Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (29 page)

“You know how most people can’t walk past a mirror without looking?” Bart Bramley asked me. “I feel the same way about maps.” While I was working on the Massacre this year, it felt like aversion therapy: a dose of maps so strong that even I couldn’t handle it. But if so, it didn’t work—I have a feeling I’m going to be entering the rally again next year. Look out, Bramley. I’m gunning for you!

Maybe I’ll even invite the kids along again. But next time we’ll run it like a real family vacation: they’ll be in a separate row of seats, kept away from the adults by a clever safety system of straps and buckles, and plugged into a portable DVD player at all times. Family togetherness! Next year, we might even get farther than South Dakota.

Chapter 10
OVEREDGE

n.
: the portion of the map that lies outside the neatline border

Look for the secrets half buried like trinkets in a field, Hope that the hidden things someday will be revealed.

—JOHN DARNIELLE

A
t midnight on May 1, 2001, some unnamed hero at U.S. Air Force Space Command, located on the high plains just east of Colorado Springs, pressed a button, and it affected millions of people all over the world. Most of the things the government can do at the push of a button
don’t
immediately improve our quality of life, but this action, ordered by the president himself, made life ten times better for map nerds everywhere. Just like magic, the Global Positioning System—an array of twenty-four satellites in medium Earth orbit—could now tell you where you were standing, anywhere on the surface of the planet, to within just a few meters of accuracy.

A cynic might point out that the only reason the military had the power to make the system so much better at the touch of a button was that it had been lying to us all along. The first GPS satellite had been launched way back in 1978, but only government users had access to the real data. Civilian owners of GPS receivers got a scrambled signal that introduced random error, so that most of the time their location information would be off by hundreds of feet. Giving citizens the wrong answers to important questions is nothing new for the U.S. government, of course; the IRS has been doing it for years. But in this
case, the error was intentional, baked into the signal for reasons of national security.

But by the late 1990s, this scrambling, euphemistically called “selective availability,” was becoming obsolete. The military had figured out how to localize its GPS jamming in places where secrecy was an issue, and a new ground-based technology called Differential GPS was allowing civilians to improve on satellite data anyway. So President Bill Clinton ordered “selective availability” to be turned off altogether, and in the spring of 2000, White House science advisor
Neal Lane announced
the big moment. “All the people who’ve bought a GPS receiver for a boat or a car, or whether they use one in business or for recreation, will find that they are ten times more accurate as of midnight tonight,” he told reporters.

In Portland, Oregon, that night, a computer consultant named Dave Ulmer stayed up to watch the change on his GPS receiver, a clunky Magellan 2000 that he’d bought back in the mid-1990s, when the year “2000” appended to a product name still sounded sleek and futuristic. “It was really quite a momentous thing to see happening,” he says. “I still have the track logs that I recorded during that event.” One minute he had a three-hundred-foot radius of inaccuracy on his screen, the next—hey presto!—he had only thirty. That difference, he knew, would have meant a lot to him two months previously. In March, he’d been snowmobiling to the peak of Mount Saint Helens, trying to follow a trail he’d taken once before. But selective availability led him one hundred yards off course, and he shot out over an ice ridge he wasn’t expecting. “I slid down one side of the mountain on my back, and the machine went down the other side of the mountain, end over end, and got demolished. It was quite an eye-opening experience about what three hundred feet can do to you.”

Seeing his signal converge on his home that May night was like putting on a pair of eyeglasses after enduring a lifetime of astigmatism. Later, lying in bed, he was too excited to sleep. The scrambled GPS of the 1990s could tell you that you were in a football stadium (which, if you
were
in a football stadium, you probably already knew) but the new technology could tell you exactly which yard
marker you were standing on, and that opened new horizons. What wonderful things can we do now with GPS? he remembers thinking. There’s got to be something that human beings have never done before until this moment in time. “And that,” he says, “is when I invented geocaching.”

The next morning, Ulmer began gathering supplies. On a woodland turnout by the side of a winding hillside road a mile from his home, he pulled over and half buried a five-gallon bucket containing a notebook where finders could sign their names, four dollars in cash,
George of the Jungle
on VHS, a Ross Perot book, mapping software, the handle of a slingshot, and a can of beans.
^*
Then he posted the latitude and longitude of that spot on an Internet newsgroup for GPS users. That first announcement was startlingly prophetic, envisioning in detail not just a single celebratory stunt but an ongoing international treasure hunt in embryo:

Now that SA
[selective availability] is off, we can start a worldwide Stash Game! With non-SA accuracy, it should be easy to find a stash from waypoint information. Waypoints of secret stashes could be shared on the Internet, people could navigate to the stashes and get some stuff.

Make your own stash in a unique location, put in some stuff and a logbook, and post the location on the Internet. Soon we will have thousands of stashes all over the world to go searching for. Have fun!

The next day, a Vancouver, Washington, GPS buff named Mike Teague drove across the Columbia River and found Ulmer’s stash. He signed his name and left some cigarettes, a cassette tape, and a pen. That weekend, like a carrier of a virus, Teague created two new
stashes of his own, on the slopes of Mount Saint Helens. Within just two weeks, there were stashes hidden in a half dozen states, as well as Chile, Australia, and New Zealand, and Teague put up a simple website to keep track of the growing list of stash coordinates. It was becoming clear that Ulmer had tapped into something primal—not just the boredom of gadget gurus but some neglected part of our hunter-gatherer hindbrain that
needs
to look for elusive things and rarely gets the chance in a modern world where everything we really need (food, water, heat, reality shows) gets served up to us instantly while we sit by passively.
^*

Up the freeway three hours in Seattle, a newlywed computer programmer named Jeremy Irish returned home from his honeymoon to find that
SaviShopper.com
, the retail dot-com he worked for, was failing. “It was kind of depressing,” he tells me. “I was looking for distractions.” His wife had given him permission to buy a GPS device, and when he typed “gps games” into Yahoo!, the first site that came up was Teague’s “stash hunt” list. There was one just fifty miles from his home, he saw, and an hour later, he was bouncing along a boulder-strewn logging trail in his less-than-rugged Saturn SL2. At the end of the trail, he continued on foot through a sunbaked clear-cut, on the hottest day of the summer. “I had very limited water with me,” he says. “It was horrible. A horrible trip.” But the thrill of finding the stash—an index-card box hidden behind a stump—made the whole ordeal worth it. “Walking down the hill, I thought, well, the first thing I need to do is prepare people, so they’re not as inexperienced and unprepared as I was.”

Ulmer and the other early GPS scavenger hunters had already decided that “geocache” was a better name for their treasures than “GPS stash”—drug mules and potheads have stashes, but old-timey explorers and French-Canadian trappers have caches!—and Irish decided to begin a successor to Teague’s site under the name “
Geocaching.com
,” which came online with just seventy-five caches
listed. A
New York Times
article outed geocaching to the general public in October, and the Web server in Irish’s guest bedroom could barely keep up with demand. Maybe, he thought,
Geocaching.com
could become a real company.

Together with two other castaways of the e-commerce collapse, he began raising money, but found that venture capital options in those post-Internet-bubble days were few and far between. “Can you imagine going into a VC and saying ‘Hey, we’ve got this idea—we’re going to create a listing service for plastic containers in the woods’? ‘How are you going to monetize that?’ ‘I don’t know! You never asked that back in 1998!’” Instead, their first source of funding was a gross of donated T-shirts that they slapped with geocaching logos and sold via the website. The following spring, they started selling “premium memberships” to
Geocaching.com
as well, so they could quit their day jobs and work on improving the site full-time. That decision turned
Geocaching.com
into a robust, user-friendly site, the first place a curious consumer would go after getting a GPS receiver as a Christmas present, and it made geocaching into a mass-culture phenomenon. There were only three hundred caches listed when 2001 began; by the end of 2002, there were more than ten thousand.

That transition didn’t come without growing pains, though. The early geocaching community was an outsider one, an odd mix of techie hackers and tie-dyed outdoorsmen,
^*
and many were skeptical about an Internet company—from Seattle, no less, just like big bad Microsoft!—swooping in to systematize and commercialize their guerrilla pastime. “Some felt uncomfortable with a small group of people making money off of all their work,” says Ed Hall, who ran another website called Buxley’s Geocaching Waypoint, the first to display geocache locations on maps. “What are they bringing to it? Why are they trying to assert ownership over
our
game?” Irish and his partners made missteps as well, sending legal warnings to Hall’s site (for
mining
Geocaching.com
data to draw his maps) and Quinn Stone’s NaviCache site (because his logo used the word “geocaching,” which Irish had attempted to trademark). After Dave Ulmer himself got into a dust-up on Irish’s message boards, his name was removed from the site’s “History of Geocaching” page, which for a time credited the placing of the first cache to an anonymous “someone.”

The old scuffles are water under the bridge these days. Jeremy Irish is now more savvy about the court of public opinion, and the old guard has come around to the idea of a more centralized, newbie-friendly version of their hobby.
^*
Even Dave Ulmer, not a fan for many years, has mellowed. “I don’t mind them making money off of it,” he tells me. “
Geocaching.com
is an excellent website. The guy has put incredible hours into developing the site. He deserves a reward for that.” Irish’s little start-up has grown into Groundspeak Inc., which employs more than forty-five “Lackeys,” as they call themselves, at its Seattle headquarters, all in cubicles festooned with lime-green shades reminiscent of a forest canopy. On March 8, 2010, the geocache count on its website hit one million.

One million geocaches! To be more precise: 1,385,781 active caches at the moment I write this, with more than a thousand new ones appearing each day. That is an astounding number. By comparison, here is a partial inventory of other things there are in the world: 6,230 wide-body jets; 32,000 McDonald’s restaurants; 663,000 zebras; 40,000 Segways; and 15,900 synagogues. You’ve seen all those things, but despite their comparative ubiquity, most people have never knowingly seen a geocache; Groundspeak cofounder Bryan Roth recently called geocaching “
the biggest hobby in the world
that nobody knows about.” That’s the whole point of the game: the caches are hard to find if you’re not expressly looking for them and sometimes even if you are.
But they are everywhere, on all seven continents. There’s a geocache hidden in a stone wall at the Vatican, and one in a high temple niche at Angkor Wat, and another in the crook of a tree by Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Run your hands along the bottom of the front gates at Las Vegas’s Bellagio casino, and you’ll find one magnetically attached. There are six on the slopes of Colorado’s Pikes Peak and two at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station.