Bunch Of Savages In This Town!

I got a call from a fellow cacher on Friday. She was making a second attempt on a simple gadget cache I had recently hidden that she DNF’d. She wasn’t the first, but how anyone could miss a six-foot PVC pipe was beyond me. At the last Event I had seen her at, I told her enough to find it, but she was still having trouble. I tried to talk her through it a little, asking if she was close to the tree or the bush, in which case she was totally cold. She said neither of them was there any longer. This made my ears perk up. I had been there about three weeks before with a different cacher and watched him look for the cache in hopes of figuring out how people were missing it (again, it was a six-foot PVC pipe) so I knew it was there. Then again, so was the tree and bush. Luckily, I only live a ten-minute drive away, so I told her to sit tight and I would meet here there. When I arrived, there was no tree (just a thin, recently cut stump), and there was no bush. And when I looked down and around the appropriate place, there was no six-foot PVC pipe.

What the BLANK? Where was my cache? It was only out there for three months! It was in a place that nobody would have any reason to look at if they weren’t searching the area! I will cede that there was other detritus in that area that might deter someone from looking, but not enough to obscure it and certainly nothing questionable or dangerous. And yet, the cache was gone. It would have made sense that whoever cut down the tree then picked up any trash that was left over, but that didn’t happen. There was still crud in the area­—and not new, fresh crud either! So, somebody totally disregarded the surrounding area except for my random six-foot PVC pipe! I’ve had caches muggled before, but not one I had put such work into before. When I placed it, I said on the cache page that if it lasted a while, I might place some more. It not quite making it three months makes me question if I want to try again. I almost archived it then and there. There are only two things stopping me: (1) perhaps it was a fluke and if I replaced it, it might last longer, and (2) I accidentally stumbled upon a better place to hide it if I constructed a slightly shorter version of it.

Do I want to take the risk? I don’t know. It feels like I put a little bit of myself into each decent cache build (which may or may not be a discussion for a therapist), so I don’t know if I want to go through it again. On the other hand, if people don’t hide things, there’ll be nothing for people to find, and I’m a firm believer that you should hide the kinds of caches you’d like to find. On top of that, do I want to try the original hide again, knowing that it’s vulnerable (though I well know every cache, no matter how well hidden, is vulnerable to muggles), or do I modify it and move it to the better spot twentyish feet away? Or do I just say to heck with my concept and put a different hide in either the original or new spot? So many questions! Let me just take a few days to mourn love’s labors lost for a bit, OK?