Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (32 page)

“Hey, are you going out?” calls Mindy from the kitchen. “Dylan forgot his piano books. Can you drop them off at Janetta’s before his lesson starts?”

Is she serious? How can she not know what’s at stake here?
“No!”
I bellow, slamming the garage door behind me.

In the car, I stare at myself in the rearview mirror for a moment. What have I become? I’m yelling at my family and sabotaging their piano lessons, and for what? So that my signature will appear maybe one centimeter higher on a piece of paper that practically no one will ever see? I dutifully trudge back upstairs and grab Dylan’s piano books. Then I race back to the car and peel out.

It’s pouring rain when I arrive at the bike trail, and the spot seems deserted. The cache is now exactly four hours old—surely it’s been found once or twice by now. I’m drenched by the time I finally see the tiny pill bottle hidden in the tall grass at the base of a wooden post. I unscrew the top with shaking fingers, and I’m not sure if that’s from the cold or not. For some reason, I find myself thinking of the explorer Robert Scott. When Scott journeyed to Antarctica in 1911, he had high hopes of being the first to reach the South Pole. But on January 16, 1912, his team spotted a rock cairn on the ice ahead of them, and dog sled tracks heading north. The Norwegian expedition of his rival Roald Amundsen had beaten him to the Antarctic FTF by a matter of weeks. “
The worst has happened
,” he wrote in his journal. “All the day dreams must go; it will be a wearisome return.”
^*
I’m expecting to read the name of some GPS-toting Amundsen inside the cache, but instead I find something I’ve never seen before in my geocaching career: a completely blank log sheet. It’s unspoiled territory, just like the white fringes on the edges of maps during the Age of Discovery, and I do feel like a pioneer as I proudly make my mark with the tiny ballpoint in my Swiss Army knife.

If geocaching really is a video game downloaded into our skulls, then the initials atop its high-score list are undoubtedly LVB, for Lee van der Bokke, a retired telecom engineer from San Francisco’s East Bay. In his eight years of caching, van der Bokke, aka “Alamogul,” has racked up a staggering 53,353 finds, more than anyone else in the
world and almost 15,000 more than his nearest rival. That number is almost certainly on the low side, in fact; he’s probably logged three or four more finds while I’ve been typing this paragraph. He cached for many years as “Team Alamo” but grew tired of skeptical cachers assuming his unlikely numbers were being churned out by some massive conglomerate. “The ‘team’ is me and my wife,” he insists. “And she hates geocaching!”

Van der Bokke began as a casual cacher; he was stuck at home all day with a grumpy eightysomething father, and geocaching was a way to pass the time while walking his golden retriever, Casey, in the local hills. As his numbers grew, so did his intensity; he began to strip his caching runs of nonessentials: the dog, the wife, even left turns.
^*
“I don’t cache every day,” he tells me. “I’ll normally go a couple days a week, somewhere with high numbers.”

“So you plan in advance? ‘Here’s the area we’re heading for, here are the thirty caches we’re going to get’?”

He laughs dismissively. “Oh, no. We don’t go
anywhere
for just thirty.” This must be the geocaching equivalent of Linda Evangelista’s famous dictum that supermodels “don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.” Thirty sounds pretty good to me—it would be at least triple my own daily record—but hundred-cache days aren’t unusual for megacachers like Alamogul. “Sometimes it’s a chore,” he concedes. “More than twenty-five caches in a day, and it starts to get boring. But if you’ve driven a long ways to go somewhere, you want to get it done.”

So megacachers will cache long past the point of pleasure, because they know the withdrawal would be worse? It’s hard not to see at least a smidge of compulsion in their devotion to the game. When van der Bokke discusses caching, he has an almost Howard Hughes–like propensity to use the word “clean”—he’s motivated, he says, by the desire “to clean out an area. I wanted to keep a ten-mile radius around my home
clean
.” This very morning, he and a friend had been out “cleaning
up” some new caches that had appeared within this ten-mile safe zone—and were unable to find just one. “That’s frustrating, because now it’s sitting there. I’ll sit at my computer being frustrated. It’s still there on my map.” You scrub and scrub and that nonsmiley just won’t go away!

But I understand that compulsion now; it bothers me too when I look at my neighborhood on
Geocaching.com
and there’s the little green box of an unfound cache tucked in amongst the smileys, taunting me. Oddly, the idea of unlogged caches doesn’t bother me much in real life; I’m fine driving past them and saving them for another day. But something about seeing them on a map makes their presence almost unbearable. I wonder if this is the dark side of maps, if their orderly authority can gull us into believing in the rightness and importance of all kinds of iffy propositions. In 1890, for example, the diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes was lobbying hard for Britain to connect her two territories in Africa. Think how great it would look on a map, he argued, if British imperial red ran all the way from Cape Town to Cairo! Luckily, Lord Salisbury, the foreign secretary, was no map buff. “
I can imagine no more
uncomfortable position than the possession of a narrow strip of territory in the very heart of Africa, three months’ distance from the coast, which should be separating the forces of a powerful empire like Germany and . . . another European Power,” he told the House of Lords. “I think that the constant study of maps is apt to disturb men’s reasoning powers.” Similarly, the maps made by the great
Serbian geographer
Jovan Cvijić after World War I showed the ethnographic divisions of the Balkan peoples in neat stripes and soothing pastels. But in practice, that beautiful map helped inspire a century of brutal ethnic cleansing, an attempt to make the region’s real-life ethnic borders as clear cut as they seemed on the map.

Whatever you think about van der Bokke’s obsession, there’s no denying the scope of his achievement. When friends or family scoff at the time he puts into his global Tupperware hunt, he asks them, “Do you know anybody that’s number one at
anything
in the world?” There was, perhaps, only one other geocacher who was ever in his league. Alamogul’s predecessor atop the caching leaderboard was one “CCCooperAgency,” the world’s most prolific cacher for most of the last decade. CCCooperAgency was Lynn Black, an insurance agent
from the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area—by all accounts a popular and extraordinarily energetic geocacher but to me a total enigma. She walked away from the game in 2009 and now refuses to discuss the geocaching world she once ruled.

Most prolific megacachers are retirees with limitless free time, but Black was a busy business owner and mother of three. She hauled her family around on power-caching runs all over the eastern seaboard, but none of them quite had her boundless stamina for the game. She soon became aware that her geocaching obsession was becoming a problem. “
I don’t do anything
besides geocaching,” she told a newspaper in 2005. “You need to set up a clinic for Geocachers Anonymous,” her husband, Kevin, concurred. She tried to quit several times, telling an interviewer in 2006, “
I started to miss
my kids. They’re sick of geocaching. It’s just too selfish, you know what I mean?”

But each time she thought she was out, like Michael Corleone, she’d get pulled back in. Her rival Lee van der Bokke had been about fourteen hundred caches behind Black from the time he started and couldn’t gain any ground on her no matter what he did. In 2005, he heard from a mutual friend that she’d quit caching once and for all, in order to see more of her family. “Two days later,” van der Bokke marvels, “she hops on a plane and heads to Germany without her family for six weeks’ caching! That got me so upset.” In late 2008, she finally called it quits after her 25,000th cache and retired her CCCooper-Agency account for good. But within a week, she was caching again—though not as avidly—under a different handle. Finally, on the last day of 2009, at a cache near a Lancaster County lake just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, she left the following log:

Was out enjoying
a nice walk with my husband and he was the one to find it. Very nicely done. Last cache.

And with those two words, “Last cache,” she was finally done.

The saga of CCCooperAgency, as I come to understand it in fragments, from interviews and message board postings and geocache
logs, is a cautionary tale for me. Some people are born with a genetic predisposition to addictions like alcoholism, but, like Lynn Black, I seem to have been born to geocache, and to geocache obsessively. My deepest loves—maps, exploring places, solving puzzles, space-age gadgetry—make me a perfect-storm candidate for GPS rehab.

After-school specials have led me to believe that “bottoming out” stories from
real
addictions often involve back alleys and Dumpsters, and in the end, mine does too. I’m nosing around the Dumpster behind a Discount Tire one afternoon because my GPS receiver seems convinced that there’s a geocache hidden somewhere in the rockery there. I’ve been searching for less than a minute when I realize that a jump-suited “tire specialist” is watching me with the kind of sour, victorious expression you’d expect from someone who just caught a strange man examining his garbage.

“Uh, what are you doing back there?” he wants to know, and I have to admit I can see his point.

I clamp my GPS to my ear. “Oh, sorry, I had to pull over and take this call. I sort of wander around when I’m on the phone.”

He stands watching me with arms folded until I’m back in my car and out of his parking lot.

What
was
I doing back there? Geocaching is supposed to be an excuse to explore the world’s hidden beauty spots, but I’ve made it from a means into an end. And because I’m a city dweller, most of my caching has been of the decidedly unscenic urban variety: “microcaches” dangling down manholes, magnetic “nanocaches” no bigger than Tylenol pills stuck to bike racks and garbage cans and ballfield bleachers, even one disguised as a wad of chewing gum and stuck under a table on a sub shop’s patio. I decide to broaden my horizons: I need to get out of the city.

Browsing the Groundspeak website, I discover a cache just two hours north of me that comes highly recommended. It sits above a little-known waterfall on the Nooksack River not far from the Canadian border. Only a handful of brave souls have found the cache: its
Geocaching.com
terrain rating is the maximum five stars, which would be a first for me. “THIS IS A VERY DIFFICULT SLOPE,” warns the hider’s description in stern capital letters. “DO NOT
ATTEMPT THIS CACHE ALONE.” He also reminds me that I’m under no obligation to seek his cache, that he assumes no liability in the event of my untimely death or mangling disfigurement, etc. No more Dumpster diving—this is the cache for me!

That weekend, I dig out my hiking boots and some old work gloves and drive up to Hard Scrabble Falls. I’ve never been on this highway before, so I’ve brought some printouts of other nearby geocaches I might pass along the way. But the five-star cache is the first order of business. The bottom of the falls is a short, easy hike up a dry creek bed from the trailhead, and the morning is soul-scrubbingly beautiful. It’s early spring in the Northwest, the kind of day that seems gray and wintry until the sun breaks through the clouds for a moment and reveals that the seemingly dead black trees are actually covered with a million specks of the clearest, most limpid green. January to June in just seconds.

This is no Psycho Urban Cache #13, but by my standards, at least, it’s pretty extreme. There’s no trail up the steep slope south of the falls; instead, some thoughtful local has left a system of tree-anchored ropes to help visitors up the more vertical sections. I make it up the 430-foot zigzag with much huffing and puffing but no life-threatening scrapes, and I count the stair steps of roaring water as I pass them: six, seven, eight. By the time I finally make it to the ninth cascade, where the cache is hidden, my arms and legs are sore. That’s what I came for, I tell myself—after all, you can’t spell “geocaching” without “aching”! Here I locate the ammo box without any trouble, as expected: the cache is listed as a five-star climb but only a two-star hide. A means, not an end.

I walk to the rocky edge of the ninth waterfall and look across the valley to the Cascades on the other side. It’s everything the Discount Tire parking lot was not: grandiose, inspiring, entirely free of used prophylactics. I feel a moment of kinship with Dave Ulmer, the grandfather of geocaching. He still sends me near-daily e-mails full of nutty Ayn Rand quotes and gorgeous photos of sunsets and cacti, and it’s comforting to know that he’s still wandering the West somewhere like David Carradine in
Kung Fu,
following his GPS receiver to ghost towns and cliff dwellings and abandoned gold mines. GPS
buffs often use the acronym POI to refer to the “points of interest” to which the technology has taken them. In fact, I think, geocaching makes the whole planet into one big POI—a richer, more compelling place to live.

Standing on the edge of the cliff, I unfold my printout listing nearby geocaches. I still have a few more hours of daylight; I could probably find eight or nine roadside caches on the drive home.
Or
I could keep following this trail up past the geocache; apparently there’s a tenth waterfall and then ropes down to the punch-bowl valley on the other side. It won’t pad my count, but then again, that’s not really the point, is it? I put the paper back into my pocket, slip on my gloves, and continue up the side of the mountain.