Recycling

Yesterday, on the Day of Honored Matres, I set out for a cache. I didn’t really want to go far for one because some rough storms (possibly involving serious hail) had been forecast for some time that afternoon or evening and I didn’t want to be in some crazy far location when/if they dropped in (they did, but that’s not important right now). I pulled up the map and looked for the closest and easiest one I could find. To my surprise, there was one a little over a mile away that I know hadn’t been there the last time I checked. When I saw the name of it, I knew exactly where it was.

With a cache called Texas Spiders, there wasn’t a lot of question. On a nearby walking trail is a giant spider sculpture. Five years ago, back during the Snowpocalypse, I found a cache at the foot of one of its legs. At some point in the misty past before that, I had found another cache there, buried in rocks at the base of one of the stones by a different leg. This time, it was hidden in the trees behind the iron arachnid. It turned out to be a bit of a pain, actually. The log was in a DNA tube inside a plastic spider, but I didn’t bring tweezers to GZ with me. No big deal, though. I walked back to the car, got a pair (I need to get some new ones; I only have one pair left), and then came back to the cache. Unfortunately, the log was in there so tightly that even with tweezers I wasn’t able to get it out. In the end, I put the tip of my pen in through the top so I could at least get ink on the log, and then called it victory. The calligraphy of the Founding Fathers it ain’t, but it was good enough for me.

It made me think though, about all the times I’ve seen a cache get archived and then have a new one pop up in the same location. Many years ago, there was a cache that was one of my inspirations for buying a ladder. It was a flat magnetic sheet about fifteen feet up a light pole, painted to blend in. I felt like I was the Pope of Chilitown when I got it. Eventually, it got archived; I can’t remember why though. After sitting unused for a few years, I went ahead and put a cache of my own there. Since magnetic sheets are no longer legal since they do not satisfy the container definition, I put a boson tube at a similar height from a magnetically attached hook. Another cache I once picked up was a challenge of questionable placement. The owner drilled a hole in a tree and put a (slightly bigger) DNA tube in the hole. Long after it was archived, I decided that, while I do not advocate for drilling holes in trees, since the hole was already there, why not hide a cache there as well? It was a great cache, too. I used a piece of its fallen bark to make a cap for a similar DNA tube and it blended in so well. Unfortunately, that cache was not long for this world. The tree’s bark sloughed off a few months later, leaving the tube completely obvious. I’ve seen LPCs fade and be replaced in the same manner. I’ve seen ammo cans disappear to be replaced by peanut butter jars to be replaced by mayonnaise jugs in successive order. I’ve seen uninteresting caches go away and be replaced by equally uninteresting caches. Which gets down to the question: why are we drawn to the same places? Sometimes I completely understand. Some locations are interesting and naturally bring people to them. But other places are nothing special. I can imagine why someone might place a cache in one of those places, but if that cache gets archived, why go back to the same place? Especially when it’s nothing special.

Oh, well. I won’t accuse a giant spider made of iron girders of not being special.