Month: January 2023

Placed by Cache Owner Scook in 2002, twenty summers and winters have given this cache some stories to tell.

As we turn northbound, the city awakens, sparkling with droplets of humanity going about their brand new day. Short winter sunlight hides bashfully behind blankets of frozen air. The geomap slowly unfolds toward Malabar Farm State Park.

Louis Bromfield’s home welcomes us. Born in 1896, Louis served as an ambulance driver in WWI, lived in France for 10 years, then returned to his hometown of Mansfield. His dream mansion came to life when he bought the old Ferguson Place.

Here Louis created the TV and movie scenes which made others famous and him wealthy. Hollywood screen players of the 1950s came for cow milking, corn husking, and egg gathering, while Louis wrote their scripts. As new TV watchers across America migrated from family and outdoors to the next packaged production, actors on the TV screens came to Malabar, in search of slowly dimming rural identity. E.B. White visited in 1948, and, not quite speechless, wrote, “Sailors, trumpeters, mystics, actors, all of them wanting to drive the tractors, all of them eager to husk the corn, some of them sipping their drinks till morn . . .”

Inside the Visitor Center, we locate the old Ferguson Place in the hills of Malabar, where our trail will climb up and up.

At the trail head, a cabin nestles off the path. Forty years after Louis’ death, the movies come back to his farm. Not movie buffs ourselves, we still love the title, Shawshank Redemption. Every cache gives a golden opportunity to redeem ourselves one more time. We found it.

Our cache description hums a lilting refrain, written by Louis 75 years ago in Pleasant Valley. We follow his footprints.

You approach the Ferguson place by a steep, half-ruined road through the forest, a road worn deep, where even the outcropping sandstone is rutted with ancient wheel tracks.

On its damp shaded banks grow ferns and carpet of the loveliest of all spring flowers.

Overhead the trees join their branches so that the whole road is a tunnel laced with wild grapevines where light itself is the color of watery depths.

Tornado tangles still cover the trail. We turn off just in time. Not every day feels like fighting a tree.

On the other hand, almost any day is good for finding some stair steps and a cache in the middle of a wood.

Inside the cache, the Fergusons appear, with a sided house, glass windows, and the very steps now set before us. From 1819 to 1939, generations of Fergusons lived in the house, as bears, wolves and Wyandots left the land, a road to Newville passed by the house, Newville disappeared, and the house succumbed to fire.

When Louis bought his land, Up Ferguson Way was already a landmark. He wrote a short work of fiction with that title, and readers came from all over the world to see where the story happened. Up Ferguson Way. Now we are here.

Twenty years of cache logging creates its own history. In 2002, a very early logger found it necessary, due to brilliant sunshine, to pull his sweatshirt over his head in order to get enough shade to get his GPS reset. Upon finishing, he found he was the object of a car full of older folks taking in the scenery. In 2003, a cacher apologetically records that they felt it best to take down all the red ribbons tied to trees by a previous finder, leading straight to the cache.

In 2008, the Cache Owner leads a tour of new cachers to find his cache . . . and gets lost. In 2009, all caching parents reverberate with the record: It is funny how little boys love tromping through the woods looking for treasure! In 2011, the guided tour of the farm comes up the hill to the Ferguson site. An entire tour group raises their hand and asks, “Hey, what’s that metal box over there?” Answer given. In 2017, with a cache now almost old enough to drive, the CO returns from somewhere, checks, and all is well.

Louis felt this small spot held a secret air of healing, rest, restoration, and peace, where his rambunctious mind was quieted. He is echoed by Cache Nation.

Wind whispers, moo of cows from far field echoes, flash of whitetail deer leaps through brush, mulch and mustiness and leaf mold mix in a forest cocktail. Green is a distant, September memory. Brown soothes, settles, and satisfies.