If You Walk Without Rhythm

I found my daily cache behind an orthodontia clinic. I was already a bit surly. My first attempt was a failure because I was trying to find a little green container in a tree in ninety-degree heat. This is not the season to deal with camouflaged micros in trees (and yes, it’s gonna get worse, folks). I took the path around the building that led to a rock wall near a stream. The cache owner noted that it was a good chance to see something from pioneer times, but I suspected the wall was merely the retaining type, built somewhere closer to the end of the twentieth century. I just knew that the cache was going to be a fake rock in the wall. As I began my search, I began to instinctively shimmy and shake. I had already combined multiple factors in my head: the nearby stream, the damp leaves piled up against the wall, the shade of the trees. I knew that there was one inevitable outcome: mosquitoes. With all due respect to Mr. Slim (I assume Fatboy is not his actual given name), worms are the least of my worries. Mosquitoes have usually given me a wide berth. When others are getting eaten alive, I remain untouched. The only times when I have to worry about them are when there are great swarms of them or when I’m the only living thing within a hundred yards. Well, the last people I saw were on the other side of that building. The skeeters were coming, and that right soon. In fact, the first moment I stilled to examine a possible hiding spot, I felt a brush of something fast against my arm. When I looked, two bloodsuckers were sitting there, preparing to feast upon my precious vitae. I thwarted them, but I had no doubt more were lining up in attack formation. I decided to speed up my search, especially since I was sweating so much it was actually hard to focus on details. I pulled back onto the path where there was a little sun and some breeze, both anathema to the common mosquito, and looked at the hint for the cache. All it said was that some rocks were different colors than the others. That didn’t narrow down my search area at all. So I went to the logs. One of the most recent finders, a cacher with fewer than a hundred finds, noted that the photos helped her. So I turned to the photos and found the perfect one of two children presenting their newly found cache. More importantly, I could make out the details of their background and align myself with that electrical box and that protruding rock and those paired trees. I looked more closely at the nooks in line with the photograph, and voilà! There it was! A few gray rocks obscured a red “rock.” Inveni, inscripsi, reposui.

I guess my point here (and I do have one) is that there’s no shame in checking for clues. Use the hint! Use the logs! Use the photos! Get it and get out as quick as you can! Because the mosquitoes are coming for you, and I don’t want you to die of heatstroke!