Change The Conversation

Since all I could do last time was complain about something I had done a thousand times before, I decided to start working on something completely new and different (for me)! While looking for a cache that wasn’t there a while back, I stumbled across something I had never encountered before: the word riparian in the wild. It was in the description of a civic project to beautify and protect the banks of a local creek. It doesn’t look like a creek these days; climate change, drought, and voracious urban water consumption have taken a huge toll on the waterways around here. But it is still obvious that a significant body of water once coursed through the area. With a good enough weather event, the creek would even flow again. And note that I’m not making light of its diminished power. It has, on a number of occasions, completely submerged downtown Austin. It is a sleeping serpent that, under the correct conditions, can strike the city in a memorable and meaningful way. At the same time, development encroaches upon it. All along its banks are the houses, apartments, and offices of the city that it threatens. Therefore, we want to control it for its sake (and the beauty of the environment) and for our sake (and the value of the lives and developments beside it). To that end, there is a concerted effort to preserve the forest and wetlands along the creek. This is a long and rambling way (because concision has never been my thing) of saying that I had discovered the perfect spot for an EarthCache!

I’ve spent about a month knocking the idea around in my head of making an EarthCache. I said it before, and I’ll say it again: anything related to earth science is outside my wheelhouse. I went into physics and astronomy in college because those were the disciplines most opposite to anything life- or earth-related. But it is something I’ve never dipped into before, either as a general subject or a geocaching endeavor. So I decided it’s time to do something new. That’s why I’m going to spend the weekend at the library absorbing the subject and then figuring out how to condense it into a short description that cachers can easily digest. I know that for many, it will go in one ear and out the other; I have certainly retained little I have learned from EarthCaches up to this point. But I also know what weirs do and quite a bit about karst and sugaring because of EarthCaches, so maybe there’s hope that it might do something for someone. And hopefully, next week, there will be a new EarthCache out there. I’ll no doubt let you know when that happens.

I guess my point here (and I do have one) is that boredom is temporary, and there’s new stuff waiting around every corner. Or some kind of crap like that. Imagine I said something more profound here.