As a kid I used to play
treasure hunt, all by myself. I’d take a piece of notebook paper
and draw an X for my starting point — the front stoop of my
house — on a dead-end street. Then I’d make a series of
marks, each one representing a step, guided more by a desire to
fill the page than by geography or cartography.
Years
later I’ve discovered the perfect pastime for trail followers like
me, and I bought my husband a Global Positioning System. He wanted
it for marking waypoints while he was hunting or taking
photographs. I wanted it because I’d learned about geocaching, a
worldwide hobby that involves hiding and finding small treasures.
Some believe geocaching brings crowds onto public lands.
My husband and I frequent public lands anyway, so using a sport
today to practice GPS technology might save us from getting lost
tomorrow.
Our first geocache search was on a winter
morning, unseasonably warm and windless. We set out from home
slightly off course. While my husband drove, I held the GPS, which
warned we were getting farther from our goal. Using data plucked
from satellites, it constantly calculated our distance from the
goal, how long it would take us to reach it at our present speed,
and what time it would be when we got there. Eventually, we
corrected our course, bounced through some Wyoming ranch country,
and parked at a fishing access we’d often visited and could have
found with our eyes closed.
The GPS let out a victorious
chirp.
We found ourselves at the base of a tall
cottonwood tree, surrounded by a broken picnic table, smashed beer
bottles, blackened logs in a fire ring and the grave of someone
named Snowflake. But for the life of us, we couldn’t find that
cache. We poked in knotholes and shook branches and wobbled on the
picnic table for a better view. No cache.
Foiled for the
time, we headed to another cache, which was also hidden not far
from the cottonwood tree. Along the river, through several
turnstile gates out onto a school section, past a pile of feathers
that once was a goose, the little arrow on the GPS screen led us,
and when the machine twittered and chirped again, we knew we were
very near.
Sure enough, we found the purple plastic box
under a canopy of sagebrush. Contents included a slightly mauled
stuffed toy, a little key chain, pencils. We took a never-sharpened
Bugs Bunny pencil and left a Massachusetts quarter. We added our
geocaching handle to the log book, and proudly announced it was our
first-ever find.
I wish I could mark waypoints in my
interior life the way geocaching lets me do with the physical
world. I could mark places where I’d made bad choices, and a little
sound in my head would chirp and twitter if I strayed that way
again.
Even more, I wish I could mark my mother’s
thoughts. In her late eighties and recently diagnosed with a form
of dementia, she has trouble finding the names for things and for
people. The piece her church choir sang on Sunday, the name of the
young man her niece is about to marry: These words are still there
in her mind. They just get a bit buried in the brush, or placed too
high up a tree.
I want to draw on the power of satellites
to track down those nouns, those pieces of language that describe
who we are, where we are, and what we live for. But not even GPS
gizmos, with their computers and waypoints and precision military
technology, can locate every treasure. There is no decode button
for life.
A few weeks ago, we returned to the cottonwood
near the river. This time we spotted a knothole higher up in the
tree than we thought to look before. I made a step of my hands and
gave my husband a boost, and he scooted along the long limb of the
cottonwood until he saw a glint of metal in the sunlight. He tossed
down to me the treasure: a tiny pen with a small narrow sheet of
paper rolled inside in a tight barrel. I unfurled it and added the
date of our find and our team name.
Like a flag planted
on the icy summit of Mount Everest, that scrawled signature
announced we’d come, we’d seen and we’d conquered. If only
everything in life were that simple.
Julianne
Couch is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). She writes in
Laramie, Wyoming.
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