Geocaching

I went geocaching for the first time yesterday. It's starting to fade away as a trend so I felt like it was safe to try it out. After all those cutesy stories about going geocaching for first dates and family bonding time and romantic proposals I thought for sure it would be fun. But do you know what is really fun? Not going geocaching.

My friend, Tyler, and I were extra adventurous and boated out to some islands on the Columbia. I know what you're thinking, if geocaching doesn't sound exciting enough, try geocaching with a boat on secluded islands. We were practically Huckleberry and Tom rafting the river, out to find some treasure. But do you know what is really exciting? Not going geocaching with a boat on secluded islands.

We'd been on the island three minutes when I looked up and saw Tyler running from the bushes, slapping himself silly with a swarm of mosquitos dancing around him. We ran back to the boat to put on some insect repellent. That'll stop 'em. As we walked back into the heart of the island, I tried to brush off the hundred mosquitos that were still clinging to the back of Tyler's shirt. Ever since my run-in with the West Nile virus a few summers back, I've never trusted another mosquito - I don't care if they just want to hang out on somebody's shirt, they're a bunch of sneaky snakes, the whole lot of them.

The GPS counted down, 25 feet...17 feet...10 feet...go, find your treasure! We looked up from the handy GPS guide to find ourselves in the middle of a handsome blackberry patch. Awesome, cause that's exactly where I would hide a geocache - in the middle of a field of plants known for their wicked thorns and menacing stings. I started searching, I started getting scratched. The bug repellent became useless as soon as all those mosquitos smelled fresh blood. They must have been insane with hunger to have pushed passed the deadly bug spray, because every scratch I got was soon surrounded by two or three swollen bites. If I were in the insect repelling market, I would forget the sissy spray stuff and come up with a pill you could swallow that would not only give off a repelling smell (that only the bugs would smell, of course, and to everyone else it would smell like fresh rain on a meadow of wild flowers) but also turn your blood to poison so that if any bug dared to break past the smell, the second they touched your blood they would explode into pretty little miniature fireworks. Efficient and entertaining, that is my dream but I digress. So after 15 minutes of this geocaching fun, we found an empty torn ziplock bag in a stump that said "Official Geocache Container." Isn't geocaching awesome? You know what's really awesome? Insect repellent pills that turn mosquitos into an explosive fireworks show and not geocaching.

Apparently, Tyler and I are true geocachers because we did not let this stop us. We tried another island. More mosquitos, more thorns, more no geocaches. Another bloodbath for us, another bountiful feast for the little suckers, and a good joke for whoever said they hid a geocache there. This time there wasn't even an empty bag. We got back into the boat. Tyler looked me up and down. My arms and legs were red from the blood and the swelling. I had been transformed from Huckleberry Finn to Quasimodo with a swollen bug bites above my left eye, my right cheek, my upper lip, and a couple behind my ear. "How about let's try one at a park instead of an island," he said chipperly. "Ok!" I said, just as chipper. Do you know what would really be the most chipper thing you could ever say though? "Let's not go geocaching!"

We tried a park. We got to the site of the geocache treasure, it was under a grove of Cottonwood trees. The entire ground was covered with fluffy white cottonwood seeds, like a thin gentle layer of snow. So pretty. Do you know what else is pretty? The blackberry thorns underneath the layer of cottonwood snow. After long minutes of painful searching we still had no geocache treasure and Tyler started to cry (it turns out he's very allergic to cottonwoods and his eyes were burning). Do you know what would really make me cry? Geocaching.

We tried another park. This geocache was called "Message in a Bottle" and we were sure that it was hidden in a bottle by this giant tree. You can hide a lot of things in or around a giant tree. It also is a good hang out spot, so obviously perfect for some geocaching fun. Here are some things and people we found there: beer bottles(some empty, some not), inappropriate trash (as opposed to the appropriate trash like fast food garbage which we also found plenty of), broken glass, old toys, druggies shooting up heroin, white collar workers smoking pot on their lunch breaks, a couple people making out, a couple other people breaking up with dramatic sobs, geese, geese poop, old people holding hands, little kids playing horseshoes, and cigarette butts as numerous as the sands of the sea. Oh, and no geocaches.

We had reached a point where if we gave up now we would just be miserable failures. We decided to try one more. We walked a couple miles in the 90 degree afternoon sunshine, across the park, under than over than under a bridge, through a jungle, through a golf course, through a parking lot that I believe was built specifically for drug deals, to a pretty little garden path. I stumbled on the path a couple times, either from pure geocaching excitement, or from the fact that I was dying of thirst. In the rush and thrill of it all, we had forgotten to bring water. No matter though because I think the geocacher's motto is "Water is for Wussies" and we were true geocachers, not wussies. We were getting close. The GPS said we were 10 feet away! We looked around...could this be true? No thorny bushes, no mosquitos, no cottonwood trees, no druggies, only mounds and mounds of geocache hope. We stepped off the path, passed a few trees and walked right onto the edge of a thirty foot cliff. Was I scared? No way. You know what would really scare me? Making geocaching a hobby. We decided that it would be best to keep walking on the path, circle below to the rocky river bank and climb up the cliff rather than try climbing down it which would certainly lead to a tragic geocaching death. So we walked the path, circled around to the coordinates and started climbing. For every step we climbed, we slid backwards two. We kept up this strategy for quite some time. Finally we looked at each other and without saying anything, we just let ourselves slide all the way back down to the river's edge. We sat in silence for awhile, watching a bald eagle circle overhead and listening to the sound of distant laughter from children who had never known geocaching dreams. Tyler skipped some rocks and I soaked my burnt, bloody, bitten legs in the freezing water and it felt so good. But do you know what felt even better? Deciding it would be all right to be geocache failures.

This morning I was applying generous amounts of soothing liniment to my aching, itchy body and I discovered a few bites on my rear end that had suddenly flared up. I notified Tyler immediately that it would be a long time before anyone could talk me into geocaching again. He was shocked and begged me not to judge geocaching from that one experience. Fine, I said, I may not have a right to judge it, but do you know who does? My itchy geocaching bum.