187. Cotulla, La Salle County

I had previously assumed that Cotulla was some older Mexican settlement that had been here since the days before the sky was blue and water was wet. Imagine my surprise to learn it was named after a Polish immigrant, soldier, and rancher, who donated land for the railroad. Receiving a railroad depot and a post office, the town was made county seat and so its legend grew (for certain values of “legend”).

I ended up picking the cache up on the way into town at a local cemetery. Some of the stones themselves were pretty ostentatious, but I ended up a little disconcerted with this find. I have no problems with cemetery caches. In fact, as I was discussing with a police officer (because a call had been made by a concerned citizen that there was a suspicious person [me] trying to break into some electrical boxes), I enjoy coming out to see these little cemeteries in the middle of nowhere. In this case, though, either the cache owner or one of the finders along the way had put the cache in an urn on one of the headstones. That I find disrespectful. Sure, fences and trees are fine. There’s a cemetery cache here in Austin contained inside a fake tombstone. I have no problem with that. If a cacher was to die and had a stone made with a cache in it, I’d be totally down to visit them. What I do have a problem with is using a random person’s stone to hide things. Perhaps I am anthropomorphizing the dead a little too much, but they didn’t know us and we don’t know them. As much as we enjoy the hunt and the finding, who are we to wrap up other people into it? Even if they never know, I find such fiddling about with their tombstone to be wrong and I hope one day the cache is either moved or removed. All that said, I also lay claim to my own hypocrasy. Distasteful as I found the hide, I signed and returned it. Sometimes I’m part of the problem.