Several days ago, I went for an FTF in a location I thought extremely inadvisable. A few days later, it was finally found by a cacher with under one hundred finds. Fair enough. On that same day, I went for another FTF. I noticed that a new cache had dropped at a church cemetery (there always is one) between work and home. I was pretty familiar with this cemetery, both because I had passed it countless times in my various in-town travels and because it was previously the home of a longtime Virtual that has now been archived. I figured a D1.5/T1.5 that was kid friendly and wheelchair accessible should be the proverbial easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
I was wrong.
Ground zero was at a fence line near a couple of trees and cedar saplings. I began my search. I started in the trees, as those seemed obvious. The big trees had no nooks or crannies, and the saplings, though sizable (more like bushes), contained nothing but snails. I looked at lower-hanging branches as well, but nothing. Then I went to the fence. I saw nothing along the fence. Just to be sure, I walked the fence line for about 150 feet in each direction. Nothing, though I found a couple of good places to hide a cache if I was so inclined (and if there weren’t already a cache there). I gave the fence line a second good look. Being waist high, it seemed like the perfect location for something wheelchair accessible. I saw nothing new. I gave all the trees another good once-over in case I had missed something obvious, but no joy. I even did the unthinkable and investigated a decorative element of a nearby grave, which, though it would have been gauche, could have been a possibility. In the final case, I was happy to see nothing.
I opted to give up. It was hot, and I was tired and looking forward to watching the series finale of a TV show when I got home. I began asking myself a series of questions: This wasn’t supposed to be a hard cache, so had I lost my touch? Was I losing the ability to find basic caches? I’ve found so many of so many different types, but most of them were local, so am I stuck in a certain mode of thinking? My worries, I felt, were not entirely unfounded. But before I spiraled too far, I considered three options:
1. That I was blind and dumb. This is always a possibility, often the one I default to.
2. That the cache was cleverer than the D/T would suggest. From certain cachers, I expect a cache will be harder than the description lets on. However, this CO was a newer cacher, so I expected it to be closer to baseline.
3. That the cache had been muggled. This was actually a good possibility. I found fresh weed-whacker wire along the fence, so I suspected there had been some trimming between when the cache was placed and published.
Finally, I (indirectly) reached out to the CO to let her know that it might have been muggled (it takes a lot for me to openly admit that I have been blind and/or dumb). She responded with a photo of the hide. It was so incredibly obvious (hanging from a tree) that I couldn’t have missed it if I tried. I also noticed some kid-inspired decorations in the photo. None of those had been in the cemetery. If all that was gone, it meant someone must have done some cleanup and removed everything, including the cache! Option three was the winner! I was not a terrible personcacher!
Geocaching While Black 