Six or seven years ago, I looked at one of the first Mysteries that I ever had the guts to face. I had found many (though not all) of the puzzles in them intimidating, so it felt like a big step for me to try one. It showed a series of flags (not national, possibly signal) and it was obvious that each flag correlated with a digit. I started crunching numbers, referencing the Internet, came up with numbers that made sense within the context of the cache description, then went to and searched my newly divined GZ.
I failed.
Over time, I got better at easy to mid-tier puzzles but I never revisited this early snub. There were a lot of other caches for finding and I figured I’d get back around to it one day. A couple of years ago, I was at an Event thrown by visitors from New Hampshire and was gifted with a list of Mysteries they had solved before they arrived. Among them was that Mystery I had failed so long ago. It was nowhere near where I had calculated all those years ago, at least a mile away. I kept the list around, picking a cache from it every now and then when I needed one and didn’t want to think too hard about it. But I never went back to that first failure.
Yesterday, that changed.
I needed a cache so I pulled out the list and there was the one I had left sitting for so long. I remembered how last week I had been thinking about removing old pins off my map. I was also thinking of the CO, who has recently earned even more respect than we already have for him because he and his wife went from Georgetown up to Stephenville over the weekend and found a wedding ring dropped by cachers visiting from Maine. I looked at the cache page again and realized that it hadn’t been found in three and a half years. I decided that it was time to go after it. It would be easy to get to on the way home from work and if it wasn’t there, I could divert to another cache easily enough. I pulled into the parking lot of an upscale Mexican restaurant and parked in a side lot in view of smoking kitchen staff who obviously didn’t care about me. I grabbed my bag and set off down a trail into the wooded hill behind the restaurant. The path had been clear cut sometime in the last couple of years and I was worried that perhaps the cache might have been lost or otherwise compromised. I took a moment to check out the hint. After some quick rotation, I saw it read “After FTF.” Since the FTF had been almost nineteen years ago, I assumed that the hint will never be changed. A recent previous finder (five years ago) noted its well covered hiding spot. Thinking of cover, a couple of spots were options, but one shone out over the other. I looked in a hole in some non-karsty stone and saw one end of an ammo can! It was a tight fit, but I was able to slide it out from the organic detritus that had collected around it and through the hole into the sunlight for the first time in years. All the trackables that had once been in it were gone, but the log was still the original from 2007. Inveni, inscripsi, reposui.
I guess my point here (and I do have one) is that yesterday’s failures have the possibility of becoming tomorrow’s victories. Or maybe you haven’t really failed until you give up entirely. Or maybe failing before leads to the growth that prepared you for now. Or something like that. Pretend I said something profound here.
Geocaching While Black 