All My Dreams Torn Asunder

My last few days (from a caching perspective) have been defined by needs for maintenance. A few days ago, that lovely couple visiting from Canada DNF’d a cache of mine. The last person who went for it a month before also DNF’d it, but they only had half a dozen finds, so I just assumed they whiffed it. The couple, on the other hand, had more than enough experience for this hide of mine they were trying to find. I swung by the location. I should be able to see it from the car, but it wasn’t there. Did it go missing recently, and the newbie just missed it? Or was the newbie astute enough, and I ignored their DNF because what do they know with so few finds? Either way, I’ve got to go out and get some spray paint now.

A couple of nights ago, I went out and grabbed a night cache. I found the redirector thanks to my UV light, but when I tried to read it, I was stumped. The alterations for the north coordinates were fine. The ones for the west coordinates were illegible; the ink had rubbed off. These things happen, and as fate would have it, the CO happened to be friend of the site Buckandi. I gave him a call to let him know about the smudged numbers, and he hooked me up with the numbers that were smudged. I found the cache, and I know that he’ll get around to reinking it sometime in the next few days or so.

Yesterday, I went after a cache. I knew it was magnetic and on a rail of some kind, but I didn’t find it. Thanks to a photo from earlier this year, I was quickly able to ascertain that there was previously a guardrail there that had been torn out and replaced with a cement wall. I thought for a minute about sending a message to the CO to let them know what was up, but I decided to submit it for archival (or, as they’re calling it now, “Reviewer Attention Requested”) because I’d never seen an active sign of the CO in town other than some caches they had placed. Upon further investigation, they haven’t found a cache in over two years, one of only a couple dozen since 2018. And since it was getting late in the day and I didn’t feel like a hike in the greenbelt, I ended up driving down to Buda to grab something easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

All but the most mindful and focused of us do it sometimes. A cache sits around for a while, waiting to be repaired or replaced (that’s why I have a five-foot PVC pipe in my back seat). Is it possible that I’m being a little melodramatic about it? Perhaps, but if we don’t keep up with our stuff, other cachers suffer (to the extent that having to go to another cache can be considered suffering). Their hopes, their joys, their very dreams are on our shoulders. And sometimes “they” is us. Remember, for it is the doom of men (or women—I don’t mean to be gender assumptive) that they forget.