Iced Empathy

Remember how I mentioned it was cold in Austin? Well, it’s gotten colder still. I have no doubt that the denizens of New Jersey, Michigan, and Montana are laughing at what we consider cold. But retain some empathy for us down here. When you’re sweating out your entire body weight at ninety degrees every day of the summer, we are waiting for it to hit one hundred so we can start making sun tea. Different people and places are accustomed to different extremes. But that’s beside the point. My point here (and I do have one) is that the wind was beyond chilly when I stopped for a cache yesterday. I jumped out, leaving the car (and the heat) running, at the dead end of a street. I knew the cache was related to one of the reflector poles, and my eye was immediately drawn to a wire hook attached to the top of one of them. So imagine my surprise when I saw that the item attached was not a cache but a “geocaching tool.” Cute! It only took a moment to figure out that the tool had magnets in one end for reaching a cache inside a pole. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, I thought. 

I put the tool in the pipe and reached downward, but no joy. I reached and groped around as my fingers started to go numb in the breezy twenty-five-degree air. Was I doing it wrong? I didn’t have time to think about it much as someone came out of a nearby house with a dog on a leash, looking in my direction. My proverbial spidey senses were blaring, but I found myself in an awkward position. Often, I try to present my search in a way where I might have some plausible deniability. Often, having my clipboard, using my phone to “take photos,” or entering fake info on a simulated app is enough to make me look official. Playing with PVC in a metal pole? Not so much. I mentally prepared myself for a conversation when the homeowner said, “You’re half right!” 

Turns out my expected muggle was, in reality, the CO. He saw me working on the cache and, with the temperatures what they were, wanted to save me from spending more time searching with wind cutting through me. He told me what I would have eventually figured out: I was probing the wrong pole. And I would have figured it out, but not until losing all feeling in my fingers. I looked down the next pole, and there was a bison waiting below. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy—this time for real. Thank you, Kayak05, for not making me freeze more than I had to! Now I may have to commit some intellectual property theft!