Return with me to the heady days of 2019. We had recently rung in the new year. I was still working on the Texas County Challenge. The world had not yet ground to a halt because of the Time of Cholera. We were young and naive but full of vim and vigor. Or not. I don’t know your life.
On a late night, I went to find a lonely cache. I had already gotten my cache for the day, but I took a late-night jaunt to get ahead of the game. I was going out at midnight so I could have one early for the next day. I chose the cache because it hadn’t been found in four years. It required compiling computer code to get corrected coordinates, and the provided resources responded with a 404 error. I’m not a programmer, but I know a lot of programmers, so I turned to one of them. He spent a little time compiling the script, correcting a flaw he found in it, and then recompiling it to get me the coordinates. They led me to a green space by a new suburb and across the street from a school. I followed a path and searched for about forty minutes in vain. The cache was gone or possibly hard to find in the darkness. Thus is life. About six months later, another local cacher solved it, went to the location, and replaced it. My feelings about zombie caches aside (the CO had not logged in for a couple of years), I was a little miffed that I had not gotten the credit for finding it after so long, but otherwise went about my life. I would be back to find it another day, and that right soon.
“Right soon” turned out to be yesterday. I took the early evening, long after all the kids should have gone home from school, to go after it again—five years after my ignominious defeat. This time, in the sun’s dying rays, the lay of the land was a bit different. Where once there was little vegetation and a well-trodden path, now there were knee-high grasses and prickly vines. Burrs stuck to my pants as I progressed into the tree line; pointy spines poked my shins through the cloth. But a couple hundred feet later (because I can tough it through a couple hundred feet of almost anything), I returned to the vaguely familiar trees I had searched before. I once again searched for my prize. And, in the dying rays of the sun, I once again came up empty. The grasses, the broken tree limbs, and the unkempt detritus of years of neglect obscured what I had come for. After twenty or thirty minutes of searching, I set the dream of finding this cache aside as I had so long ago. Disheartened but unbowed, I grabbed a nearby cache that I knew would be both easy and, in fact, there because I had helped the CO hide it.
My point here (and I do have one) is one I’ve spoken before: gather ye caches while ye may. You never know when that cache you’re saving for some reason will get archived or be muggled or lost beneath years of change. Don’t be like me! Get it while the getting’s good!
Geocaching While Black 