International Geocaching Day

The weekend saw the arrival of International Geocaching Day. In the back of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, there’s a cemetery (there always is one) that I had visited once before for a cache. On Saturday morning, I parked under the desperately welcome shade of a tree, walked to a tree stump in the back corner of the cemetery, and pulled out the cache. I signed the log under the great and quickly moving shadows of landing planes. Despite the plunging rays of heat, I took a little time to walk between the stones, partially in memory of the ones who rested there, partially to allay my curiosity. I could have sworn I had seen a fake headstone in the cemetery once before, perhaps some kind of redirector or something, but I saw no sign of it this time. Could it have been my imagination? Possibly. My mind wanders a great many vistas, both real and ephemeral. It wouldn’t have been the first time I remembered a snippet of something from a sleeping or waking dream. I watched a couple more incoming planes and then set off for home and the glories of air conditioning.

Sunday was a slightly different story. In the afternoon, a new cache published. I hadn’t gotten an FTF yet this month, and I’ve managed to get at least one a month since the beginning of the Time of Cholera. I decided to shoot off and go for it. I found myself at the entrance of a park, the GZ for the brand-new Mystery cache. There was a phrase there that would answer the puzzle. I put it in, noticed that someone else had solved it before me, and then, with the corrected coordinates, drove deeper down the entrance path. I got closer and closer to the real GZ.

I saw an SUV parked down the road in the direction that my arrow was pointing. I came to a stop just in time to see Buckandi, who lives much closer than I, traipsing out of the woods. My chance was lost! Technically, it wasn’t. He was kind enough to offer me co-FTF for the cache, but I demurred. I figured it this way: if I was FTF and signing a cache, and someone came up to find it while I was doing it, I’d happily offer to split FTF with them, but if I was walking away from it and they came up, I most certainly would not! The least I could do was hold myself to my own standard. Besides, it was worth losing it to run into him. We stood around chatting about stuff, especially our Washington shenanigans, which occurred a year ago this week. Good times. Then we remembered it was over a hundred degrees. Again, I opted for the choice of air conditioning. Besides, I had both writing and thinking to do. Big thoughts were welling around in my head because … well, you’ll read about it soon enough.