I’ll never forget the first time, back when I was in basic training a thousand years ago, that a drill sergeant told me, “If it ain’t rainin’, we ain’t trainin’! If it ain’t snowin’, we ain’t goin’!” Being both mathematically minded and in Missouri in the springtime, I would think to myself that that left very few days to work with because if we’re staying unless there’s snow and we’re not learning anything unless it rains, there wasn’t very much time to do what needed to be done. Of course, he meant it in a more literary fashion: anything we were doing couldn’t even be considered training—or even forward progress, for that matter—if there wasn’t some sort of precipitation involved. This was brought front and center to my memory yesterday.
When I got out of bed, the sky was blue, and the sun was shining (I tend to sleep in on Sundays). I had breakfast and lounged around in my bathrobe for a bit before going through my daily emails regarding new local caches. A new one had dropped earlier a couple of miles away from home and was still unclaimed. I hadn’t gotten an FTF in a couple of months, so I decided I might as well get this one now. I got dressed, jumped in the car, put on my shades, and went for a drive. I knew ground zero (a local bridge) well enough to know that I wouldn’t be able to park very close to the cache, so I turned onto a side street about two hundred feet away and parked. When I opened the car door, I felt a drop of water fall on my exposed wrist. Perhaps there would be a little summer shower, I thought. No big deal. I’ve cached in the rain before. By the time I walked about fifty feet, that summer shower had arrived. By the time I walked fifty feet more, that summer shower had turned into a drenching downpour. In a split second, two conflicting thoughts jumped into my head: (1) I’m already drenched, so I might as well go the other hundred feet and get the cache, and (2) I’m too old for this [crap]. I walked another hundred feet … right back to the car. Had I brought my trusty umbrella, I might have opted to go immediately back, but no. I decided to sit for a while and wait it out, hoping it would quickly pass. That was twenty wasted minutes. The rain came down even harder as I waited. In the end, I decided to go home. And as I arrived, there was no sign of any precipitation. Until I got out of the car and the rain chased me down again, this time through my front door. I changed into something a little less waterlogged and kicked back to regain some of the warmth the water had wrenched from my bones.
No, my opportunity was not lost, only delayed. I waited a couple hours until there was sunlight again and drove back to GZ. This time when I got out of the car, I felt a slightly reduced Spear of Apollo poking at me through humidity over 9000. I walked my two hundred feet to the bridge and took a moment to appreciate the rushing water beneath before noticing a magnetic bolt. I put my ink on a fresh log, and all it cost me was a bit of time and a change of clothes.
Geocaching While Black 