Divergence

I want to make a calculus joke, but will limit myself to a more serious subject. I have a friend who I used to go caching with. Not long after I started caching, I mentioned it to her, and she remembered that she and her ex-husband found a few and how she liked it. We began to cache together. We had always been friends, but this gave us more of a reason to hang out. It was never anything fancy; we’d go out somewhere and find a bunch of LPCs in a neighborhood or drive out of town to visit a few cemeteries. After I had my car crash, I went with her to do new counties from Cuero to La Grange. I would have gotten to them eventually, but I can literally say that I completed the Texas County Challenge because of her.

A couple of days ago, she and I got together for dinner. Now that she lives in Cuero, we don’t see one another as much as we used to when she lived here in Austin. She only comes up three to four times a year these days for various reasons, so I usually see her a couple of times a year. Our caching habits have greatly diverged. I’ve done quite a bit since the days we would go out together. She has mostly quit. Whenever she goes to a new state, she finds one (and she has souvenirs I don’t—heck, she made it to Mingo before I did!), but otherwise has set it aside. Dewitt County has almost nothing in the way of cache density. Nearby Victoria is up there, but I can’t blame her for not wanting to drive twenty-five miles to find a cache. Add in some health issues stemming from a broken leg sustained a year ago, and her mobility has changed enough that she doesn’t really feel it’s in the cards for her any longer.

It’s sad to lose a caching buddy. Don’t get me wrong: there are many people I enjoy getting out there with. But caching served as a wonderful opportunity to spend more time with an old friend, both when she was local and when she was living in the hinterlands. I’ve lost other caching buddies before in more permanent ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that the road creates a bond, whether it’s to the ends of the earth or just around the corner. And now, though we are still friends, our bond is slightly weaker than it was before. And that makes me sad.