Worst Among Equals

I went to a local Community Celebration yesterday. I expect that a good handful are going to be hosted in the next six weeks or so as time is running out to host them. I wonder if maybe HQ would consider awarding them randomly as time goes on so people can have chances of attending them in the future? Or maybe any time someone creates an Event, it has a random chance of being a Celebration? Interesting thought, but that’s secondary to all this.

As I said, I went to a Community Celebration. A few locals showed up. A couple of names I hadn’t seen before arrived; they’re wintering here, doing volunteer work at a nearby state park. And then in comes … Hullu_Jussi, fellow finisher of the Texas County Challenge, who hails from Finland? What? Soon after, the attendance triples as a giant batch of cachers arrives from parts all over the state, country, and world:

TTO2? KidWrangler? Hughling? What the heck are all of you people doing here? As fate would have it, a lot of them had gathered for some caching! They, along with many not pictured or listed, had gathered in Austin to work on some cache runs in the area before heading off to spend the weekend working on a bigger caching project.

Now here’s the thing: there was a time when I would have been a little cowed by all the caching competence that was in attendance (there were folks with tens [and in at least one case, a hundred] of thousands of finds, hundreds of loops, all the countries one could think of, and any number of accolades and accomplishments). I’m not now. At this point, I think I can admit without humility or bravado that I have done some things from a caching perspective. At the same time, in a group like that, I still felt like a bit of a newbie on the block.

My point here (and I do have one) is that some people who cache dread the idea of going to an Event. Some people have anxieties and personal issues that prevent them from getting around that many people. Some don’t have a desire for a social experience with an activity that can be very solitary and private. Still others don’t want to face the prospect of breaking into a group that can seem from the outside to be cliquish and intimidating. I’ve been caching for years, am a fixture in my caching community, and could even be considered something of a celebrity and I still feel a little bit of all those things. I consider myself one of the gang and yet I can find it all a bit intimidating at times. How much more so for newer cachers with a hundred finds walking in to a room with (for lack of a better term) local or regional legends? Luckily, when I first started going to Events, I had a couple of things on my side: several cachers were very friendly, happily introducing me to people I wouldn’t have approached on my own and I didn’t know who anyone was or what they had done to be cowed by them.

To those of you who are considering going to an Event, I highly recommend you do so. You’ll learn a lot. You’ll make friends. You’ll hear about group caching opportunities. But remember that the person you’re talking to may have only fifty or over fifty thousand finds more than you, but they all put their pants on one leg at a time, wrestle with the same issues, like the same things (especially caching!), and are just people like you. I promise that hundreds of Events later, you’ll wonder why you were even worried about Events in the first place. And every now and then you’ll remember why, but that’s OK. Everyone else does it, too.