I tried to maintain a carefree cheerfulness as I sorted laundry the next day. I woke up before Twiggy and as I sorted and waited for him to wake up, I thought: Why do I call him Twiggy? It’s such a silly name and he isn’t a silly man. He’s warm and caring and handsome and rugged. A little outdoorsy. He likes boondocking and geocaching and wading in creeks and meat pizzas and saving the brown M&Ms for me and feeding that childish Travel Bug the blue ones. He rents a room when I want a shower even though he’d be content in the van… He doesn’t even look like Ichabod Crane anymore. He looks like… Tony. He looks like a man finding his way and having a great time doing it. But he doesn’t look like a Twiggy.
There wasn’t a lot of sorting to do and when I finished it was still too early to start up a washing machine. If somebody rented the room next to the machine they wouldn’t appreciate the noise coming through the wall early in the morning. I sat in the chair in the room, bored, then dug out a book. I sat sideways in the chair with my legs draped over the arm and read the first chapter but I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were changing. I considered climbing back in bed and asking Twiggy if we could drop the nicknames but I worried about the response I would get in such an intimate setting. It was a simple question that could be misinterpreted if I asked him under the wrong conditions. So I decided to just try using his name to see what reaction I got.
Wow, I didn’t know such a small change could make such a big difference.
“I have to drive to Dickens,” Tony said at breakfast. “I think it’s twenty miles. These mom and pop garages will usually do a small job on the spot but I don’t really know how long it will take.”
“Remember to tell Charlie he is very popular. I don’t even remember who sent us to him anymore, but at least two people did. I’ll try to get the laundry done while you’re gone.”
“Okay. If you get bored while the machines are running you can find a new cache to hunt for.”
After breakfast he dropped me off at the motel. He walked up, let me into the room and I went to load up the laundry for the first load. Then I remembered he still had the laundry soap in the van. I dashed to the door and called to his retreating back, “Oh… Tony! I need the soap!”
You’d think the police were ordering him to freeze. He stopped. The change was more than significant in his mind. He turned and walked all the way back. If I had used the nickname I’m sure he would have said, “No problem, let’s go get it.” But he walked back and stood silently before me.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I just… what are you talking about?”
“Why’d you switch to my first name?”
“I do that a lot,” I lied.
“No, you don’t. You took to the nickname and you’ve always called me Twiggy.”
It was my chance to take him aside and have a heart to heart talk and tell him that my opinion of him was changing, but I couldn’t. I chickened out. So I said, “I’ll switch back if you want me to.”
He thought for a moment, wrapped his arms around me and said into my ear, “You can call me anything you want. I’ll go get the soap.”
Then he walked a little taller and a little straighter as he walked back to the elevator.
When he came back with the soap he found me in the little laundry room loading two washing machines. I only sorted into piles of darks and whites, since we hadn’t worn our permanent press very often on the geocaching trail. He stood in the doorway for a moment, then handed me the bottle of soap when I reached a stopping point.
“Thanks!”
“You’ve got a room key?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Remember we have to be checked out by noon.”
“Righto.”
When he left I thought that if we only had an afternoon to geocache I better look locally for a new cache to hunt for. Maybe one on the way to the event would work. Maybe I could find one between here and the lake Tony had spotted in his research. We couldn’t drive too far or we would use up our geocaching time. Geocaching seemed to be a delicate balance between miles and fun. Do too much geocaching and you never reached your destination. Put in the miles and you pass up some fun caches. Planning was the key.
I was glad Tony and I both had our school computers because it wasn’t wise to leave washing machines running by themselves. They could get off balance and cause a ruckus, or somebody could slip in and steal your whole wardrobe. So I went to the room and retrieved my laptop and took it to the little laundry room. The room only contained two washing machines, two dryers, a wooden bench and a plastic chair. The dryer had a metal hook on the side for hanging permanent press but there was no folding table or soap dispensing machines like at the Laundromat. I tried using the laptop while sitting on the bench. It was uncomfortable so I tried scooting it out from the wall so I could sit cross legged on it, but it was bolted to the floor. The plastic chair was little better, so I ended up sitting cross legged on the floor. When I finally got settled in a position I could work in I found that having so many machines in the room disrupted my wifi signal, so I ended up back in the room again. This necessitated frequent trips to the laundry room to check the progress of the machines.
“All right. First step. Where are we and where is the lake?” I said to myself. I found a little notepad on the dresser and the address of the motel was printed on the sheets so I punched that address into the search field. I found out that the motel was on the outskirts of Washington and the town wasn’t very big, even though it was considered the larger nearby town and the one people drove to for shopping. I zoomed out from the town and watched for a lake. There were a lot of lakes around but the map didn’t help me find the one Tony had been looking at. I refined my search to geocaches west of Washington. It was tedious clicking each cache, reading the 1.5/1.5 rating and ruling it out, then going on to the next cache. Next I tried searching for the next town, inputting the name of it into the search field and then looking for the ones with the most favorite points. This worked better, though I had to run down the hall to the laundry room before I let myself get too wrapped up in my searching.
I tried to find geocaches that were away from towns. I was beginning to get a little too wary of my geocaching activities being seen as suspicious in nature. I wasn’t sure why looking for a plastic container was a bad thing, but we’d met up with the police and been misinterpreted enough times that it was best to just avoid geocaching in public places. However, a cache caught my attention and wouldn’t let it go. It had sixty-two favorite points. The down side was it was at a mall. The good thing about it was the terrain was rated a two but the difficulty was a four. How could a cache at a mall be rated a two? I thought anyplace at a mall would be wheelchair accessible making it a one. I read the description and the terrain rating became clearer. Ahhh, it wasn’t at the mall. It was under it! Under the mall? This was sounding more and more like something from a movie. What did the underside of a mall look like? How would one even reach ground zero or know when they were near the cache? I went back and finished reading the description. We were supposed to park at the outer part of the mall parking lot and follow a sidewalk to “the opening in the earth”. Then, with flashlight in hand, we were to walk a hundred and five paces from the opening. A hundred and five? That seemed a strange number. There was no way the number could really be true. I assumed that they averaged the stride of a normal adult. But what if you had a long stride like Tony or a short stride like me? Well, no matter, we only had the hundred and five paces to go by so that’s what we would use. I read the logs.
“Wow, creepy, but fun. Never did this kind of cache before. TFTH.”
“DNF.”
“This was so cool! Me and the geodog did it and the dog got totally soaked. Luckily he’s a lab and loves the water. He isn’t allowed in the mall but nobody said he couldn’t go under it. TFTC.”
“Wear waders, had fun with this one. Recommend doing it in the summer. It’s freezing in the winter. TFTC.”
That last log prompted me to look for shorts. I usually had a couple of pairs at school in case I got ambitious and went to the gym. I also searched for my oldest shoes. If they were going to get soaked I wanted to soak the worst pair I had.
When Tony returned I was folding the last of the laundry and I was dressed in shorts and tennis shoes.
“Whoa! You have thighs!” He said.
“You already knew that from Miner Mice, and I suggest you wear shorts, too.”
“No problem,” he answered though he didn’t take his eyes off my white legs.
“I know. Blinding, aren’t they? But I’ve got a reason for wearing shorts.”
Tony frequently wore shorts at school. He usually wore cargo shorts with an old rock and roll t-shirt and sandals. Franklinburg didn’t have a lot of warm, sunny days until close to the end of the school year. But that didn’t stop Tony from wearing shorts to class. It was possible that Tony had never seen me in shorts before. The few times I had gone to the gym were due to dessert binges with him the night before. So he saw me in pants and then I went to the gym to work off my guilt trip when he was in class the next day.
“I don’t really recommend geocaching in shorts. You need protection from thorny plants and poison ivy.”
“There won’t be any thorny plants or poison ivy where we’re going.”
“Oh, really? And where are we going?”
“We’re following the map on the GPS until we get to a way point and then we’re following the directions in the description to find a two/four cache in another town.”
“You must be pretty set on this one to wear shorts and be all ready for it.”
“We’ll need two working flashlights, a pen, but no swag.”
“Wow, I’m impressed. You’re even talking like a real geocacher.”
“It’s contagious,” I said.
“So… do you have any further information?” he asked.
“No, you’ll have to trust me on this one.”
One eyebrow went up.
“And wear shoes that can get wet,” I added.
He wanted to ask me more about what we were doing but he kind of enjoyed me taking the initiative and risk involved in surprising him in his predominately male hobby. So far I hadn’t met any women who were geocachers so I assumed more men were into outdoor pursuits.
“I got the van fixed, though that doesn’t help us get an updated registration sticker on it.”
“Oh.”
“Oh what?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t go find this cache then,” I said.
“Why?”
“It’s in a town and a spot that is likely to be patrolled.”
“And we’re going to get wet at this highly patrolled place?”
“Possibly.”
“What kind of a place is this?”
“A surprise with sixty-two favorite points.”
“And it’s a log only.”
“Yeah.”
“This doesn’t sound like a cache you would choose.”
“I can’t help it. I am too curious.”
“Well… okay. I’m willing to risk it if you are. Maybe we can park outside the highly patrolled zone. It’ll probably increase the walking we do, but we started out this trip walking more than we needed to.”
“Really?”
“I’ll follow you anywhere you’ll wear those,” he said.
“Just a little more folding and packing and I’ll be ready. Your shorts should be in that box,” I said indicating a box that obviously contained only his clothes.
He searched in the box for his shorts. “You even fold these?” he asked as he held up a pair of shorts.
“Yes!”
“I suppose you fold underwear, too,” he joked.
“Just in half.”
“You’re sure you want to go find a muggly, wet one?” he asked. “What’s this one called?”
“I can’t tell you. That would give it away.” Actually the name of the cache was Journey to the Center of the Mall.
“A local swimming hole?”
“No.”
“A fountain in a park?”
“No.”
“What would be wet and muggly at the same time?”
“I didn’t say the place was muggly. Just the place we’ll be parking is muggly.”
That had him even more puzzled.
“Can I take any of these boxes back out to the van?” he asked after he had changed clothes.
“Give me two minutes,” I said. “You can pack up your toiletries while I am folding. I didn’t know where you kept them.”
“In a box? I only have one box.”
“But there are multiple areas of that box. You need to be able to find it.”
He went into the bathroom and came back out with his shaver and toothbrush and dropped them in his box. I folded the last shirt and then placed the piles carefully into our boxes.
“Okay, they can go out now.”
He grabbed his box. I grabbed mine, and we took them to the van. A quick trip to the office to make sure they knew we were checked out by noon and we were ready to hit the road again.
“Where are we off to on this mysterious geocache hunt?” he asked.
“Shafter,” I answered.
“Hmm, I don’t believe I remember a town named Shafter on the highway between Belle Fourche and Franklinburg.”
“Right. Well, just follow my directions,” I said.
“I wish this map on the GPS would show us more roads. Right now it shows us driving in the middle of nowhere.”
“When we get closer it’ll show the highway. The surface streets will click in about a mile from the cache.”
“You have to know where you’re going before you get there?”
“Roughly.”
“Okay. Hopefully it will tell me more as we go along.”
“How far away is it?”
“Seventeen miles.”
“Okay. On this highway?”
“We might be watching for an exit.”
He wasn’t sure he should trust this geocacher newbie he was traveling with, but he was glad to see me trying, so he kept driving. Part of the fun of geocaching was that even we if got lost we could find a geocache wherever we were. I was beginning to think that, unless you were in the middle of a big lake or a military installation that there would be a cache within a mile of wherever you were. I kind of doubted there would be many suspicious looking containers on, say, an Army base.
“By the way, Gabby, it doesn’t matter to me and it probably is used more often than the proper term for convenience sake, but the GPS is really a GPSr.”
“O… kay.”
“It’s a receiver, that’s why they add the R.”
“I thought it was a system and that’s why they use an S.”
“Like I said, the common term is GPS but you might run into a few picky geocachers who will insist it’s a GPSr.”
“Well, I wish this GPS would receive some more roads. The map makes it look like the town is south west of us but the highway keeps going west.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll watch for exits and I bet the next road pops in just in time. How far off the highway is it?” he asked.
“Well, the line to the cache is about three times longer than the line from this highway to the town.”
“Ah, so five miles?”
“Yeah, roughly.”
“As the crow flies.”
“No, as the hawk soars.”
“Not the dragon?”
“Hmm, no, I think distances are shrunk for dragons. They seem to get everywhere quicker than normal creatures.”
“So, are we going to another dragon house?”
“No, at least I don’t think so. I doubt they would allow one to live where we are going.”
“Oooo, so mysterious.”
“Hey, even I don’t know exactly what to expect.”
Five minutes later a junction sign appeared and between the junction sign and the turnoff the new road appeared on the GPS screen.
“Yes!” I said triumphantly. “Take this exit and head south.”
We could tell the town had a sizeable population when we could see a downtown area jutting up from the rest of the city. To me this booming mecca meant shopping, though I was definitely not dressed for shopping anywhere. My mother wouldn’t even allow me to go to the mall dressed in shorts. She would say it was immodest. But I wasn’t going to shop at the mall.
The mall we were going to was not the big downtown mall. I was grateful for that because the downtown area looked like a bustling metropolis.
“Gwen, I think you’ve gone off the deep end,” Tony said. “You’re only going to find LPCs and magnetic nanos in a place like this.”
“No we won’t! We need to be on the east side of the mall. Watch for a little park. The parking lot butts right up to the edge of a park.”
“And the cache is at the park?”
“No, but we need to begin walking close to there. Do you think we’ll get a ticket if we park at the mall?”
“It’s very likely.”
“Shoot. We can’t afford a ticket. Especially an out of state ticket. Hey, I have an idea. Where’s a notebook?”
“Why?”
“Oh shoot, I think all the notebooks are in storage. Well, any piece of paper will do.”
I looked in the glove compartment and there were a lot of miscellaneous papers in there so I pulled one out, tore off the blank bottom of it and began writing, “Dear Mister Officer, sir, we know our registration is expired. The sticker is at home and we are just trying to get home from college without a ticket so we can put it on the license plate.” I wrote it in flowery script so it would look like a naïve girl wrote it. Then I showed it to Tony.
“It’ll never work. You’d just be drawing attention to the date on the sticker.”
“But they’ll give us a break, you’ll see. They aren’t really mean. They just have to do their job.”
“Every ticket they write is money in the city’s bank account. It pays their wages. They have to write tickets to get paid.”
“Not to everybody they see.”
“Well, we’ll compromise. We’ll put the note on the windshield and when he goes to put the ticket there he will see it. Then it won’t draw attention to our sticker, but if they stop they will still read it. Where are we supposed to park?”
“Waaaaay on the east side.”
“And where are we now?”
“On the north side.”
He drove around the outside of the mall which necessitated a lot of steering wheel cranking and stopping and waiting for other cars. Most of the shoppers seemed to prefer parking on the north side of mall. So the east side of the mall had plenty of parking spaces. I wasn’t sure it would the day after Thanksgiving but right now the east side of the mall was relatively quiet.
I watched the GPS screen.
“Turn right and go down to where that tree is,” I instructed.
He parked and glanced over at me.
“Okay, now what?”
“Now we make sure we have flashlights and a pen.”
“No worries. I stuck mine in my pockets before we left.”
“Okay, well, let me find my flashlight. I need one that fits in my pocket.”
“Like this?” he said as he pulled out the headlamp.
“Let’s hide them as long as we can. We have some walking to do. This is just the first waypoint.”
“Whooooaaa, waypoints. You’re learning. How many waypoints are there?”
“Only one more. Then we have to follow directions because we can’t use our GPS.”
“But geocaching is a GPS based game.”
“Okay, well, you’re welcome to try once we pass the next waypoint.”
“Lead the way my intrepid mall explorer.”
“I’m not sure you should use that word. What happened last time you used it?”
“I don’t remember.”
I stopped on the sidewalk to see which direction the GPS said to go, but then there was only one way to go and that was to follow the sidewalk. I think I must have been walking like a duck because Twiggy was laughing at me and following at a distance. The sidewalk ended and I had to cross the street. There was a lot of traffic on the street but there was a stop light at the entrance to the mall. Across the street was the park. I crossed the street and followed the sidewalk on the other side. Then that sidewalk ended too, so I entered the park looking for a way around the fence. When the fence ended the ground sloped into a big cement drainage ditch. It was still grassy like the park, but I knew when I saw what stood at the end of the ditch that this was the opening I was looking for. I stopped and let Tony catch up.
“Whoaaaa,” he said. “We’re going in there?”
“See for yourself.”
I handed him the GPS and it said to go sixty feet straight toward the opening.
“Coooool!”
“Don’t hurry. Once we get to the opening we have to count our paces.”
“How many?” he asked eagerly.
“A hundred and five. But I suggest we stop at a hundred and see if there’s any beacons.”
He strode forth singing, “Yo ho, yo ho, off we go playing pirate games all daaay. Treasures to seek. Underground…” he stopped and said, “I never was very good at making up songs on the fly.”
We stopped at the cement.
“A hundred paces,” I said hoping I didn’t sound uncertain.
We both stepped onto the cement.
“One Mississippi, two Mississippi,” he said.
“What are you doing? It’ll take forever if you count like that.”
“I was told to go slow and savor the moment.”
“We’re in a drainage ditch. This is a sewer system.”
“It’s an adventure. What’s this one called?”
I thought the name would contribute to his sense of adventure so I told him, “Journey to the Center of the Mall.”
He resumed counting, “twenty one, twenty two…”
“Oooh, here’s the water,” I said. “You did wear shoes that could get wet, right?”
“Righto, madam.”
“Oh my gosh, there’s things in the water!” I lifted my feet higher. “What are they?”
They were light colored, like they never saw the light of day. I began wading toward the dry part of the tunnel.
“I think they’re crawdads,” he said. “Good bait.”
“Do they bite?”
“Through shoes? No. They might pinch a finger. Let’s see.”
He wiggled his fingers under the water but none of the crawdads would come near, so I felt a little safer.
“Oh shoot, I lost count.”
“Me, too.”
“Well, let’s continue on. We can always go back and count again. We should see something at the hundred pace point. It doesn’t smell like a sewer system.”
“There are two sewer systems. The bad stuff usually has its own drainage system. If people could walk around in the bad stuff they would fence it off a lot better than this.”
“So this is just water?”
“Yep. At least the crawdads think so.”
It didn’t take long to need the flashlights. We turned around frequently trying to guess when we had walked a hundred paces. I figured a hundred paces was more than two hundred feet.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Just ahead.”
There was a sound of rushing water and off to the side was a pipe large enough to crawl though. Water was pouring out of it and flowing into the tunnel we were walking through.
“This might be the landmark we’re supposed to watch for. Let’s read what’s next.”
“When you reach the point of no return you will see creatures in the water. Never fear, they only seek things that live in the water. The creatures know of places you never dreamt of. Walk to the right thirty paces and seek the treasure at the center of the mall.”
Tony turned to his right and counted thirty paces. He entered a side tunnel, but just barely. He stopped.
“Now what?”
“It should be right here.”
“What does the hint say?”
We found the hint and it said, “In the drink.”
“Oh great, it’s under the water,” he said. “And it’s a log only?”
We began wading back and forth in the water hoping our feet would feel the cache. Back and forth, back and forth. As I waded I began looking at the walls of the tunnel. Geocachers were not the only ones to come down here. There was colorful graffiti on the walls. Gaudy pictures, gang tagging, signatures. One person had painted an elaborate landscape showing a spooky church and graveyard at night. Hands groped from the graves.
“There’s your pirates,” I said pointing out the graveyard.
“There’s something right here. Shine your light in the water.”
I pointed my flashlight at Tony, then followed his arms down into the water. There was a cement lump.
“It’s… heavy,” he said. “Or just firmly in place.”
Finally there was a sucking noise and the thing flipped over ponderously. It was only about a foot square. Once it was turned over it wasn’t difficult to carry it to a dry spot on the edges of the tunnel.
The crawdads still looked spooky drifting in the water, especially the dead ones. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had stepped on them.
“Shine the light here,” Tony said. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
“It’s crawdad city hall and now they are all going to pinch you for stealing their only landmark,” I said.
“It’s got a lock and lock in the bottom,” he said as he examined the cache. “It’s encased in cement to weigh it down. I thought you said it was a log only.”
“That’s what the description said.”
“Maybe they just put a log in it because they weren’t sure how watertight it was.”
We signed the log wishing we had something to leave for the next geocacher, but we hadn’t brought anything along. We replaced the cache with a sense of accomplishment.
“I wonder where this tunnel goes,” Tony said.
“Under the mall,” I answered.
“Wow, I’ve never been under a mall before.”
“Me neither.”
“Too bad there aren’t any handy vents. I think it would be funny to stand at the vent and say things like, ‘Thank you all for shopping at AnyMall today we’d like to tell you about a sale on corkscrews at FancyFeet.’”
“Why would a store like FancyFeet have corkscrews?”
“They wouldn’t. That’s the point. Just make up something silly that will leave the shoppers all standing around going, ‘what in the worrrld?’”
“If you did that, security would be down here and they would fence off the end of the tunnel forever.”
“I guess.”
“And all the geocachers would be mad at you.”
“Who…WHHOOOOO’s down there,” came a voice from further down the tunnel.
“Oh no, muggles? Here?” I said.
“No worries,” Tony said into the tunnel. “We wandered in. We’re wandering out now.”
“Don’t hurt me!” I recognized the voice of a girl and it came from further down the tunnel.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Tony said. “Why would we do that?”
“This tunnel is haunted,” the girl said. “Demons live down here. They kill children.”
“Why would kids be down here?” Tony asked.
“They lurk and when you turn your back they attack. They’re eeevil. I’ve heard the stories. I come down here and the place freaks me out but I can’t help but think I might see them one day, groping from the walls of the earth like the hands from the graves.”
A shiver went up my spine even though I thought the girl was crazy. Maybe the shiver went up my back because I thought she was crazy.
“There’s no demons down here,” I began but she interrupted me.
“They feed on the unaware! You better leave.”
“We are,” I said. “Are you okay?”
She stepped into our flashlight beams. She didn’t have her own light. When I saw her I almost ran away. She was dressed in mostly black and she had her face painted with black stitches. I would expect something like that at Halloween but this was July.
“Go,” she said in a distant voice. “Go before they come. If they come you’ll have no chance.”
“Are you coming, too?” Tony asked.
“Nooo. I’ll stay. I watch… for the demon… someday I will see him… someday…”
“Let’s go,” I said quietly to Tony.
“Uh huh,” he said. “You’re sure you’ll be okay by yourself?”
“I hear them! Go!”
There was a sound in the distance but it didn’t sound like demons. It sounded like water.
“Let’s get out of here,” I repeated.
I took pictures of the graffiti on the way out hoping the pictures would capture the oddness of the hunt. I worried that the camera flash would scare the girl. I wished I could take her picture, but I thought she would object. She didn’t look like she expected tourists in her demon filled tunnels. The experience left me feeling a little melancholy. Tony jumped and tagged the roof of the tunnel splashing water everywhere and probably crushing a crawdad or two.
“Wow!” He said. “You sure know how to pick ‘em!”
“Yeah, that was… weird. I think she must watch too much TV.”
“Or take too much of something besides TV.”
“You think…”
“Yeah, I think. I hate to leave her but she seems to be in her own little world.”
“What a place to live. What a way to live. I’m glad it’s weird to me. To think it’s normal for somebody else… let’s get out of here.”
He grinned at my naivety. Maybe he’d seen more of the world than me but I hoped people like that girl were only seen on scary TV shows.
“Where to now?” he asked when we were standing out in the daylight again.
“I don’t know. I didn’t expect it to be that easy.”
“I say we go back to the van, dry off, maybe change shoes. Yes, we definitely need to change shoes. Then let’s go to the food court and see if the mall has wifi.”
“Okay. In shorts?” I asked.
“Sure, why not?”
“Uh… okay.”
I could feel my mother’s disapproval from two hundred miles away even though I probably saw a dozen girls in shorts skimpier than mine. I felt naked. And I was a little bit irritated with myself for feeling that way. I looked around for a woman in a dress and I saw a few but they were high fashion ladies. They looked like lawyers. How could they walk in those high heels? How did they stay looking elegant all day? Hair spray for sure and lots of it. But why dress up so much that you had to maintain perfection all day?
“What are you doing?” Tony asked.
“Trying to find my place in life,” I said.
“And what are you deciding?”
“That life is a river and I am failing miserably at swimming upstream.”
“What!?”
“Sorry, I think the shorts have hijacked my brain. I can’t help but be self conscious and when I get self conscious I start comparing myself to everybody else and everybody else has it all together and I don’t so I’m drifting downstream.”
He smiled and I knew I was due for one of his famous Twiggy philosophy lessons.
“If you don’t like fighting to swim upstream just relax, follow the river down, and you’ll end up in the ocean where you can be anything you want.”
“Fresh water fish die in the ocean,” I reminded him.
“Can we look in some stores?” he asked.
“Just avoid clothing stores. I don’t want to be tempted.”
“By clothes?”
“Yes, it’s a common problem with girls. They spot clothes from several aisles away and pretty soon they are trapped in a dressing room with an armful of things they can’t afford. They try them all on anyway and they get sad because of all the things they have to put back. So it’s best to just not even go in those stores.”
“If you could buy anything in the whole mall what would you choose?”
“I’d get a pair of jeans and go to the restroom and change so I feel like myself again.”
He sighed. “No, anything you want. What would you choose?”
“I don’t know what this mall has.”
“Pretend it has everything.”
“I guess I would get hiking boots and a GPS so I can show up at the event and look like a real geocacher.”
“You won’t be judged by your appearance or whether or not you have a GPS. They will know how much of a geocacher you are by how you talk and you already proved you can talk shop with the best of them. When you told that cop you CITOed the cache I almost laughed.”
“I can’t help but wonder if we’re walking over the cache,” I said. “Hey, how did they get the coordinates for the cache if their GPS won’t work down there?”
“They got the first two way points and then they plotted it out on a satellite map. They counted the steps to the turn and counted again to the hiding spot, then they plotted it out on satellite images to get the longitude and latitude. If you look at a satellite image the cache icon will appear to be on the roof of the mall.”
Tony stopped walking and pretended to be listening.
“Hey!” he said. “Fancy Feet is having a sale on corkscrews!” I gave his shoulder a gentle punch and we continued down the mall looking for the food court.
“Oh, cool! They have teriyaki bowls! I haven’t had one of those in ages. And lasagna! And shish k bobs! Ooo, I hate food courts.”
“It doesn’t sound like it to me,” he pointed out.
“There is such a thing as too many choices. When you eat cafeteria food for most of the year, and then only eat at places you find on the road, selection becomes more important, but I don’t know what to choose.”
“Cinnamon rolls,” he said.
“Cookies!”
“Ice cream. Soft serve and candy bars blended into a chunky…”
“Stop it!”
“English toffee lattes.”
“They have those?”
“Irish cream lattes with whipped cream and chocolate shavings on top.”
“Arg! Let me see how much money I have.”
“Put that away. I may not be able to get you a new GPS receiver or hiking boots but I can get your lunch. What do you want?”
“I haven’t had Asian food in ages.”
“Okay, Asian it is. Let’s get our food first. Then the devices can be looking for a signal while we eat.”
One disadvantage to letting the devices search for a signal is all the constant checking to see if they were successful. Tony’s cell phone seemed to get enough of a connection to download some caches, but the search capabilities were limited.
“I’ve got an idea,” Tony said. “But we’ll have to see if they have the right kind of store here.”
“What kind?”
“Are you sure you don’t need an Irish Cream latte with whipped cream and chocolate curls on top?” he asked.
“If you want one, just get one,” I told him.
He huffed and sat a little more firmly in his chair. I was beginning to see that he wanted me to want one so it would give him an excuse to get his own. I had to admit I did want one. I just didn’t want him to buy me one. I wondered where his seemingly unlimited amount of cash was coming from. I was flat broke, but it was because I was at the very end of my semester’s allowance. Had I gone home after school ended I wouldn’t be financially strapped. I’d be eating at my parents’ house and working at some fast food place near their house and gaining weight with every meal.
“Let’s try your idea,” I suggested. “And get the lattes for the road.”
“Okay. First we have to find one of those fancy gadget stores. This mall is big enough. It should have one. Let’s find a map of the mall.”
There was a map between the food court and the main hallway to the mall. When we looked at the map we could see that the mall was three stories tall and they had two stores that might fit the bill. I wasn’t sure what Tony had in mind, though, so I followed him to the nearest one.
We entered the gadget store and Tony started drooling. I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and remind him that we were there for a specific reason. He began looking around at all the cool gadgets and pointing out the ones that didn’t really serve a useful purpose, they just looked cool. A salesman approached.
“May I help you, sir?”
“Actually, I’m looking for something to help me in my hobby. I brought the laptop into the mall hoping to get a wifi signal but it seems to be weak or nonexistent and I was wondering if there was anything I could buy that would turn my laptop into a wifi hotspot.”
“Yes, sir, there sure is. What kind of a hobby do you have?”
“It’s called geocaching. I’m on the road and it’s kind of fun to stop and find a cache and stretch my legs, but I ran out of caches in my GPS. I really need a way to download them on the fly.”
“Here you go, you just plug this into your USB port…”
“Do you think you could demonstrate it? You might want to know how to download caches in case you get other geocaching customers. Geocachers really like their gadgets.”
“Well… I guess. You actually have your laptop along?”
“Yes. I brought it hoping to upload caches over lunch but I couldn’t do it.”
“Okay. Let’s find an out of the way flat spot…”
I couldn’t believe it. Just by sounding interested in the product Tony got a demonstration and gave a geocaching lesson in one fell swoop. He showed the salesman how to get the caches from the internet to the computer and the computer to the GPS and we were all set for more geocaching. Unfortunately he didn’t have enough money to actually buy the gadget, but he left the salesman confident that he could help more customers with his new found knowledge and he promised to look the salesman up if he was able to purchase one in the future, so he left the salesman with hope of a sale.
“That was slick,” I said as we made our way down the corridor.
“Thanks. He typed in the password and everything!”
“So did you find a cache to look for?” I asked.
“Not yet, but they are all in there. I showed him how to grab caches along a route and bingo bango bongo there they were. I’ll drive, you search for a good one.”
“Lattes?”
“Lattes.”
Before we got our lattes, though , it occurred to me that we were in a mall and a mall might have kid friendly swag.
“Do you think they have a toy store?” I asked Tony.
“Sure.”
“I want to look for little toys to put in the caches.”
“A toy store isn’t the place to go,” he said. “Too expensive. But since we’re in a city, I bet they have the ideal place.”
“Where?”
“We’ll find a telephone book and I’ll find one. You’ll see. It’s the ideal spot for geocachers.”
We headed for the van and stopped at the coffee cart on the way.
“Two large Irish Cream lattes with extra chocolate,” Tony ordered.
“Hot or ice blended?”
“Ice blended!” said.
“Hot,” said Tony.
“Cheers!” said Tony and we toasted to the next leg off our journey.
“Uh oh,” I said as we neared the van and saw a yellow piece of paper on the dash next to the note.
“Uh oh is right,” Twiggy echoed.
He pulled the ticket off the windshield and brightened. “Good job partner! It’s just a warning!”
Tony pulled into the parking lot of a party store. A party store? Mylar balloons filled the front window. Happy Birthday! Over The Hill. Golden 50. Cartoon balloons. Birthday hat balloons, balloon sculptures…
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” he said.
I walked the aisles of the store in wide wonder. There were tiny toys everywhere! Other people would call them party favors but to me it was an opportunity to add color and fun to the geocaches.
“Look! Angry Birds masks!”
“Remember that has to fit into a geocache,” he reminded me.
“Oh, right. So, no masks.”
“Think small. The smaller the swag the more caches it will fit into. And remember you have to carry these things around. Don’t buy it if you don’t want to pack it.”
“Rats.”
Forty dollars poorer I had several packages of swag for girls, boys and adults. I was in business! I couldn’t afford dinner, but I could make many junior geocachers happy.
“You are not going to leave those plastic dragons in every dragon house you see,” Twiggy said.
“I know. I only have six of them.”