“So…”
We crept down the stairs again. Twiggy insisted on going first. He stood there in a fighting stance daring the bear to come close.
“What do you think?” he whispered. “Are they gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whatever you do, don’t run toward the van. The tower is better protection.”
“Right.”
We walked toward the trail gawking around like two little kids in a haunted house. The light was dim and we really only decided to try the trail because we thought the bear had gone home and we had the head lamp. We just passed the first bushes and had started to relax when there was a snuff and a whuff from the brush and we both jumped and dashed back to the lookout tower. Twiggy was nice enough to let me jump over the gate first and we stopped at the grate huffing and puffing. It was twice as heavy this time and we ended up back in the office room sitting there collecting our thoughts and giving our confidence the little boost it needed to spend a night in the tower.
“So, which side of the bed do you want this time?” Twiggy asked.
“The linoleum. The wood is too hard.”
“You got it. Gabby… I’m sorry I got you into this. If you would rather I take you home…”
“No! No. I want to keep going. I don’t know how we can ever win the contest only finding one cache a day, but I do want to try. If I go home I’ll read books and listen to music and wish I could be doing something outside. But there won’t be anywhere to go and… here there is. There is always somewhere to go and something to do. I saw a bear today! That is so cool! And I found tiny dragon houses in the tree roots. I was really hoping for a shower but seeing a bear was worth it. I can’t wait to see what we find next!”
We ended up spooning that night. We started out just laying there side by side, shivering in the night. Tired and hungry but unable to sleep, we finally found a little warmth curling up together. Twiggy was surprised, but grateful, when I finally scooted over and he put his arms around me trying to conserve the little bit of warmth we had. We woke up often, still shivering. One of the times I woke up in the night I could hear howling in the distance.
“Can you hear that?” I whispered in case he was asleep.
“Coyotes,” he said.
“Or wolves?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen either in these mountains.”
“Maybe I do want to be a forest ranger after all.”
Dawn colored the sky very early in the morning atop the mountain. I had bed head again and no mirror or brush to help my attempts at taming it.
“It’s not bed head if you sleep on the floor. Then it’s floor head.”
“We’re lucky we got chased back. We almost left without locking up the cache again.”
“Oh yeah.”
We took a look around the watchtower and didn’t see bears anywhere so we descended the stairs once more and checked on the cache before locking it up safe and sound.
“Take a picture of the tower so we will remember it always,” I said as we found the trail again. He turned around and lined up the camera for the picture.
“You too,” he said. “Stand next to that rock and you’ll be framed right.”
And so we had our second adventure captured in pixels, and we hiked down the mountain to the awful green van. Home sweet home.
“That thing is so ugly,” I said as we approached it. “But it sure is good to see it again.”
“I agree one hundred percent.”
“What do geocachers call their cars?”
“Usually geomobiles or cachemobiles.”
“With this avocado green van I think it looks more like guacamole than a cachemobile. Maybe it’s a cacheamolé.”
“I don’t know, but it’s the pits,” he joked.
“There’s enough dirt in it to grow an avocado tree.”
“I’m starving and talking about Mexican food isn’t helping. Let’s go eat.”
“It’s a deal.”
We were so hungry that I didn’t even think about my hair. I don’t know what the other customers thought when they saw us at the closest café. We looked like drifters, which I guess we were, temporarily. But we were very hungry, happy drifters with a goal in mind.
“Insane Asylum is next,” I announced after three quarters of a huge burger had been devoured.
“Oh man, are you sure? We just lived through a bear encounter and you want to find Insane Asylum?”
“It’s got a good rating. We need all the good ratings we can get.”
“You mean difficult ratings. Would you allow me to define difficult?”
“We found the Pink Panther Cache, didn’t we? And that one was supposed to be harder.”
“It was harder. We got trapped by a bear and spent a freezing night on the mountain. I’d say we earned that one.”
“Well, maybe I’m crazy, but I want to find Insane Asylum.”
“Okay, you’re the boss.”
“And after that I want a real shower.”
Chapter 7
I wanted to find Insane Asylum because I had seen the pictures. It was at the ruins of an old asylum and the walls looked spooky, like they could tell stories people didn’t want to hear. It looked like the wind didn’t whisper through the empty widows, it screamed like a banshee, and when it was still you could hear ghost stories on the breezes as they stirred the ashes of some long forgotten time.
Bumping along in the van I was beginning to think the van had once belonged to a resident at the asylum. The zebra striped walls and the purple shag floor looked like someone had decorated it after a bad dream.
“Turn left in about half a mile,” I said to Twiggy.
“Who puts an insane asylum way out here in the sticks?” he asked.
“Somebody who doesn’t want the residents bothering the neighbors.”
“There haven’t been insane asylums in use for years.”
“That’s why there’s only ruins left.”
“I think you’re crazy
