Like most seven-year-olds, the log for Cache Owner now-we-are-nine loudly voices its opinion. We will be sure to add ours.
We return to Pleasant Hill Lake, a 70-year-old with 783 acres of outdoor playground, sitting in the laps of both Ashland and Richland counties. Like all reservoirs created to avoid another Great Flood of 1913, Pleasant Hill brings lake life within the reach of thousands of Ohioans.
As evening shadows lengthen, the online logs wheeze and whine like an old accordion. This is a dangerous trek, across a gully, it’s 300 feet off the coordinates, contents of the cache are strewn around the ground, it took ten of us to find it. Yes, yes, and yes. And will we have to call eight friends?
The CO remains silent. As unique as snowflakes, some cache owners visit often, refresh paper and baggy, add comments to the weblog, assure that all is well, admonish that only actual signers can be logged, or reset the coordinates. Other owners plant the cache, then . . . say nothing at all.
And so, in this case, we find that all those who wander. Are. Definitely. Lost.
The lake offers sympathetic silence. Waters flow in from the Clear Fork, and leave to join the Black Fork of the Mohican at Loudonville. If you need directions to the Ohio, keep paddling your canoe thirty miles south, as the river winds, to where the Mohican joins the Kokosing, rebranding as the Walhonding, then turn east twenty miles where you will join the Tuscarawas as it becomes the Muskingum. Turn south and paddle for 80 miles, and that river in front of you is the Ohio. Tribal names still echo those long-departed canoe-drivers, guided by communal memory and their unscreened, nondigitized Local Landmark System.
Tiny bi-valves add their clammy comments to our mysteriously dark treasure hunt.
With a smile both shy and stunning, this little jewel finds us.
For two years, cachers try to work out the coordinates. Finally in 2017, N40 38.356 and W082 19.835 stick. For the next five years, and counting, logs will regularly pass the baton forward by referring to the 2017 coords.
Bark scrapes hands, twigs puncture knees, leaves hurl feet downward, burrs glue shoestrings, every sense sings, as we wander homeward.
OH Love Of Geocaching 