Since we had an hour to drive while we found the dirt road in question we turned up the radio and belted out the songs we knew. It was one of my favorite memories. No matter what station we put it on Twiggy seemed to know every other song that came on and eventually I tried to find a station that he didn’t know any songs on. Mexican music was finally the solution, but then I didn’t know the songs either, so it was back to a familiar rock station. Mile after mile, song after song.
He had let his beard grow. It wasn’t long enough to be a proper beard but it was enough for me to see what he might look like bearded. And he continued to wear darker colors and fewer math prof shirts. He was relaxing into his role and I couldn’t help but think that I was learning what kind of a man he really was. He enjoyed his time outdoors looking for caches. He had watched out for me while the bear was threatening and patiently taught me how to chimney climb while the bear was pawing around near his feet. He chased me down when I’d been taken to the police station and even bought my fireman’s special. He wasn’t just a coffee drinking, late night study buddy, exam acing college student anymore.
“This road is really pretty,” I commented.
“I never saw so many cows and sheep,” he said.
“And red barns.”
The road he turned on looked like somebody’s long, dirt driveway. It ran along a fence around a field of grazing cows. We passed a house with kids playing out front, pushing trucks and cars around under a big shade tree. It made me wonder if they had internet out here and how we would log our finds today. It was unusual to see kids playing outside these days.
“This is a most excellent driveway,” Twiggy said. “Just imagine it right after a rain and at about forty miles an hour. Mud up the wazoo! Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“Uh, I’ll take your word for it,” I answered.
We followed the farmer’s property line through the flats, but as the road began ascending a hill we left the farmer’s fields below and climbed up into some hills. We weren’t far from the farmer’s fence line when Twiggy found a wide spot in the road and pulled over.
“Ready for some slow power caching?” he asked.
“I guess.”
“Some of these will be really easy, some a bit tougher. Let’s hope there’s a variety to keep things interesting.”
I began to get interested in the trail of caches about the third one. We found one in a fence post, in a hollow tree, and one that was a real bird house with a fake floor.
“It’s not a dragon house,” I said. “But it’s cute. I wonder how many birds have tried to go inside and failed.”
“Should we add a little sign that says occupied?”
“Birds can’t read.”
“But they can tweet.”
“Just be glad they don’t yelp,” I said. “We don’t need the internet flooded with pictures of birdseed and bugs.”
He put his arm around me. “Gabby, there’s no one in the world I can joke with like I do with you. You make my heart laugh.”
“You, too,” I said. “I wonder what’s next.”
“I don’t know but write down Home Tweet Home, Whoo’s Looking for Me, and Pole Vault.”
“Okay. Three down fifty-one to go.”
“This might be a fun road if the names are any indication. The next one’s called It’s a Shoe-In.”
“So, are we looking for a shoe or is this a particularly easy one to find?” I asked as we tromped around in knee high weeds.
“There’s no telling. That’s part of what makes geocaching fun.”
It’s a Shoe-In was just that. It was a small, metal container inside a baby shoe, inside a youth sized shoe, inside a woman’s shoe, inside a man’s shoe. It was quite a feat to untie each shoe and remove the shoe inside and an even bigger job putting it all back together but it was a fun cache. The man’s shoe had been out in the elements and faded but each layer was more protected so the smaller shoes were more colorful. The baby shoe was a cute, pink sneaker. The metal container I would learn later was called a bison tube. We would end up finding a lot of bison tubes in our geocaching. They could be challenging because they were small, but they were a bit disappointing because they almost always contained only a log. Geocaching was still new to me and I looked forward to sorting through the contents and trading for something I could use or bring back to my sisters and brother. However, the feeling of accomplishment was greater if we had a hard time finding the cache. So sometimes the little ones were more fun. I just didn’t get to trade.
The next one was hard and took us close to an hour of searching. It was called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We looked for geocaches disguised as nests. We looked for a hidden cuckoo clock. We looked in all the usual hiding spots just in case the name had nothing to do with the way the cache was hidden. After half an hour of searching we read more about it. Since it was hidden by the same geocacher as the shoe cache we decided the name had to be a clue. We finally spotted a large nest high in a tree.
“It can’t be over that,” I said.
“I know tree caches exist, but that is ridiculous. The rating isn’t high enough so it can’t be one we have to climb to.”
“That’s the only thing around that even comes close to fitting in with the title.”
“Then maybe…”
He began searching the base of the tree.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“A line of some kind. A light rope? It would have to be something that withstands the weather, and last a while.”
“Why?”
“Because if it’s up there it could be strung up.”
“Oh! They really do that?”
“Occasionally.”
I began searching the base of the tree, too. The nest was still the most likely thing around that fit with the name of the cache so I thought it had to be up there somewhere. I looked way down in the bushes because they might have tied the end to something and the branches near the base of the bushes were the only things stout enough to hold a weight. While I was searching my fingers brushed something that felt weird. It almost felt like feathers, but feathers that were not connected to a live bird anymore. I jerked my hand out and jumped back!
“What happened? Did something bite you?” Twiggy asked.
“No. It just startled me, that’s all. My imagination jumped ahead of my eyes.”
“So what did your imagination think it was?”
“A dead bird.”
“Hmm, a dead bird would not last long out here. So what was it really?”
“I don’t know. I guess I could take a second look. It’s not like a dead bird can hurt me. It’s just… gross.”
“Want me to look?”
“I… yeah, I guess I do, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay, where?”
“Right down there,” I said pointing to the base of the bush. “Down in the leaves a little bit.”
We switched places and he reached down under the bush. I could hear the leaves move around as he searched for a possibly dead bird.
“I don’t know what you found but I don’t feel anything down there.”
“It felt like feathers, except it was too hard to be a bird.”
“Well, I declare it safe for further exploration,” he said.
“O… kay.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to put my hand back down there, but I knew I felt something. So when Twiggy gave up I took another look. I identified the bush I had been at before and stuck my hand into the deep dark depths, down into the leaves, and felt around. My fingers remembered the feel of object even if my mind had jumped in fright and I managed to feel the same feathery, firm object I felt before. Oh no. I found it again. What was it? I was afraid to look so I felt it a little more as my mind sorted through all the similar things I had felt like that in the past. Fortunately that list was rather short and so I wasn’t afraid to look at the object, but when I tried to pull it out it was tangled in the weeds.
“I found it,” I said. “Not the cache, but the thing under the bush, but it’s stuck!”
He came over one more time and found the thing I was trying to pull out of the bush. He soon discovered that it was tangled up, too, so he took out his pocket knife and cut it loose.
“Gabby! Gabby, please!” he sounded frantic. There was thrashing around in the bush next to me and I couldn’t figure out why. “Gabby, say something! Anything!”
“Ohhh, man! What happened?” I asked reaching for my head.
“It found you!” he exclaimed but his attitude was so mixed I still wasn’t sure what happened. Usually when we found a cache we declared, “I found it!” But he had said it found me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“No. I’m not sure of anything. What happened?”
“The dead bird is inanimate, but it was attached to a line and the line led up into the tree. It was attached on the other end to the cache, which was big and heavy and… fell when I cut the line. It was very well camouflaged. You were beaned on the head by the cache.”
“Why am I under the bushes?”
“Because that’s where you landed. Do you want a hand up?”
“I guess.”
He gave me a hand up but I couldn’t walk because I was stuck in the bush. Twiggy looked at me as if he should call 911.
“What’s wrong?”
“Gabby I… Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m still in one piece, aren’t I?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
“So, help me out of this bush.”
He bent the branches back so I could find a way out.
“What are we supposed to do when someone gets bashed on the head?” he asked. “What day of the week is it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t known since we left school though.”
“When is your birthday?”
“April Fool’s Day.”
“It is?”
“It doesn’t help to ask me questions you don’t know the answer to.”
“What was your locker combination in high school?”
“Fifty-four, eleven, sixty-two.”
“How many steps from your dorm room to the bathroom?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I counted because I went there so many times in the dark.”
“Lucky, you. It was all the way down the hall from my room.”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three.”
He decided I might live but he made me sit down to look through the contents of the cache. I put in one of our college keychains and took a crocheted bookmark. It started me thinking that I could make things to leave in caches. I’d have to think about what I could make. My sisters would like helping me. I signed the logbook and closed everything back up.
“Now how many fingers am I holding up?” Twiggy asked, but he kept changing his fingers.
“Two X squared plus one fourth?”
“And what is that?”
“I don’t know. Give me some paper and a pen and there’s hope of an answer.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like I got hit by a container full of toys.”
“Which reminds me, how are we going to put it back? I can tie a knot in the paracord but I can’t get the container back up there again.”
“Was the bird really a bird?” I asked.
He held up a fake bird that came from an arts and crafts store.
“Oh, so that’s why it felt like feathers. Too bad we can’t send him up there. We don’t have to get the cache up and over the branch if we can get the other end over.”
“Didn’t you say you took archery in PE instead of… I don’t remember what.”
“Refrigerator climbing, and… yes. Why?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a bow.”
“No. The school had enough for the people in class. But we could probably fashion a bow out of something else.”
We scrounged around in the van but the best we could come up with was a towel. A towel?
“Okay, trial run,” Twiggy said. “We put a rock into the towel and tighten it quickly.”
“What?”
“Haven’t you ever played water balloon volleyball?”
“Uh, no.”
“Hold the corners of the towel out. I’ll show you how it’s done. Hold it steady. Now watch.” He yanked on his corners and the rock popped up into the air. “If we do all four corners at the same time it works better. So… one… two… three… yank!” The rock went about twenty feet up into the air. “If we tip the towel we can direct the flight.”
“So you want to tie the end of the cord to a rock and launch it over the branch?”
“Yeah!”
“You’re nuts.”
“Let’s see how high we can get one to go.”
From experimentation we found that we could launch a small rock close to a hundred feet, but not straight up. After getting hit in the head by the cache it didn’t seem wise to launch rocks straight up, however to get a good line on the branch we had to be somewhat close to the tree. Then when we measured the paracord we found out that we just about had to be right under the tree for the cord to reach.
“Do you think a rock will go that high with a line attached to it?” I asked.
“I think a better question is where are we going to find a rock that the cord will stay attached to.”
This started a search for the perfect missile: one the line could be tied to securely and one that would fly on the projected course. A small log didn’t work. We could tie the cord on but it flew awkwardly. A smaller log was too light. The cord dragged it down.
“Too bad we don’t get a physics lab credit or two for this,” I quipped.
“This is elementary school stuff. To get a lab credit we’d have to do the math.”
“Oh, then forget it. You don’t suppose we could hire a squirrel,” I suggested.
“No.”
“What about a pipe?”
“Pipes don’t grow in the woods.”
“Yes they do. Look!”
I pulled out a six inch piece of pipe. It had a notch cut in one end. A notch just big enough to slip a piece of paracord through.
“Looks like the cache owner has had to fix this hide a time or two,” Twiggy said smiling. “I bet he didn’t bring another person and a towel.”
He tied a knot in the end of the paracord and slipped the paracord through the pipe and lodged the knot into the notch in the pipe.
“Stand back,” he said.
When I was standing away from the tree and watching where the pipe might fly he threw it up in the air. It didn’t even come close to the branch. He tried again, harder, still without success.
“Okay, let’s try the towel, but watch your head. I don’t want to give you two concussions in one day.”
We tried launching the pipe up over the branch but it took a lot of practice to get the right angle, velocity and height. By the time we successfully sent the pipe over the branch we were too tired to celebrate the victory. We sat at the bottom of the tree with a huff.
“We did it,” Twiggy said. “I was not looking forward to emailing the CO and telling him I broke his cache.”
“It still needs some tweaking but I think we can get it close to the way it was before.”
After we sat and rested we began figuring out how to get the cord threaded through the bolts so the cord lay right against the trunk of the tree. We couldn’t reach all of them but we threaded it through enough of them to make the cord hard to see. Then we wired the bird and the paracord to a perch in the bush so the bird would be findable, yet easily overlooked. When we stepped back we agreed that everything looked the way the cache owner had originally intended it to. There was a little bird in a bush perched as if he was watching the world go by. Only a geocacher would investigate far enough to discover the little bird’s secret.
The next cache was called Dropping Like Flies. I couldn’t imagine what the cache owner could possibly have done to make a cache of dead flies, but he’d done it. It was very odd and puzzling. At the coordinates we found a little child’s fishing pole and on the end of the line was a magnet. We stood there with the little fishing pole in hand thinking, now what? We looked around for someplace to go fishing. We had to read the hint, which said, “rock fishing”. There was a pile of rocks so we lowered the fishing pole until the magnet went into a gap. We pulled it out and two plastic flies were attached. Twiggy grinned.
“What is this guy going to make us do next?” he asked.
Again and again we lowered the magnet into the rocks and it always came up with plastic flies with little magnets glued to them.
“One of these holes has got to have a plastic bottle or a magnetic nano in it,” he said, but it took a lot of fishing to finally pull it out.
“I hope lots of kids find this one,” I said as I signed the log.
“We can write in our log that it was fun and kids would enjoy it so parents will be more likely to bring their kids along.”
We scattered the flies around on the rock pile and made sure they fell down between the top rocks, then dropped the cache into one of the holes.
“Whoever laid this trail of caches has some imagination,” Twiggy said. “Most geocaches are just a plastic jar hidden in a tree or bush. These odd ones are fun.”
We hid the little fishing pole again and went on down the road.
The next one was not as inventive but at least it was easy. It was called Pipe Down and it was in a pipe that was bent over on its side.
Between Pipe Down and Off the Record it began misting. It was rather pleasant driving through the misty woods.
“Do you mind hunting in the rain?” Twiggy asked when we closed in on the next cache.
“Not this rain. I hope it doesn’t start pouring though.”
“Do you have a rain coat?”
“I’m the one who strolls to class in the rain, remember?”
“I take that as a no.”
“If this cache is off the record does that mean we can’t log it?” I asked.
The cache was a little metal box screwed to an old vinyl record. I had never heard of the song before.
“I think it should have been called Off the Charts,” I said.
“Just because you never heard of it doesn’t mean it wasn’t popular. After all, if it’s on a record it was a song from before you were born anyway.”
“Uh, yeah, the date on the record is 1975. So why is it called Off the Record if the cache is on the record?”
“Because you have to take it off the record to sign it? I think you are over thinking this hobby a bit. The name is just a pun. It’s not supposed to be taken literally.”
“Off the Record is an idiom. It’s not a pun.”
He sighed. Okay, so maybe I was over thinking the names a little too much.
We came to another fence line. I wasn’t exactly pleased about the fence. Fences meant property lines and property lines meant people.
“Oh look!” I said. “A horse!”
“It’s not a horse. It’s ground zero.”
“On a horse?”
“The name of the cache is Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth.”
Just then the rain started pattering down steadily.
“I know I’m not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I am not grateful for this gift of rain,” Twiggy said.
“Aw, come on, what do you think makes this forest so green?” I asked.
“So, are you ready to look the gift horse over?” he asked.
“Sure, it’s not quite pouring. We won’t get too wet.”
We got out and walked over to the horse, but we couldn’t look at him very thoroughly because he was looking over the fence and one rule of geocaching is that caches are not suppose to be on private property. The horse himself was private property, but his mouth was accessible from public lands so we walked over and said hi to the horse. He didn’t answer.
“It says don’t look in his mouth. So what do we do?”
“Sometimes a title just refers to something close by.”
“So,” I said to the horse. “Are you the gift horse? I’ve heard of a Tooth Fairy and an Easter Bunny. Do you hide gifts?”
The horse didn’t answer.
“The Easter Bunny never answered me either,” Twiggy said.
“What did he say?” I asked, but he just wriggled his nose at me.
“That’s what they all say,” I replied.
“The Tooth Fairy always wrote ‘thanks’ on the envelope of money she left, though,” he said.
“My Tooth Fairy wrote poetry,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Uh, yeah, lousy poetry, like it was made up in ten seconds while she was leaving my money.”
“Do you remember any of them?”
“Hmm, let me see. ‘Your tooth was loose, and so I came, to give you nickels, and a dime.’”
“That’s terrible.”
“I told you. How about, ‘You pulled it out, now do not pout, I have some money but not a lout.”
“How could you stand it?”
“It was funny,” I admitted. “My sisters and brother liked to hear them. Since I was the oldest it was all new and exciting and they had something to look forward to. But I think even they got tired of the lousy poems.”
“I guess your mom and dad were trying really hard to be original.”
“I guess proper tooth fairies try to be creative.”
While we talked we were looking around the horse for a container.
“The hint says ‘just hoof it.’”
“That just means to walk to it.”
“Not with a horse statue. It’s bound to be a little one down by the hoof.”
The hoof of the horse was just reachable from outside of the fence. There was a box with a bolt on top by the left front hoof and the right back hoof, but there was another box by the right front hoof without a bolt. The box was painted the same colors as the other boxes, but there was no bolt. Twiggy reached under the fence and the box without a bolt came free. He pried off the lid and looked inside. He pulled out a piece of paper.
“May you win the lottery.” He pulled out another. “May you be FTF for every cache.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He pulled out another one. “Good health.” He pulled out the log book and read the first page. “We’re supposed to write a gift on a page of the note pad and add it to the cache as swag.”
“Oh, hmm, I don’t know what I would write for another geocacher. May all your coordinates be true?”
“Here,” he said and handed me a page. Then he ripped one out for himself. I wrote my gift on the piece of paper and stuck it in the cache. He sat down and puzzled about his gift and then scribbled a quick note.
“What did you write?” I asked when he stuffed it into the box.
He handed me the cache and I plucked out the first paper. It said, “May you see dragon houses under each tree.”
“That’s the gift you’d like to give other geocachers?” I asked.
“It’s a gift you gave to me,” he said. “And I treasure it.”