Stopping at that ATM cost us a bundle. By the time the police let us go it was past our check out time and so we had to pay late fees. We packed up and drove out of town just to put the experience behind us. We did, however, give the ATM cache a favorite point.
One strange thing that geocaching does to perfectly normal people is it makes FREE WIFI signs jump out at you. Since we were on the road the only chance we had to look for more caches and log our finds was when we had a connection to the internet. Finding meals and an internet connection was a double bonus even though it made older couples glare at us for eating out, but hardly communicating with each other. We did communicate. We even had a common hobby to talk about. But to the casual observer it looked like two kids on a date who barely acknowledged the existence of each other.
“No extra muggly places,” I said as we were searching for a new cache to find. “And don’t order me a second hurricane ever again.”
“You were kind of fun there for a while,” he said.
“I was?”
“I never twisted before. You said your parents were old fashioned but I never expected them to be that old fashioned.”
“It’s good exercise,” I said.
“Provided you can still stand up. I guess if you can twist you must not be too shnockered.”
“I don’t know, that headache was awful. I don’t want to do that again.”
“Here’s one that looks pretty safe. There is one building close by but it’s a four difficulty.”
“What kind of a building?” I asked.
“Let’s look at the satellite image. Maybe that will give us some clues.” He clicked a link and waited for the map to change to the satellite image. He clicked to zoom in. “What is that? Gabby, can you figure out what that is? The building is here. It looks like a house, except there are lots of cars parked at it as if it’s a business. But the cache is in the corner of the little parking area. On a big red thing.”
“A fire truck?”
“Could be.”
“Look at the logs. Maybe they say something.”
“Uh oh. DNF, DNF, DNF, third try and still no luck. I don’t know why I keep coming back to this place. There are twice as many DNFs as there are finds. It’s that one occasional find that gives me hope there is a real cache here,” Twiggy said as he read the logs. “I am the cache owner. I assure you the cache is there. Use your geosenses and feel around.”
“Sounds interesting. But it sounds like an interesting waste of time.”
“Yeah,” he said disappointedly.
“We can look if you want to,” I offered.
“I always did like fire engines.”
“Then let’s go look.”
“Maybe business will be slow.”
“It doesn’t sound like it matters a whole lot if someone is there or not. It’s the cache itself that is hard to spot. Nobody seems to find it on their first visit.”
“Maybe we’ll luck out and find it and drive all the other geocachers who haven’t found it crazy.”
Before we could find Seeing Red we had to drive through miles of country roads. I had never seen so many cows before in all my life. I never knew corn plants grew taller than I did or that horses didn’t really eat hay, they eat alfalfa and alfalfa is stemmy and leafy, not at all like what I thought hay was. I found out that what I thought was hay was actually straw. Guess I’m not much of a country girl. The road narrowed from four lanes to two. The shoulder of the road narrowed until there was nothing but woods next to the road. If we got another flat tire we’d have to drive a ways to find a spot wide enough to pull off. It was pretty and I couldn’t help but look for deer. I was a little afraid of seeing one, though, because the tree line came nearly up to the road.
“I love these little blue highways,” Twiggy said. “This is what geocaching is all about. Discovering new places, however small they may be. Just a road going nowhere that I never would have seen.”
We passed a few houses and I expected to see hillbillies rocking in rickety old chairs out on their porches. I knew it was silly to think that, but when the fire truck appeared ahead and we pulled into the tiny parking lot I thought we had landed in Hicksville. The building appeared to be a little general store. I would usually call it a corner market, but there was no corner and no town, just a few houses, the store, fire truck and miles more of roads leading to more green places that I had never heard of or dreamed about.
“Look at this old thing!” Twiggy said. “I wonder if they’ll let me sit in it.”
It was a fire truck for sure, though the red paint had faded in the sun. It was so old that the ladders were made of wood.
Twiggy sighed, “All right, to work. A micro on a fire truck.”
There are just too many little hiding places on a fire truck, especially a fifty year old fire truck with the engine showing and the hoses deteriorating in the weather. The GPS put the cache at the front end of the truck but the coordinates and our GPS could be off putting the whole fire truck as a possible hiding spot. After a quick search I began a methodical search, but I gave up on the methodical approach quickly. I could search for hours and never make it past the engine.
“This is impossible!” I said with an exasperated huff. I looked up and there was a man sitting in a rickety old chair on the porch of the store. “Muggle alert,” I mumbled to Twiggy.
“Heyall!” the man said. “Aint had a geo catcher here for a week! I thought y’all had given up the hobby!”
Twiggy’s head popped up from behind the truck. “You know about the cache?” he asked.
“May I recommend to you that y’all go inside and order the fireman’s special. Won’t cost a lot but it might pay off, if ya know what I mean.”
“Uh, no. What’s a fireman’s special?” Twiggy asked as he walked around the truck and up to the porch. “Tony Yancy,” he said extending his hand in greeting.
“Ernie Crabtree,” the man said.
“It’s good to meet you Mr. Crabtree. Are you a geocacher?”
“No, no son, caint say that I am. Maybe you could say I’m a geocacher watcher. I like seeing what folks go through to find the cache on that ol’ truck. I hear it’s a toughie.”
“It is,” I admitted. “There are too many places to hide something on it!”
“This is Gwendolyn,” Twiggy said.
“Ma’am,” Mr. Crabtree said with a tip of his sweaty, old hat.
“What is a fireman’s special?” I asked.
“It’s kind of a code phrase. Means you want a clue about where the cache is. It’ll earn ya a malted milkshake. Best shakes this side of the road.”
I didn’t see how that made it a very good shake but I was willing to see what happened if I asked for one.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Martinsville, so named because there’s more purple martins here than people.”
“Never saw a purple martin. I never hope to…” Twiggy began.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Uh, sorry, it just pops into my head whenever I see something purple,” Twiggy said.
“You are so random.”
“Let’s go see about that fireman’s special.”
“Hey Clyde!” Mr. Crabtree yelled as he got up out of his chair. “We got us some of those geo catchers! They been out there only half an hour. Does they qualify for your fireman’s special?”
“Clyde’s in the bathroom,” a woman said. “With a book. It might be a while.” When she saw us walking into the store she smoothed out the wrinkles on her apron and said, “Well, well, welcome to our little store. How may I help you?”
“This here’s Glenda,” Mr. Crabtree said. “She can shake ‘em better’n Clyde anyhow. These folks need the fireman’s special!”
“Oh, I should have guessed when I saw the GPS,” she said. “Not many people come in. They mostly look and quietly disappear. Come have a seat at the counter. I’ll fix you right up.”
Twiggy and I were not sure about wanting a milkshake but it seemed to be part of the process of getting a hint out of the store owner so we sat down at the counter. There was a soda fountain behind it and the shelves were lined with a small assortment of canned goods, cake mixes, baking essentials and drug store staples. One corner of the store was reserved for souvenirs, most of which had purple martins painted on them. As she made our milkshakes she launched into a monologue which was worded very oddly.
“Don’t let Ernie feed you a LINE. He might not know much about the cache but he’s an UPRIGHT individual. Used to work for the fire department. They even had a POLE in his old station. They never used it though because they didn’t polish it. It was grimy. But if it was polished up it might have worked better. They had sleeping quarters and a kitchen upstairs where they would FUEL UP but they had to find their way down stairs to get out to the fire. This town used to be twice as big until the fire of 1972. Burned half the town down. They had the old fire truck out there and a couple of bucket LINES trying to save the town. HOSES and bucket LINES couldn’t save four of the buildings, though. It was tragic. But this little town stands up for itself. We help each other out. TIES THAT BIND. Neighbor to neighbor. You’d think the folks would move to other parts but we like our little crick and our one room school.” She held up two wrapped straws. “Would you like one or TWO?” she asked.
“Oh, just one for me,” I said.
“I’ll give you two anyway. One is normal. One is what you are looking for.”
Twiggy and I shrugged and opened a straw. I opened a white one with multicolored stripes. He opened a red one.
“I bet the red one blends in with the fire truck,” I said.
“I never heard of hiding a cache in a drinking straw before.”
After sitting in the general store drinking a chocolate malt and looking at the odd merchandise we weren’t nearly as frustrated and we decided to take another look at the fire truck. Twiggy took his straw along as a reference point. We walked around the truck again trying the straw up to anything resembling a tube. There were plenty of those!
“Did you notice all the times that lady annunciated any word that had to do with tubes and lines and straws? There was probably a dozen hints in that odd story she told us. I’m sure the cache looks just like a fuel line.”
It took us another half hour of searching. The plastic straw wrapped around the log had faded in the sun, but it had faded in a different way than the rest of the paint job on the old fire truck. The paint on the truck had faded to an orangish color and the straw had faded to nearly pink.
“Oh! Oh! I think I found it! Twiggy look! Is that it?”
He craned his neck to get a closer look.
“You’re developing geosenses faster than anybody I’ve ever cached with!” he said.
“Well, is that it?”
“I think so, but how does it come out?”
We had to use the tweezers from the pack to pluck it from the engine, almost like playing the game of Operation. He held up the straw victoriously and then figured out how to get the log out. At first we thought we would have to use the safety pin and pull it out the end but one side of the straw was slit and the log came out the slit easily.
“We need to make sure the slit is on the back side when we replace it,” Twiggy said. “Less water will get into it that way.”
It appeared the log had been damp many times but we found a spot on the soft paper to sign our team name.
“Good work padner!” he said as I rolled the log small enough to fit back inside the straw. It wasn’t an easy thing to do because the paper had been damp and dried again and it wasn’t smooth anymore. It took a few tries to make it small enough.
We waved to Mr. Crabtree but then Twiggy stopped.
“Can I sit in the driver’s seat?” he called toward the store.
“Go for it! Kids do it all the time!”
“All riiiiight!” Twiggy said as he clambered up into the cab of the truck. He rang the bell, looked around for the siren switch, and flipped it on. It didn’t make any sound because there was no electricity but he bellowed out a siren and he pretended to drive the old truck to a fire.
“I’ve even seen sixty year old men do that,” Mr. Crabtree said.