Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (31 page)

Cache proliferation: fifty square miles east of Denver, with its Malthusian swarm of little geocache icons placed along “power trails”

The artificial abundance of a million-geocache world has soured some old-school cachers on the game. Originally, the rarity of geo-caches was part of their allure; you had to venture to a remote mountaintop or deserted beach to find one. By definition, how can it be special anymore to find something so ubiquitous? Purists call the new glut of low-quality caches “micro-spew,” and heap scorn on their most typical delivery system, the 35-millimeter film canister. “Film canisters are to geocaching what spam is to e-mail,” they will tell you, or “Every time you hide a film canister, a fairy dies.” Ed Hall once made it a point to find every cache in his neighborhood but finally gave up when a cache—a film canister, natch—showed up a quarter mile from his house in the least exotic spot imaginable: the drive-through of his nearest Burger King. “It was at that point,” he says, “that I realized geocaching had probably jumped some kind of shark.”

But other geocachers thrive on the density. They won’t rest until there’s a pill bottle Velcroed to the metal skirt at the base of every parking lot lamppost and a magnetic key container beneath every picnic table. The more the merrier! I think this is a telltale clue to what’s driving geocaching’s sudden popularity: the urge to fill an otherwise overexplained universe with mysterious secrets. Children intuitively believe that our gray everyday existence must conceal beneath its surface another world, brighter and more interesting, like the one in story books. But then they get older and gradually come to terms with the sad truth that there
is
no hidden world—no Confederate gold behind the bricks of the old fireplace, no genie in any of the glass bottles washed up by the surf. Geocaching restores those lost treasures by the thousands. It’s a way for acolytes to make the world feel a little more magical, one camouflaged Altoids tin at a time.

The Harry Potter books have sold six jillion copies by trading on this same fantasy: a secret world known only to a small coterie of insiders. In J. K. Rowling’s series, just as in geocaching, seemingly ordinary places and objects conceal numinous secrets: a blank brick wall might open onto a magical secret alley, an old boot or a newspaper might be an enchanted teleportation device in disguise. It’s no
surprise, then, that geocachers have borrowed the word “Muggle”—a clueless nonwizard in Harry Potter’s world—to apply to clueless nongeocachers. This reflects both the satisfaction cachers take in their secret knowledge (they can walk along a busy trail with the confidence that they know something about that particular tree stump that
nobody else knows
) and the very real threat posed by outsiders. Cachers will go to great lengths to avoid being spotted while hiding or retrieving a geocache, because all it takes is one too-curious onlooker and the secret spot might be “Muggled” (plundered) and thereby ruined for future seekers. So there’s a clandestine thrill to the sport, almost reminiscent of Cold War–era double espionage: lots of long, chilly waits on park benches pretending to feed birds and cautious drive-bys of prearranged “dead drops” on lonely country roads.

Geocachers develop their own tricks to avoid suspicious looks (followed, quite often, by 911 calls—police interrogations are a rite of passage for prolific cachers
^*
) as they lurk in shrubbery and poke around utility boxes. Some swear by a fluorescent orange vest and clipboard: you can apparently act as fishy as you like as long as you’re dressed like a city employee. Others, like David Carriere of Ottawa (geocaching handle “Zartimus”) go caching only by dead of night. “It was the only time I could find to go, with the kids and all,” he tells me, but I’m not entirely convinced by his innocent explanation. Zartimus, you see, is best known in caching circles for his eccentric uniform: a Batman cape and cowl accompanied by a ten-foot bullwhip. If Muggles approach, he says, “I kill the light by pulling the cape over my head and I just sit there. You can’t see me with that thing on because the cape breaks up the shape.” I prefer daylight caching (and don’t own a single superhero vigilante costume), so I develop a strategy of talking loudly into my GPS receiver as if it were a cell phone while searching, and I avoid caches near schools and playgrounds unless I have my kids with me. You may laugh, but if you’re a middle-aged man, just try spending twenty minutes carefully rubbing your fingers over every inch of a playground’s chain-link fence and see where you end up spending the night.

Geocaching and the law have had something of a checkered relationship. The creepy lurking isn’t the most serious problem; since 9/11, hiding weird-looking packages in public urban places has become an increasingly bad idea, and hardly a month goes by without news reports of a geocache-sparked mass evacuation, which typically ends in a bomb squad dutifully detonating a small box of gumball-machine toys. Often these hides have been placed, in violation of
Geocaching.com
guidelines, too close to infrastructure: bridges, railroads, or monuments. And it doesn’t help that one of the most common kind of geocache container is the most suspicious-looking one possible: a green military-surplus ammunition can. You might as well hide your logbook in a round black ticking sphere with a sizzling fuse on top and the word “BOMB” written on the side. In Arabic. “I use Tupperware now, because it doesn’t look dangerous,” says Ed Hall. “An ammo box: not so much.”

Cache containers in the wilderness can cause problems of another kind: once you attract hundreds of people to some out-of-the-way spot, it’s not an out-of-the-way spot anymore. Visible “geotrails” tend to form as vegetation gets trampled and soil compacted.
^*
The National Park Service banned geocaching from national parks and wilderness areas early on, seeing it as a perversely elaborate form of littering. But in a time of declining park attendance, many wilderness managers are privately sympathetic to geocachers, who are model visitors in other respects: avid, knowledgeable nature lovers who often organize cleanup events as they search, using the motto “CITO”—“cache in, trash out.” In October 2009, the park service “clarified” its policy by giving park superintendents leeway to allow geocaching where appropriate, and in 2010, caches finally returned to some national parklands.

Just three months after finding my first cache, I’m officially addicted. I don’t go out on twenty-four-hour power-caching runs like the
ventura_kids, but I do get a little twitchy if I haven’t grabbed a cache for a day or so. I try to pretend that my habit is “just research,” or I drag Dylan along with me as a sort of beard, so that I can blame it all on his insatiable appetite for plastic toys, but he typically gets bored at least an hour or two before I do and I have to string him along with the promise of doughnuts so that he’ll come with me for
just one more, I swear
. I schedule errands around the locations of puzzle caches I’ve solved. I switch out my Swiss Army knife for one that has tweezers (for removing stubborn log papers from tiny cache containers) and a ballpoint pen for signing. In fact, I’ve signed my caching handle in so many logbooks that I actually catch myself endorsing a check with it once.

It’s not unusual for geocachers to rearrange their lives around the game. “
Viajero Perdido
,” an Alberta geocacher, became so obsessed with a single cache on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast, one that had sat in the jungle for five years without a single find, that he flew all the way to Central America just to log it and tacked on a Caribbean vacation so that friends and family wouldn’t think he was crazy. (He and his native guides spent hours blazing trails with machetes, but with no luck; he returned home with nothing but a “DNF”—“Did Not Find”—to his credit.) “
Hukilaulau
,” from Long Island, says he took a temp job in Phoenix just so he could stop in Kansas along the way to log “Mingo,” the world’s oldest active cache.

Dave Ulmer claims that geocaching’s addictive properties were all part of his master plan. “Geocaching is a new application program for your brain,” he tells me. “It’s like getting a new game for your computer and installing it. When you learn about geocaching, you’re installing a new game in your brain.” Ulmer has spent the last decade working on
Beyond the Information Age,
a manifesto on information theory that he’s convinced will change human history, if he could only get someone to read it. From my perusal of the manuscript, I become convinced that it’s either completely crackpot or completely genius; I’m just not smart enough to tell the difference. In Ulmer’s parlance, geocaching is an “ISSU”—a self-replicating “intelligent system specification unit.” “It’s a very complicated system, when you think of all the millions of people that are involved in it. That’s how I put it
together, and that’s why it worked so damn well. It was engineered to be that from day one.”

“So you see the whole activity as a life-form that spreads on its own? Are we all little neurons in this big brain?”

“That’s right!”

But for all my absorption into the geocaching hive-mind, there’s one coveted caching honor I don’t have: an FTF, or “First to Find.” Some cachers specialize in finding
virgin
caches—being the first to sign a newly placed hide. If twenty-four-hour power cachers are the marathoners of the geoworld, then First-to-Find hounds are its sprinters. Bryan Fix, a Portland, Oregon, native who caches as “Scubasonic,” has a near-superhuman FTF track record: more than nine hundred FTFs notched, fully 14 percent of his finds. He once bagged ten in a single day, which is remarkable, since the Portland area sees only ten or fifteen new caches in a typical
week
.

Back in the day, when there weren’t many geocachers, the FTF was an achievement within the reach of mere mortals; even casual cachers would stumble upon one from time to time. But this is the steroid era. “Premium” members who pay
Geocaching.com
$30 a year can choose to receive instant notifications the second a new cache is published, and the hard-core types make sure those messages find them on their phones or PDAs.

“I actually sleep with my BlackBerry,” Bryan tells me from behind the desk of his Vancouver, Washington, real estate office. He’s a strikingly youthful-looking forty-nine-year-old, with a high, gleaming forehead that somehow makes him seem boyish, not balding. “I have it on the vibrate mode, and if it beeps, I jump up and I’m gone. I always have my clothes laid out next to the bed. I’m out the door in a minute, and I enter the coordinates on the way.”

“So you’re like a doctor.”

“Well, I don’t get the money.”

The FTF junkies are often the most social of geocachers, since they’re the only ones who so often converge on the same cache at the same time. Bryan knows and likes his nemeses, even though he’s not the most beloved figure on the local circuit. “I’ve been accused of cheating,” he sighs. “I guess they’re bothered that I get so many, but
if you want to get ’em, get up off the couch and go get ’em! There’s nothing stopping you.” He’s seen cars squeal up to new cache locations only to have their angry drivers scowl at him or slam their fists on the car roof in frustration when they see that there are already flashlights combing the forest. No one, after all, remembers the
second
team to climb Everest.

He’s also learned over time where his rivals live, based on which geocaches they’ve beaten him to—FTFers, like street gangs, develop “turf.” So Bryan decided to broaden his turf by analyzing where new geocaches would appear and at what time of day. “I started seeing a pattern,” he says. “So I would actually drive over and sit centrally located, where I thought they were coming up.” He still spends some nights at his favorite spot, the Foster Road on-ramp to I-205, camped in his car like a cop on a stakeout, waiting patiently for new prey to appear on his BlackBerry or laptop. Most nights, sooner or later, one does. “And then I take off. I’m out of there.”

I don’t get instant notifications of new geocaches, so in my short geocaching career I’ve never even come close to an FTF. Then, one drizzly afternoon as I’m walking out of the grocery store, I idly pull up the geocaching app on my phone and select “Find Nearby Geo-caches.” I’m just blocks from home, and I motored through all the caches in my neighborhood months ago, so I’m not expecting to see anything close by. But there sits a blue question mark at the top of the list: a mystery cache I don’t recognize, just a mile or two away. I bring up its full listing, and it looks like a simple logic puzzle. Even better, it was published less than two hours ago and the user log is still empty. I race home and spend ten minutes scribbling away at the problem with a pencil, and finally produce some likely-looking coordinates. When I bring them up on Google Earth, they turn out to be the end of a biking trail just five minutes from my house. Is a local “Scubasonic” type already en route, or do I have a chance? I grab my car keys and take the stairs down to the garage three steps at time, adrenaline-infused blood throbbing in my ears.