A fifteen-year-old gift from Cache Owner Doing Time beckons bashfully from the boondocks.
Winding through the spaghetti bowl of Columbus freeways, we exit I-70 to Route 42, turning onto Spring Valley Road. With the silent softness of a sleeping Siamese, the land ripples, dependent on yet master of the farmer who claims it.
Ice flashes across a frozen Deer Creek, quivering in serendipitous sunlight. Among these broad fields linger long-ago litheness of Shawnee, Wyandotte, Mingo, and all tribes sharing this public hunting ground. Immigrants cultivating today’s sod farms harvest armories of arrowheads, once clasped in tribal palms, then held by two centuries of soil, now handed to the future.
The damming of Deer Creek forms the jewel of Madison Lake State Park, now blocked by a politely dogged obstacle. Shamed for not being the loved and long-awaited master, we creep by.
Gnarled cloud fingers unfurl across a darkening sky, warning of the coming storm. Still, we will prevail.
Coordinates lead us to the Sugar Maple Trail. In 2016, Cacher Tripple Shot began checking on this decade-old cache. In 2021, Tripple Shot replaced the container and the log. Two more cachers followed, describing the container as broken and soggy.
Two months ago, Tripple Shot ruminated on the meaning of the Cache Owner Doing Time, and accepted de facto adoption of the cache. Like all cache owners, Tripple Shot will make an investment which repays no dividends, no interest, no promotion, no political capital, no engineering of plant or human, only careful guarding of a tiny vessel in a distant place, and the gratitude and goodwill of nameless strangers.
Tucked into a tree trunk, the abandoned adolescent is given a cool new geocaching pouch, dry drawers, and another 15 years of life.
Past logs tell us that, for this year’s Thanksgiving walk, Grandma brings her grandson caching, and they leave a trackable. When she goes to log, she sees she found this cache 12 years ago.
Anchoring our hearts to the places we love, the gentle graces of this and all cache owners walk with us back down the trail.
OH Love Of Geocaching 