Wapak River swag attack

Our last venture northwest will take us directly to Wapakoneta and the Auglaize River. Cache Owner mattyice85 has placed a swag attack in a secret childhood fishing spot, when timeless, sun-filled days yawned and stretched.

A road crew battalion slays rebel asphalt and reconnoiters.

Far-flung fields wait for the little guys to fix the Big Guy. Sunlight suffuses cartwheeling clouds.

Neil’s farmboy grin welcomes us to Wapak. From this soil came the first human foot to touch the moon. Centuries deep beneath the ground, those wandering, invisible roots still hold and nourish the towering tree above.

Our geotrail detours to get the Mars update at the space museum. Humans dream and race to see who will be the first Christopher, Orville or Neil on Mars. Engineers revel in the novel challenges of entering a completely hostile environment, and designing machines to conquer it. Meanwhile, shuttle astronauts long for showers, pizza, ice cream and all that is quintessentially bound to their home planet.

As plasma is shot into rocks, ground surfaces are drilled, and trash accumulates, humans search for new sources of capital to ship back to Earth. The best minds in the world focus on flying rockets to distant barren lands, an easier task than that of inventing, reinventing, patching, and repairing the failing engines of communities around them.

That’s enough update. Weeping willows on the Auglaize take us back to peaceful placidity on a perfect afternoon, where average Americans do the reinventing and patching.

Stylista treetops preen in their watery mirror. Fresh waterways across Ohio contain critical habitats for filtering and maintaining water quality. Like oil in a car engine, as the water quality deteriorates, so goes the water cycle. Here the dumpsite has been dismantled, leaving a warning epilogue.

Summer’s leftover green refreshes. Discovering a faint geotrail, a large rock, and a deceased feline finally lands us on a waterlogged container.

The log shivers damply. We drop in a small, watertight micro.

With gratitude to our cache owner, we soak in the beauty of our planet and all that sustains it.