Gravity

As I mentioned previously, this past weekend was my seventh geoversary. I was up in Longview on that day, so I decided to find a special cache to cap off my seventh. I warmed up Cachly and set it to filter out anything with less than fifty favorites. That left four caches within a twenty-mile radius: one in town and three in surrounding towns. The D5/T1 Wherigo did not enthuse me. There was a Virtual that would have been very fitting for the theme of this site, but I didn’t want to do a cache that I knew would be such a downer. There was a Traditional on the edge of town, but I decided I wanted to knock out something I’ve had on my radar for a very long time. I took my older daughter (the younger daughter was at a party) and went for a different Virtual in neighboring Rusk County in the town of New London.

Why does natural gas smell the way it does? Because in 1937, there was a horrible accident at the local school in New London that resulted in the deaths of almost three hundred people, most of them children. Natural gas, which at the time was odorless, seeped into the crawl space of London School. A spark from a piece of equipment lit it, causing the gas to explode, blowing the building off its foundations, effectively erasing an entire generation of children. The world poured its attention and grief toward the town. Two years later, after the dead were identified as best they could be and cleanup was done, a great tower commemorating the tragedy was raised.

There was a Virtual there that I had seen on the map a hundred times. Our time had come. My daughter and I read the plaques and some of the many names inscribed in granite. And then we looked at the requirements for logging the Virtual. It could be claimed in one of two ways: we could provide answers to a series of questions or …

… we could take photos of ourselves at one of the displays inside the New London Museum across the street. Being human and therefore lazy, we chose one photo over six questions, especially since the photo (unlike the questions) would involve air-conditioning.

There’s something you should know about me: I tend to mask sadness with humor. This means that while half of my brain was overwhelmed by the gravity of the moment, the other half was generating jokes about the things I was seeing. The jokes started coming the moment we were confronted with the first display, a scale model of the school with a pull-out section revealing the crawl space. There were photographs of children and teachers who died. There were news clippings along with sports and band memorabilia. There were messages of condolence from all over the world, including a telegram from the now-infamous chancellor of Germany. And there were artifacts: a clarinet that had belonged to a student, a teacher’s dress, a high chair that had been given away because it was no longer needed, and the music teacher’s tambourine. And the jokes kept generating to fight the sadness.

You read about things like this (at least I do), and you acknowledge them in the abstract as bad or sad, but being faced with the reality of it—looking into the maw of such suffering—even eighty years past, could bring a person to tears. While my own coping mechanism may not be the most appropriate, I had to laugh to keep from crying. I can’t begin to imagine how I would face the loss of my children. For that to happen to an entire community? I don’t even know how they went on after that. But what choice did they have?

Once my daughter and I were done at the museum, we faced the hardest decision of our day: where to go for lunch. We headed back to L-Town. We were going to be passing that high-favorite Traditional, so we stopped at a town park and took a shot at it. I was happy I didn’t have to go to the fence line since it was ankle deep in stagnant water from recent rains. When I finally reached GZ, I quickly deduced where the cache would be hiding, although my daughter beat me to it because she had been reading the logs. I’ll admit I’m still a little confused about how the cache was placed, but after comparing some dates, it’s possible that it was placed while the park was still under construction. Bravo. Our fingers were not enough to get it out, but with the help of a magnet on a stick (one of the rare moments I actually used that thing!) and a pen, we were able to get it out of its hidey-hole and put our ink on the logbook. Victory! After that, we got lunch, did other things, and generally hung around for a while. Finding two caches isn’t that big a deal in the greater scheme of things, but it was a good way to commemorate my milestone. I’m not normally into the entire self-congratulatory thing, but why not? I earned it!