Many Happy Returns?

A couple of nights ago, I needed a cache. I decided to go after a relatively new one (only a few months old) because it was very simple and pretty close to home. I’ve mentioned before (especially when I was bus-bound after “The Incident”) how caching has taken me to parts of Austin I’d never been in, even though I’ve lived here almost my entire life. For the first time in a long time, it happened again. I found myself driving streets I had never been on in a neighborhood I barely knew existed. I also immediately knew why. In the past, I’ve talked about the socioeconomic aspect of cache hides: that you are less likely to find them in poor neighborhoods and even less so in richer neighborhoods. This neighborhood was the latter, not the former. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the cache was on a set of electrical boxes in the median of a boulevard running between older urban mansions. I parked outside the wall of one of the compounds, quickly investigated, and found a 3D-printed bolt with a magnet in the top. As the old homes seemed to loom, I signed the logbook and made my way off. I rarely feel like I don’t belong in my own city, but that was one of those rare moments. It wasn’t fear; I didn’t feel like someone would call the cops on me for doing something suspicious. It was more that I could never imagine myself living there. Even if I had the kind of money that one of those houses would require, I would choose another part of the city to live in. These streets felt alien to me, and I felt no need to quibble with that assessment. I was off like a shot the moment I was done.

Yesterday, I needed a cache. I have a list of solved puzzles that I’ve been taking from when I don’t know where I want to go for one. When I can’t decide, I just choose one off the list and go get it. I drove up to Round Rock to run a couple of small errands and then drove over to one of the completed puzzle finals. I found a piece of fishing wire tied to a post and began to despair that the cache was gone. Just to be sure, I checked the other posts there and found a wire hooked on the top of its lip. I pulled out the container, signed the recently replaced log, and returned to the car. I pulled out my phone again to log it electronically but received an unexpected message: “Cannot Log Duplicate Found On Same Geocache.” What the heck? I only get that message when I try to log something I’ve already logged. I looked through the old entries, and you can imagine my shock at learning that I had logged this one almost five years ago! I didn’t even remember finding it! I guess I can’t be expected to remember every cache I’ve ever found, but this was a hard reminder that I definitely do not. It was no huge loss. Another cache in the same puzzle series was hidden a few minutes away, so I popped right over. When I arrived at ground zero, I definitely didn’t remember ever being there, though after the revelation ten minutes before, I knew that meant nothing. I quickly found another wire hanging on the lip of a tree’s knothole. I signed and logged it. This time, there was no error.

In my favorite TV show, a character noted that while humans say that “the past is prologue,” her people say that “the past is sometimes the future.” Whichever one is right (I think they both are), whether it’s something I’ve written or somewhere I’ve been, it’s always close, and it doesn’t matter if I return to it or it returns to me. Or some kind of crap like that.