Impermanence

A couple of days ago, I checked out my emails to look at the freshly dropped caches.  In among them, I saw a brand new EarthCache!  Man am I glad I figured out how to get notifications for those!  It published early in the morning and located relatively close to a cacher known for picking up FTFs, so I figured that I’d leave it for another day; he’d likely find it long before I got off work.  When quitting time came around though, it was still unfound.  You know what that means: time to go for a drive.  I went out to Hutto, a town outside of Round Rock (also not far from Taylor where I hear there’s gonna be a Mega in a couple of months) to their big central district.  I parked on the edge of it, behind an old cotton gin turned event center, and began my search.  The EarthCache was dedicated to the limestone of the Leuders Formation, an especially dense limestone common in Texas, an example of which was a sculpture at GZ.  I jumped out of the car, and walked over to GZ, but saw no sculpture.  I was confused as the only statuary there was a painted and obviously mass-produced hippo statue, more concrete than limestone.  A walk around the building was no help either.  For a moment I despaired of answering the EarthCache questions, but luckily there were chunks of limestone about that were sizable enough to make the appropriate observations and produce answers to submit.  When I did, I noted that even though I was able to answer the questions, the mentioned sculpture was nowhere to be found. 

I got a really fast response from the CO.  I had apparently conversed with them before regarding another EarthCache I had gotten just over a year ago.  They sent me a picture of the sculpture, and I confirmed that I had seen nothing like it in the area.  They did some sleuthing on their own and then got back to me with the explanation: in the week and a half between when they submitted it and when it published, the city had moved the sculpture from outside the event center to inside nearby City Hall!  I was immediately relieved to know that I’m not as unobservant as I think I am.  I was also happy that I was able to get an FTF on an EarthCache.  But it also reminded me of a cache I hid last year.  A previous cacher had drilled a hole in a tree to hide a cache (which, coincidentally, I was also FTF on) but had since archived it.  I don’t condone hiding caches that way, but after it had been gone for over a year, I used the same spot to make a new hide (“waste not want not” I sometimes say).  Despite the tree having remained unchanged for years, my cache only lasted a couple of weeks.  Weather had caused the tree’s bark to slough off, leaving a D4.0 hide as naked as the proverbial jaybird. 

I guess my point here (and I do have one) is that everything changes on a long enough timeline: animals into fossils, sediment into rock, trees into bigger woodier trees, and caches no matter how cleverly placed.  It’s one of the few common thoughts that both science and liberal arts prepare people for.  Or some kind of crap like that.