paper inside, and put it back where he'd found it.
Microcache
“Well that's how you do it,” Arnie said, but he seemed underwhelmed. Earlier he had waxed poetic about far-flung caches his family discovered across Utah’s backcountry. Once the hunt led them to a point so perfect they could see across sixty miles of red earth desert to the gleaming blue waters of Lake Powell. Another time Haydon and he buzzed their four wheelers twenty miles into the wilderness in search of a cache called the Honey Hole. After a fruitless search around a Pondersa Pine they saw an aberration in the tree’s bark about six feet above the ground. Whoever placed the cache had carved a round wooden cap to cork a naturally occurring tree hollow shut, and then camouflaged the lid with bark. The find was worthy of the effort it took to find it---a common theme in Arnie’s stories. Aside from a logbook, the hollow contained what would become Haydon's first pair of real binoculars and a Swiss Army knife.
In comparison to all that, the tiny pill bottle we found in Myton was a nothing to Arnie and his family. It was my family’s first cache though, and we found it marvelous. So marvelous, in fact, that I got a subscription to Geocaching.com and bought a ten dollar iPhone app for want-to-be-geocachers without GPS systems. At home in Houston I fed our zip code into the little app, and almost immediately satisfaction runneth over the paranoid part of my personality: so many little canisters hidden in most every place I visit regularly, and I'd never even accidentally come across one. What else out there aren't I seeing?
Geocache locations near Rice University in Houston, Texas
We all travel paths in our daily lives that seem ordained and empty and devoid of surprise, especially in Houston’s sea of traffic islands, parking lots, and highway frontage. But then you look at this map overfilled with tiny hidden secrets that live beneath our noses. And you realize the world itself has always remained magical and full of surprise, but that it’s been you who has given up the search for the unexpected. As if in response to life’s not so pleasant surprises---the Tooth Fairy changed your diapers; chocolate gives you zits; graduating college doesn’t equal knowing what you want to be; parenting is as hard as growing up---people unconsciously give up on surprise altogether.
As I gazed over the thousands of caches in the Houston Metropolitan area, I loved this sense of geocaching giving surprise back, allowing mystery to reenter a cacher’s sphere of purpose. For this reason, I wanted our family’s first adventure to center around one of these hidden-in-sight-of-our-daily-lives caches. Tune in next week for the story of that misadventure.
