I went out to L-Town over the weekend to see the Girls. The younger daughter had to go to an extracurricular thing out of town so her sister and I took her to school to catch the appropriate school bus. The older daughter fueled up the car and then set off on a mini road trip of our own. She wanted to continue working on the Texas County Challenge and the Texas 2-Step.
We started out at the Cherokee County Courthouse. There was a Mystery located there meant to be our first find of the day. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bust. We got the information we needed from the courthouse monuments and corrected our coordinates, but when we got to GZ across the street we couldn’t figure out where it was. Ironically several people I knew had found it in the last year, but I didn’t have contact information so phoning a friend was out. When a woman and her grandchild pulled up in their car, my daughter and I decided to get some warm drinks and consider what to do next. As you can imagine, finding the non-Traditional cache in a county is the more important cache to find. Traditionals are all over the place (at least they are in Texas) but it’s not uncommon for a county to have two or three non-Traditional (though those numbers have been going up since people have been making more because of the 2-Step). We discussed options for going forward, but decided to give this one another look. When we returned to GZ, the same car with grandmother and granddaughter was still parked. We decided to abort and go for a Traditional a few blocks away at a local park. Unfortunately, it wasn’t there.
However, there was another at the other end of a nearby bridge. That’s how we ended up walking the length of the longest wooden footbridge in America. At the other end, we found a small contraption that seemed a little out of place on a telephone pole and once we pulled a retaining pin out, a log dropped out. Traditional completed, we decided to go down the road to a Multicache but I couldn’t help trying our already solved Mystery again. The same car was still sitting there so we left Rusk for points south. The Multi was also a bust. Not only did the redirector point us miles away in the wrong direction, but it would be a hike to the final that neither of were in the mood for. Since all the other non-Traditionals were in the other direction, we decided to not worry about it that day. Cherokee County isn’t far from Longview so we could always go back fairly easily.
Our next stop was in Angelina County. We had gotten a Virtual in Lufkin a year and a half ago, but she still needed the Traditional. A quick stop in a cemetery remedied that. Based on the cache description, I had expected to find it at a park or baseball diamond, but my confusion dissipated once I put some particulars about the location together in my head. That was the farthest southern extent of the trip. One day, I’ll be dragging children to Houston and the so-called wonders of the Carcinogenic Coast, but not that day. We turned back up northward and went to a series of counties on the way back to L-Town.
We drove through the Davy Crockett National Forest to Houston County. We pulled off onto some poorly maintained county roads in the Forest to reach a small community cemetery with a Multi. We made corrections based on the historical plaque at the front and were led to a fencepost in the back with a wired tube.
Soon after, we visited a roadside family cemetery for a Traditional. There were three things I noted while we were there. First, there were six graves simply marked “Infant.” That reminder of how tough life once could be was worthy of a sigh. Second, this was the third cemetery in a row of the morning. I wondered if this trend would continue through the rest of the day. Third, though you could read most of the stones, I couldn’t find one for the family slave who had been buried there according to the historical plaque. If my editor was here, she would say that I should use the term “enslaved person” because the word “slave” is dehumanizing, reducing a person to their condition and robbing them of their personhood. I would respectfully counter that that is the statement of a society, evolving though it may be, that is trying to correct for the fact that traditionally failed on those counts. Speaking for myself, on no day have I ever considered that someone who was a slave was not a person and that the reality of their position meant they were nothing more. Regardless of terminology, I could not give this nameless person their proper recognition.
In Anderson County, we stopped in another cemetery, resulting in a rare photo of your humble narrator pulling a soda bottle blank out of a tree to fulfill the terms of a Multi. At the edge of Palestine, we stopped in another cemetery for a slightly different experience.
In the proverbial shadow of who I believed was a grandee of the city, we found a Traditional. It was notable for me because it’s the first cache I’ve gotten in a long time with the scenic view attribute, resulting in the first of a long and difficult (for me) set of Treasures. After a bit of research (meaning five minutes googling), I learned that he was a former Confederate private who never married and left a will stating that, since he had no heirs, he wished to have everything he possessed sold to buy him the largest monument that could be afforded. I was reminded of something I once read about ancient Athens. A writer from antiquity once wrote that Athens, because of its grandiose building projects, would one day be considered as ten times greater than it actually was. Congratulations, Private Conaway. You have quite a stone to mark your place as you lie in wormy earth. After some lunch and a quick drive past the Anderson County Courthouse, we continued north to Henderson County. We had long since gotten the required non-Traditional at a library in the other Athens. This time we stopped for a quick Traditional on a guardrail. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
With that, we resolved to begin our trek back to L-Town. I was planning on having my minion there help me find a cache in the area that I need for Jasmer purposes but I noticed something. We were short driving distance to the only Virtual in Cherokee County. And it was on the way, too. That Jasmer cache could wait. We set off east for for that Virtual so we would never have to go back to that county again. And when we got to GZ …
What the heck was this crazy pyramid? It turned out that we had stumbled upon one final cemetery for the day, the site of the Killough Massacre. To sum up, Sam Houston negotiated a treaty with the local Cherokee but the Republic of Texas nixed it. The Cherokee allowed some families to harvest, but they were set upon by a band that were not part of the local tribes. Most of the men were killed, most of the women and children were carried off, a few escaped to a nearby fort to tell the tale. My daughter gathered information and then I submitted the answers to the CO. Once it was logged, we were done for the day. Three new counties finished and two partials completed. Not bad for a day with one of my favorite caching partners. And I have to get the days as I can. Soon enough she’ll be going to college out of state. We probably won’t finish Texas before she leaves but I’ll take what I can get until then. And one day I’m going to visit her at school and drag her out to do some new counties!
Geocaching While Black 