Placed earlier this year, Cache Owner Nickoli_1975 directs us to a cemetery cache, where SQ Keller shares top billing with Saint John.
As we meander northwest, the complex business of corn and soybean harvest assembles in the driveway. Chemical field treatments waft into our open windows. Tangerine-shaded trees hail the season of pumpkin orange.
We pause at the Black Hoof Memorial Park. A veteran of the French-British wars, the Revolutionary War, and the Northwest Territory wars, Black Hoof fought with the French against the British, and then joined the British. In 1795, defeated by Anthony Wayne at Fallen Timbers, he put down his rifle and signed the Greenville Treaty. True to his word, his tribe did not join Tecumseh in the War of 1812.
Chief Black Hoof led the Shawnees in adapting to individual property ownership and farming, believing mutual respect could allow two nations to exist side by side. A year after Black Hoof’s death, rather than accepting American citizenship, the Shawnees moved west.
Today’s land dwellers peep over the ridge, navigating the same bewildering waves of change as the man honored here.
Our GPS moves us to a cemetery down the road, where we will drive into a field to reach Ground Zero. Centuries-old stones keep watch over the pastures and fields, immortalizing the big families who were cities unto themselves.
Offspring have moved into the digital age of urban sprawl, working now for those who have money. Spaces immense and free give way to middle-class subdivisions. Stones crumble, leaving cryptic messages behind.
Safe within Lutheran taxonomy, questions of individual salvation seek reassurance. Our graveyard celebrates freedom protected to pursue these questions.
We tramp through bristly fence overgrowth. Wooden posts transcend the cyber version, as wind whispers and sunshine soothes.
Baby Cache, only three months old, may you live a long life within your new geocaching galaxy . . . .
OH Love Of Geocaching 