It was hard to believe that our trip was nearly over. We had a long drive ahead of us to reach Belle Fourche but we drove part of it after leaving the lake. We splurged a bit on a better motel and it was worth it because the shower was nicer and the beds had foam toppers and luxurious comforters. There was a coffee maker in the bathroom, but we didn’t use it to make coffee in the morning. We had seen a coffee shop on our way into town and went back to it. We brought the laptop and the GPS in and loaded up the caches on the highway we were to travel that day. Then we only stopped to stretch our legs where there were geocaches. The closer we got to Belle Fourche the slower Tony seemed to drive. He seemed thoughtful, which was unusual for him. Usually he was very extroverted, never keeping things to himself. When I saw the Belle Fourche city limits sign I understood how he felt. Our trip was almost over and when it was over… I had to go home. I was beginning to see how Sarah felt at the end of school. I didn’t want to leave Tony here. Even if it was his home town, the end of our adventures saddened me. When I thought of the noise and commotion I’d find at home with siblings coming and going and vying for attention, the quiet of running from an angry man in a speed boat seemed peaceful. Hiding from bears and listening to stories about cannibalistic demons seemed like fun. A Sweet Sixteen party full of teenagers was going to drive me crazy. Maybe I could hole up in my room and call Tony and let him hear what he was missing.
“Time to turn on the GPS,” Tony said. “And find the event. It’s at a pizza joint. We don’t have to find ground zero. We only need to find the place, but the coordinates will still help.”
I was excited, even in my melancholy state. I had never been to a geocaching event before. It seemed strange that I looked forward to hearing geocaching stories and the chatter about FTFs and DNFs and hides. He stopped on the way so I could stand at the geographical center of the United States and find the cache nearby. We read the sign and talked about visiting Kansas where the other center of the US was located.
“All right, the event,” he finally said. “Are you tired of pizza?”
“No, I’m a college student,” I said. “Pizza is my middle name.”
Twiggy pulled up outside the pizza place. He said events are almost always at restaurants because geocachers like to eat, or at parks because they like the outdoors and geocaching. Events at parks sometimes had games. This one was at a pizza parlor and so it was termed a meet and greet. I hoped I had enough money for a Hawaiian pizza as I slid out of the van.
I expected to be able to figure out easily who the geocachers were but they blended in with the regular pizza lunch crowd. Only a simple sign that said RESERVED and a fat box with Travel Bugs in it tipped me off that this was a geocaching event. A man walked up to Tony. He was tall and spry with eyes squinted a bit from being out in the sun a lot. He was tanned darker than his gray hair, but he didn’t look old. He looked comfortable with himself, confident but mild mannered. I thought he was one person you better not double dog dare to do anything because he had probably already done it and knew more about it than you did.
“You made it!” he said with a broad grin.
“I told you I would. Gabby, this is my dad. Dad, this is the Gwendolyn.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Tony’s dad said. “You can call me Greg, or The Devious Cachester. Most of these people shorten it to Cachester.”
“You geocache, too?” I asked.
“We got into it together,” Tony said. “It was an activity father and son could do together when mom was out of the picture.”
“Did you do it?” Greg asked his son.
“I… no, Dad, I didn’t. But we’re getting there.”
Greg Yancy looked disappointed.
“What were you supposed to do?” I asked Tony.
He looked a bit uncomfortable and then suggested we should meet the other geocachers. We walked around to talk to the other attendees and it seemed Tony knew most of the people there. They called him by name and then he introduced me. There were not many of them and they seemed to be a tight group unused to outsiders, but they were all friendly and glad to see Tony had brought a friend. The time for the start of the event came and went but pizza began arriving so we settled down to eat. Twenty minutes later most of the geocachers had slowed down and the pizza pans were half empty.
“Hey Cachester!” a man called across the assembly. “We’re all waiting expectantly down here!”
“Sorry, Skeeter,” he said, then he stood up. “It looks like the normal crowd is here. The Carters are on vacation, hopefully finding the lowest cache in the US. You’re all waiting for the big announcement, but it appears Dad’s Caddy has lost his bet with the Cachester.”
“Awww, why?” half the geocachers asked Tony. The other half were glaring at me.
“Why? What’s going on?” I asked Tony.
He hesitated and stared at his feet for a few seconds before explaining, “Gwen, the contest we were in was a bet I had with my dad. I asked him how I could break the ice and get to know you better.”
“Break the ice? What ice? We’re best friends!”
“He said spending time doing something together, like geocaching, would either bring us together or break us up. And… so…he said if I could… get you to marry me, that he’d pay for the honeymoon. We just picked the Bahamas because it sounded exotic.”
“There was no contest?”
“A bet is a contest of sorts,” he said.
“I got shot at and rained on and slept in a van with you. I climbed mountains and almost got struck by lightning just so you could win a bet with your dad?” I was mad. “I almost got arrested! And we’re lucky nobody found that knife! If somebody took it you’d be in jail right now!” The anger came from several sources. He had lied to me. He’d tricked me into his scheme and his bed. I had fallen for it hook, line and sinker. I felt humiliated and embarrassed. There was a room full of people expecting me to be a happily engaged woman and I sat there being a shocked, angry, mess of emotions.
“A door prize! We have a door prize!” Tony’s dad announced, hoping that changing the subject would diffuse the situation. It sure did. I headed for the door.
“Gwen don’t! You don’t have a ride home!” Tony said as he knocked his chair over in his haste to stop me.
“I’ll figure something out!” I cried and ran out the door. I stumbled out into the parking lot and a car screeched to halt to avoid hitting me.
“Gwendolyn! I’m sorry!”
I just kept walking. I needed activity to burn off the tears. I might have been at the center of the United States but I was so far off course that I didn’t know how I was going to get back. I had no money, no car, no plan.
“Gwen, please don’t leave,” Tony said when he caught up to me.
“You lied. I can’t believe I went along with your crazy scheme for two weeks! You could have told me! I’m going home. I don’t know how but don’t worry about me. I’ll find a way. Go… have fun with your geocaching friends. I’m out of here.”
“I’ll take you home.”
“I don’t think so. I’m so mad… you’re lucky I’m able to talk to you at all!”
“I won’t leave you out here.”
“And you can’t come with me,” I said and walked miserably away.
I decided a plan had to come first. What could I do without money? This business about growing up was not for sissies. It was even more humiliating when I had to call my parents for help.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mom, it’s me.”
“Gwendolyn! How are you?”
“I’m… I’m okay. But… I got myself into a mess and I think I’ll be okay.”
“What kind of a mess?”
“It’s a long story. Is there any way I could borrow enough money to rent a car?”
“Where’s your car?”
“In Franklinburg. In storage.”
“And where are you?”
“Belle Fourche.”
“Where is Belle Fourche and how did you get there?”
“I rode with Twiggy. But… Mom, if you don’t want to help just say no and I’ll figure something else out.”
“Something’s wrong. I’m a mother and mothers sense these things.”
“Everything will be fine, as soon as I get a car.”
“You’ve got a card. Put it on that.”
“You said it was for emergencies.”
“It’s for legitimate needs.”
“I’m not sure what a legitimate need is.”
“You need to come home.”
“Okay, I’ll come home.”
I’d never rented a car before. I just handed over what they asked for and signed what they told me to. I felt like a little kid in a big, adult world and now I was by myself on top of everything else. I passed a little book store and stopped to see if they had a road atlas. They had atlases but not one that would show me the way home.
“Try the gas station five blocks down,” the bookstore owner advised. “They probably have a state map.”
“I need more than a state map, but it’s a start. Maybe I’ll pass a truck stop along the way.”
It didn’t help much that Twiggy called every hour or so.
The car was really cool. It had a super stereo system and I cranked up the satellite radio and sang for mile after mile. After a while the singing made me sad, because Twiggy and I had sung some great duets along with the radio.
I didn’t drive very far before darkness set in and I thought I better stop in the next town. I looked at the map and figured the next town big enough to have a motel was fifty plus miles. I stopped at the first motel I came to and then realized I hadn’t eaten dinner. I was still very hurt. My heart ached worse than any hunger pangs could. My phone continued to ring off and on and I answered it before I turned it off.
“Hello?”
“Gwen.”
“I don’t want to talk yet.”
“Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m going home. I rented a car.”
“Come back.”
“I can’t. I told my mom I’d be home tomorrow.”
“When will I see you?”
“I don’t know.”
“When can I see you?”
“Twig… I don’t know.”
“When school…”
I had to hang up before I cried again, then I cried anyway. I turned the phone off and went to bed still in my clothes, hungry, sad, and lonely. The bed felt empty. Beds shouldn’t feel empty. I hugged the other pillow. I wondered if there was a geocache nearby, then realized I didn’t have a GPS. I turned on the light and found my phone again. Maybe I could turn my phone into a GPS. It was midnight before I figured out that I not only had a GPS but after I downloaded an app, I could even bring up nearby caches! At least I could in my motel room. There was one on the next street over. I turned off my phone again glad to have that one piece of normalcy back in place. Just knowing I wasn’t cut off from finding those silly boxes was a comfort to me. My link to the wonders of anyplace-I-happened-to-be was still connected.
In the morning I realized I’d walked away from all my possessions. All I had were the clothes on my back and what was in my pockets. So I had thirty four dollars, my phone, fourteen cents in change, a pen, and the pathtag. I fingered the little metal disk and wondered who the geocacher was who had it made. I thought Twiggy needed a pathtag to drop into caches. Maybe I’d save up my pennies over the summer and… maybe I wouldn’t. I skipped the shower, since I didn’t have a hair brush, and smoothed down my hair as much as I could.
I bought a ninety-nine cent breakfast burrito at the nearest fast food place, then drove to the nearest geocache. I stopped beside a little ditch. A short rock wall framed a metal culvert. I felt around the edge of the culvert checking for magnetic micros. I scanned the rocks of the wall for any nooks or crannies. There was a fence running along one side of the ditch and I found the cache in the first post. It was a hollow victory, though. There was nobody there to celebrate with.
I sat in the car planning my route and my phone rang again. Twiggy.
I pulled into my hometown in the mid afternoon but I had to turn in the rental car to avoid added expense. It was a two mile walk to my parents’ house but I was so used to walking that I didn’t think to call for a ride. I just pointed myself in the right direction and started hiking. The house was locked when I got home. I knocked and my sister answered the door.
“Gwen! You’re home!” Meredith said with a big hug.
“Yeah, I’m home,” I said wearily.
“Where were you? Mom was so worried!”
“She was?”
“Well yeah, DUH.”
“Do I still have a bedroom?”
“Nothing has changed.”
“Okay.”
I started up the stairs but Meredith was impossible. She had to know everything!
“You mean you went camping… WITH A GUY?”
“Yeah. We’re just friends.” I wished I could edit speech balloons. I missed Tony so much. We were not just friends. Something had happened, something that erased the just in just friends. Something had happened and we had gone beyond friends we were… I didn’t know what we were. But I was miserable.
“So what was IT like?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t do IT. But he’s a good kisser.”
I had to explain it all again when my mom got off work.
“You did what?” my mom asked.
“I know. I’m in big trouble.”
“Honey, do you have any idea at all what could have happened?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“And… did it?”
“No! It could have but it didn’t. He was a gentleman every step of the way.”
This drew a skeptical look. “If he managed to spend a week in the same bed with you and he controlled himself that well he deserves a medal of honor.”
I was so naïve. I asked, “why?”
When she explained it all to me, about how powerful sexual urges could be, I felt guilty for putting Tony through that. No wonder I found him sleeping by himself in the van. He did it to avoid hurting me.
“But, Mom, what makes this all even worse is… I miss him like crazy. I don’t want to spend the summer without him. I…”
“You love him.”
“I do?”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what real love feels like.”
“Love is what makes you miserable when things aren’t right. And it’s what gives you the most joy when they are.”
“But he put me up in front of all those people and happily admitted he lied to me!”
“And you’re miserable, because you love him and he disappointed you.”
“Yes! I mean no!”
“Have you forgiven him?”
“If forgiveness is a feeling? No.”
“What if forgiveness is a decision that will eventually erase the feelings you hold against him?”
“Then… yes, I think so.”
“Then call him.”
“What about Meredith’s birthday?”
“Just do what you need to.”
“Can I rent another car?”
“No, but I’ll drive you to your car.”
“What would you have done?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Your reaction seemed to be pretty normal.”
“But I don’t even have any clothes!”
“Gwen, I’m shocked that you were able to handle this as well as you have. I just wish you hadn’t put yourself in such a precarious position. But your whole future sits in your hands. You either continue in school like you were before you met Twiggy...”
“Tony. The nickname is silly. I can’t think of him as Twiggy anymore.”
“You either go back to school as if you never met Tony, or you go make up and see how it goes. You can even bring him home for Meredith’s birthday party! I’m sure the girls would love to have a college guy attend.”
“You mean, I’m not in trouble?”
“Honey, you’re just growing up. You know what you did wrong. Now let’s try to right it.”
I had to buy a couple of outfits. It was kind of fun trying to think of what Tony would like. When I saw him again I wanted it to be like in the books. I wanted there to be joy and forgiveness and sexiness and friendliness all wrapped up into one moment. I knew it was a childish wish and it was unlikely to happen that way, so I only hoped without putting a lot of my heart into the hoping. It took a whole morning to go get my car.
“Now I trust you to know right from wrong,” Mom said before she left. “Go follow your heart. If he’ll come visit over the summer please try to bring him home.”
“I’ll try.”
All the lonely nights in motels were contrasting sharply with the warm, friendly nights I had spent with Tony. Every lonely moment wiped away a touch of bitterness. I stopped at a rest area and called him when I was about an hour’s drive away.
“Hello?”
“Tony? It’s me.”
“Gwen! How are you?”
“Miserable. Would it be okay if I stopped by…”
“Yes!”
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I just had to see you.”
There was a long emotion filled silence.
“That would be awesome.”
“Okay, I’ll call when I get there.”
I saw the outskirts of Belle Fourche in the distance so I watched for a large pull out, then I did a search for the closest geocache. Then I did a search to see if there were any caches hidden by The Devious Cachester or Dad’s Caddy. Tony only had two that I assumed were maintained by Greg while Tony was in school. I chose the one that sounded the most interesting and then navigated to within six hundred feet of it. It was a pleasant hike, precisely the kind of geocaches Tony liked to look for. But the last fifty feet was waist high brush that had probably grown up after they hid the cache. I bullied my way through and found ground zero to be a twisted old tree. Tony always had liked what he called “trees with personality.”
The phone rang once.
“Gwen? Don’t hang up! Please don’t hang up.”
“I’m not.”
“Where are you? I’ll be right there!”
I thought for a moment, then I read the coordinates off the GPS in my hand.
“I’ll be right there! Don’t go away.” He was so insistent, so hopeful. I couldn’t leave. It was a long wait, as I knew it would be, but I passed the time searching for the cache, signing the log, going through the swag, removing old dirty swag and replacing it with swag from my pack. I rehid the cache and sat on the ground reading the descriptions of the nearby caches. Finally, I heard what sounded like an elephant barreling through the brush. And it was Tony! The brush was thick. I knew that because I bushwhacked my way in. “You waited! Oh Gwen, it’s so good to see you. I thought I’d ruined everything. I thought you’d never forgive me and I couldn’t imagine next semester without you. I couldn’t even think about tomorrow without you. Don’t go. Please don’t go away.”
He clasped me tightly in a hug. I never felt a hug so urgently needed and I haven’t since then, either. I felt a lump in my throat and I willed myself not to cry but it didn’t work.
“You’re crying. Why are you crying?” he asked as he wiped a tear away.
“I missed you. I reacted badly and acted like a little kid and… once I got on the road reality set in. Reality looked awful bleak without you. But I didn’t know how to come back.”
“I told you how to get back. Just follow your heart.”
“My mom sent me back.”
“Your mom?” he asked.
“Uh huh. She even took me to retrieve my car.”
“Is she all right?”
“Tony… she knew even before I did… I love you. The contest might have been a sick joke, but it worked. It showed us we can depend on each other through thick and thin.”
“Let’s get out of here. Have you had dinner?”
“No.”
“Let’s pick up Dad from work… no, let’s not. Let’s find a place where we can be alone. I have some apologizing to do.”
“No, let’s find a geocache placed by each of those people at the meet and greet and log that we’re back.”
“Really?”
It took us all the rest of the day to find one cache for each family and it wasn’t really as interesting as the contest had been, but Tony’s dad began receiving congratulatory phone calls. I spent the night in Tony’s room complete with Fatheads on the wall and team pennants hanging from the ceiling. He slept on the couch. The bed felt empty, so I dragged a blanket down to the living room and we spent an uncomfortable night sleeping sitting up, shoulder to shoulder, on the couch.
“I have to go home,” I said the next day. “Mom and Dad would like to meet you. You can see what happens at one of Mom’s stuffy birthday parties.”
“Do you have to?”
“I should. You’re welcome to come along. Oh, and I need my clothes. I had to buy a couple of outfits just to come retrieve the boxes.”
“You have to stay,” he insisted.
“Tony… the party can’t be postponed. The invitations were sent months ago.”
“When is the party?”
“Two days, but I had to spend the night in a motel on the way here.”
“Stay until tomorrow. I’ll make sure you get back on time.”
“And how are we going to do that? Fly?”
“One day, just one.”
I couldn’t imagine what could be so important that it would keep me from Meredith’s party. He knew I had promised to be there weeks ago.
That night I found out what it was he was waiting on. We were once again snuggled up on the couch, this time spooning sideways, when his phone made a strange noise. Briiiiiinggggg! it said.
“They did it!” he said excitedly out of a sound sleep. “Get some sleep. We need to get up really early to beat the FTF hounds.”
“I stayed overnight for a geocache?” I mumbled half asleep.
He kissed the back of my head and squeezed tighter.
“Get a room,” his dad joked when he walked into the living room the next day.
“Yikes! Gwen! Wake up!” Tony said as he climbed over me to get to the shower. “Use the one in the hall!” he said to me as he dashed away.
“Coffee,” I mumbled as I followed him down the hall.
The shower helped a little. I only had one more outfit that I had bought for the trip so I put it on.
“You need coffee,” Tony said when he saw me walking down the hall.
“Am I that bad? You saw me worse. Is it worse than that?”
“No, you just still have the tags on your clothes.”
“Oh. Scissors?”
“Scissors, then coffee and a muffin. We’ll need the van.”
I don’t know what he was so excited about. A geocache to be certain. But he already admitted he wasn’t an FTF hound.
I removed the tags and Tony grabbed the geocaching gear.
“Aren’t we going to read the description and hint?”
“I already did,” he said. “It’s a regular size. The hint is ‘a little higher than pond scum’.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said as I followed him to the van.
“I’ll see you later!” his dad said as we hurried past.
We drove through and got coffee and cheese Danishes.
“Here, you navigate,” he said.
“I got the geocaching app on my phone now!” I said.
“Uh oh, you’re hooked. You were geocaching deprived enough to download an app?”
“Yeah. But it wasn’t the same. There wasn’t a lot of celebrating making a solo find.”
“I know how it felt. I did a lot of that after I left to go back to school. I’d been geocaching with my dad and then in school I just seemed to be playing the numbers game. Just adding smileys to my list. It wasn’t until I took you with me that I really enjoyed it again.”
“You could have told me that. We could have done a lot more geocaching during the school year if I knew you liked it so much.”
“It’s okay. I enjoyed those midnight coffee shop conversations.”
“Okay, I think I got it. This is highway 212?”
“It is.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you when to turn. It looks like we’ll be turning left. Hey, there’s a big lake out there.”
“I know. I’ve fished there many times. Is the cache near the lake?”
“Yeah. Kind of.”
He just grinned as he kept his eyes on the road.
“Okay, the turn is about half a mile ahead. Be watching for a left turn.”
There was a sign that said Belle Fourche Reservoir and Rocky Point Recreation Area.
“Okay, turn where the sign says to turn. Oh, look! It is a big lake! There’s going to be another left.”
He turned and followed the road around the lake. I wanted to get out and walk the shoreline but I waited to find the cache first. I saw a little group of trees beside the road and told him I thought the cache was in those trees. We came to a little pullout on the left side of the road but he drove slowly past the trees.
“It is! It’s in those trees!”
He drove back and parked the van in the pullout. I handed him the GPS but he said, “No, I want to see you do it.”
I hopped out of the van.
“It’s a pretty lake,” I said. “It could use a few more trees than this.”
“Sometimes Dad and I came up here and fished for hours without so much as a nibble. It was a great day if we came home with enough fish for dinner. Dad can cook up a mean fish.”
“The fish were mean?”
“I mean he knew a lot of good ways to cook fish.”
“I know that. I think the cache is this way. Come on! I didn’t see any other cars so maybe we have a chance. I’ve never gotten an FTF before. Have you?”
“Yeah, though it was a matter of chance. I just happened to be in the area with nothing to do when it got published.”
“It’s a regular sized one so maybe they put some good stuff in there.”
He smiled and followed, then he watched while I looked in all the little hidey holes.
“You could help a little,” I said.
He began looking around, mostly looking in the places I had already looked.
“There’s one disadvantage to being FTF,” I said. “There are no helpful logs to read.”
“What’s it rated?”
“A one and a half/one and a half. It should be simple.”
“Maybe the coordinates are off. Try further out from ground zero.”
“Oh! A dragon house! Look! A dragon house!”
It was a little cave carved out of the base of a tree, surrounded by rocks and sheltered from the rain by the tree above. I found a stick and poked it into the hole. I was rewarded by a hollow thump.
“I think I found it!” I knelt in the dirt and looked into the hole. There was the olive green of an ammo can deep inside the hole. “I found it! I found it! Look!”
“Pull it out.”
I pulled it out, noting the bright green geocaching sticker on the side.
“Why is it called Eating Crow?”
“Let’s see what’s inside.”
We found a flat spot to sit down and look through the contents. The lid was stiff, but Tony didn’t try to take it from me. He just watched as I hopefully tugged and pulled.
“Use the wire on the front to hold it steady, then pull firmly up.”
“I am!”
“Pretend you’re a soldier. They do this all the time,” he joked.
“Private Gwendolyn doesn’t quite sound right. Oh, I guess they’d use my last name. Private Brody sounds better.”
When the lid finally gave way I nearly fell over backwards. I went straight to the bottom of the can.
“A pathtag! And a Travel Bug! Look! A goofy Pez container.”
“Aren’t you going to see if we were FTF?”
“Oh, here, you look,” I said as I handed him the log book. “And there’s a plastic dragon, and a box, and a pair of toe socks. This is a weird cache.”
“What’s in the box?”
“It’s probably just a box. They never put real jewelry in a geocache.”
I opened the box.
“See?” I said as I tipped what I thought was an empty box for Tony to see, but as I did it a flash of gold caught my eye. I jerked it back. “Wow! It is a ring, a real ring! Who would do that?”
“Why don’t you read the log book and see?”
He handed me the log book and I flipped it open. There was no note of the name of the cache and a place to sign it. Instead, the cover of the notebook had a short letter hand printed inside.
“One day I did a terrible thing. I lied to the one person I swore I would never hurt. I thought I’d ruined my life. I thought I’d never be forgiven and I could spend the rest of my life lonely, wishing I could go back in time and change something. I ate crow. I spent a day up here at the reservoir fishing, thinking, and the next day I did some shopping and hid this cache with the one hope that it would be found some day by a very special person who means the world to me.”
I had to turn the page.
“Gwendolyn Amelia Brody, would you forgive me, marry me and make me the happiest man in the world?”
I was speechless. My heart wanted me to leap to my feet and say, “Yes! Yes!” But as a realist I couldn’t.
“Follow your heart.”
A tear fell.
“Gwen, I’m sorry.”
“I want to say yes. I really do. But the future…”
“Will take care of itself as long as we face it together.”
“We don’t have jobs.”
“Gwen, there will always be reasons to put it off. Or we can overcome all those reasons. All I ask is the chance to face all those stumbling blocks with you. Hey, if we can face bears and crazy shot gun wielding farmers we can graduate, find jobs and deal with our parents.”
He reached into the cache and pulled out the box. He opened it plucked the ring out and knelt down on one knee.
“Gwendolyn, will you marry me?”
“I… I… Yes! Yes, I will.”
It was like the sunshine breaking through after a storm. That hug beside the lake was long and emotion filled. And this time the kiss was genuine, breaking down the walls I didn’t know were there.
“I would have said yes, even if there wasn’t a ring.”
“That’s good to know but I wanted you to have it.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Don’t worry. You worry too much. First, let’s go tell your parents.”
“Uh oh.”
“No, no uhoh’s.”
“My dad would want to talk to you first.”
“So? I’ll talk to him.”
“You will?”
“Yeah! Probably lots of times. Don’t worry.”
“Have you ever heard a banshee?”
“No, I can’t say that I have.”
“Well, when my sisters find out cover your ears.”
“Gwen…”
“What?”
“Let’s pack up here. We have some miles to travel today.”
“I need to sign the log.”
“Oh, yeah. Should I leave the cache here?”
“Sure! Why not?”
“Well, because everything in it I placed with you in mind. Look, here’s a little dragon. This shotgun shell is to remind you of Insane Asylum. Here’s a rock from under the bridge.”
We probably added another half hour to our trip to the lake as we took out each thing and he explained how it was connected to some memory from school, or our geocaching adventures.
“What about these silly socks?”
“You had been looking for silly socks for some dorm event but you didn’t have time or money to go searching. I had a pair of blue and a pair of brown argyle socks so you borrowed those and wore them mismatched to the event.”
“Did you ever get your socks back?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I mostly wear sports socks anyway.”
“Let’s take pictures of it all and leave it so other people can enjoy our story and this spot. There’s lots of stuff in it. I can choose a couple of favorite ones and we’ll leave the rest for the other geocachers.”
So that’s what we did. I kept the pathtag and we took the Travel Bug so we could find a cache back home to drop it into. It wasn’t until much later that I noticed the pathtag looked like a golf ball and had Cachester written across it. At the last second I took the little purple dragon, too. In the log I wrote, “She said YES!” and signed my name. I still didn’t have a permanent geocaching name.
“I think you should call yourself Engaging One.”
I laughed because I thought it would make me sound too conceited, but I understood his pun.
“Or Bahama Bound.”
“My hot Bahama Mama.”
We laughed all the way to the van.