Recently, a cacher has been adding caches along the walking trails of Town Lake, meaning that he has begun a subtle takeover of downtown. I’ve found or DNF’d a few of his new ones, so why not attempt another one. That is how I ended up on a bouncy bridge in the middle of town. It was a sturdy span over the entrance to a cove off the lake (which is actually a river, but whatever). All that mattered was that I knew the area and there was somewhere shady to park. Once I pulled into a spot under a shady tree, I took a short walk to get my anticipated quarry.
Austin’s walking paths are very popular, and the ones by Town Lake are doubly so. I have it on good authority that they make a ten-mile circuit around the lake, but I’m not likely to test that out because I’m not that guy. As I stepped onto the bridge, I felt the light rebound of the planks beneath my feet (for a guy my size, I have surprisingly light footsteps). In the middle of the bridge, I looked out at kayakers passing under my feet into the cove. As I tried to figure out what language they were speaking (it probably was something Eastern European), I felt the planks move under my feet. A young woman half my age and size bounded onto the bridge, intently jogging to the other side. I felt the rubbery planking again thirty seconds later when a man my age in a baseball cap paced from the other direction. We acknowledged each other’s presence with nods, and he continued on. Processions continued from both directions: romantic pairs crossing together; someone calling into a business meeting and offering his input; a pair of more serious runners running in unison, counting off time segments. How was I going to make a good search when I was in the middle of muggle central? Then I remembered: the cache was magnetic. Have you ever sought out something magnetic on an iron bridge? With the whole laughing world passing by? The CO was kind enough to mention in the hint which side of the bridge to look on, but even that 50 percent reduction represented a lot of iron. I poked and prodded, careful not to break the spiderwebs that were all about. Luckily, there were no spiders that I saw. Perhaps the constant vibration kept them away during the day. In some places, I stood up on the crossbeams so I could visually inspect some areas. My eyes didn’t solve the problem, but they did spot a solution. There were a lot of spiderwebs, and the CO had been there a couple of days before to check on the container after some newer cachers had made back-to-back DNFs. I took a gamble that the spiders may not have had time to weave new webs yet, so I confined my search to places with minimal to no gossamer. And behold! During a lull in foot traffic, I felt and pulled a key box from one of the web-free patches! Inveni, inscripsi, reposui. With that, my work was done, and I started heading back to the car. I logged my find and noticed that I received another treasure: a quadrant. I have owned neither a quadrant nor sextant (its slightly smaller sibling), so I have no recollections about them to speak of. I made it back to my shaded car, and once the youth group stopped hanging out right behind my rear bumper, I headed off for home. Another day, another cache.
It was a beautiful day. The sun was hot, but not too hot (that will come soon enough), there was a light breeze that gave just a hint of cool, and it was just early enough that traffic was not yet the war against stasis that it often seems. I went out to get a cache. But which cache? I didn’t want to leave town lest I hit all the traffic returning home from work. But I’d long since grabbed most of the low-hanging fruit in Austin proper. Or had I?
Geocaching While Black 