“I can’t help it,” I said. “I am a newbie.”
“You’re doing great. This is fun. How far away is it?”
I looked around on the screen for something that looked like a number that sounded reasonable but I didn’t know what a reasonable number was. There were coordinates that were very recognizable. And there was 800 feet. I didn’t have a good feel for how far 800 feet was so I read it off to Twiggy.
“Eight hundred?” he asked. “Which direction?”
“To our… left. I think.”
“No, which direction? North, south, east, or west?”
“How should I know?”
“Look at the map. What part of the map is it on?”
“It’s right there!” I said
“Okay, that is northwest of us.”
He looked to see what was northwest.
“I think we can get closer driving,” he said.
“How far is eight hundred feet?”
“A little hike.”
“Can we take a little hike?”
He glanced again the direction the GPS was pointing.
“All right. We’ll see how it goes. We can always come back for the van.”
Again I began walking in the direction the green line seemed to be pointing. It didn’t take long for us to be totally surrounded by hip high weeds.
“What does poison ivy look like?” I asked.
“Leaves of three, let it be,” he said.
“Leaves of three at the end, or leaves of three all by themselves?” I asked.
“We’ll have to look it up. It’s too late to worry about it now. If it’s poison ivy we’re goners already.”
“Do you see poison ivy often?”
“Can’t say I do often. Maybe a time or two… per semester.”
“Oh great.”
“But I usually don’t know it until it’s too late.”
Since there was no point in worrying about it I kept tromping through the weeds. Pretty soon the ground became rocky and weedy. I couldn’t see where to place my next step. I would take a step and my foot would slide down a rock into a squishy, muddy spot.
“I’m glad I only have old shoes,” I said.
Twiggy was wearing hiking boots. He wore them a lot. I think he owned three pairs of shoes: his hiking boots, sandals, and basketball shoes. He didn’t play basketball. The basketball shoes he wore when he wasn’t allowed to wear sandals and it was too hot for hiking boots to be comfortable. I just wished he wouldn’t wear hiking boots with shorts. It looked weird. People who wore hiking boots with shorts looked like they spent their whole lives hiking. People who wore hiking boots with shorts never seemed to have new boots. Maybe that’s why I thought they spent all their time hiking.
“How far is it?” Twiggy asked.
“Seven hundred and twenty two.”
I could still hear water but I couldn’t see it yet. The ground went up and I tripped over a rock while I was trying to watch the GPS screen.
“You can put it down and just check it every once in a while,” Twiggy called over the sound of the water.
The hillside was weedy, rocky, steep and I kept slipping. I think I traveled in one spot more than I propelled myself forward and I slipped and slid and climbed my way to the top huffing and puffing and watching the triangle on the screen grow ever so slowly nearer to the cache icon.
“Whew!” I gasped near the top of the hill. “That was quite a climb!”
“Keep going. The top is just up ahead. I bet that tree right there is on top of the hill. Then we can see where we are.”
“Next time tell me how far eight hundred feet is!” I said as I climbed higher.
“I told you. It’s a short hike. You’re the one leading us. You took the route you wanted to take.”
“No I didn’t! I followed the line.”
“Then perhaps you should use the GPS as a guide and choose your own route.”
“Now you tell m…” I looked out over the hill and a beautiful tumbling river flowed below us and a creaky old bridge was off in the distance. The road we left the van next to went around the bottom of the hill and crossed the river at the bridge.
Lesson one: use the GPS as a guide and look at the world around you. You might be able to reason things out better than a blind computer chip.
“That’s a very sunny bridge,” I observed. “The cache is supposed to be hidden where the sun don’t shine.”
“I think that means it is under the bridge somewhere,” he said.
“Do cars actually drive on that bridge?” I asked. It was made of wood and it was almost one car wide. It looked terribly bumpy. I thought we might find a troll under the bridge and halfway expected three billy goats to be trotting down the road. Before we could reach the bridge, though, we had to descend the hill. I always thought that going down hills was easier than climbing them and this hill started out being easier but quickly changed when we met a long drop off. A short one I might just sit down and scoot on my bottom but this was a sheer drop of about twenty feet. That wasn’t a distance I was willing to fall. We stood at the top of the precipice and looked longingly at the decrepit little bridge below.
“Follow the ridge,” Twiggy said. “It’ll be less rocky eventually.”
“Which direction?”
“Down. If it goes down it’s more likely to just join the hillside.”
I turned downhill and picked my way gingerly across the top of the cliff. A squirrel ran across the road below. It found a weed that looked tasty and nibbled at it while I tried not to fall off the cliff and turn into a human avalanche. I slipped and sent a shower of rocks down the cliff. The squirrel turned around to watch the show.
“Whoa! Gabby, be careful,” Twiggy said.
I must have spotted a dozen cool geocache hiding spots on that hillside: little holes in the rocks, viney roots that formed tiny, mossy caves, hollow logs and funny shaped trees.
“It’s weird,” I said as I crept along.
“What’s weird?”
“Geocaching makes you see things weird.”
“Why?”
