Читать книгу Geogirl - Kelly Rysten - Страница 10

Chapter 4

“I’m not sure I am doing this right,” I confessed to Twiggy the next morning at breakfast. I had an appointment in three hours to have my room inspected and hand the keys back over to the super.

“There is no right way or wrong way to do it,” he said. “You look for the caches you want to find. You ignore the ones you don’t want to find.”

“But we still have a goal,” I pointed out.

“That’s why I put you in charge of planning. You like to keep track of details. I like to tromp around in the hills and find boxes.”

“But you’re asking a freshman geocacher to master a Geocaching 400 task.”

“You’re a smart kid. I have faith in you. I know you can do it.”

“I did find some interesting ones, but nobody will say why they are so interesting. They just say things like ‘good hide, very creative, wish I knew how to do this.’”

“See, you’re getting the hang of it. And when we find a few of those you’ll see why they made those comments.”

“After I turn in my keys I think we should go find one. I need some experience to base my decisions on.”

“You want to? Cool! So… which one looks interesting within a mile or two or three?”

“Hmm, they are interesting in different ways,” I said sounding rather overwhelmed by all the choices I’d seen on my little laptop the previous night. “Like… look at this one. It hardly says anything in the description but the logs make it sound like we should find it. Here’s a log that says, ‘been around a while. Never seen a geocache like this one.’ And another says. ‘wish I had thought of this!’ and another, ‘never would have spotted this except dogwalker sniffed it out.’”

“Hmm, and twenty-nine favorite points. We should go look.”

“But what about this one,” I said. “It says, ‘follow the trail until you get to the old bridge. Don’t get your feet wet. It’s hidden where the sun don’t shine and you might need some sun to spot it.’ That sounds kind of vague to me. People like it, but I don’t see why.”

He cracked a little grin that said to me that he knew this contest was working. Working on what I wasn’t sure. “Maybe we should go find out,” he said.

“It’s four miles away.”

“I bet I can drive four miles. You can drive four miles. If you can do it, I can too.”

“You’ll have to download the coordinates,” I reminded him needlessly.

“I’ve got them. I’ve got all the geocaches in town already in my GPS. All I need is some general directions that we can get from the map so we’re halfway there already.”

He stuffed the last corner of his toast into his mouth and held up his hand for the ticket.

The old van chugged down the city streets, down the country roads and onto a dirt path. Just seeing the dirt path made me think I was off on an adventure. I was a city girl, raised in a proper four bedroom, two bath house, with neighbors close by, a side walk to rollerblade on, peaceful streets to ride bicycles on. We knew our neighbors and walked to school.

Trees crowded the road and Twiggy seemed to relax more the further he drove. He stopped the van in the middle of the road and got out his GPS. He clicked a few buttons and scanned a menu. He clicked down a couple of times and toggled the little joystick to the right.

“We’re sitting in the middle of the road,” I pointed out.

“It’s okay. Nobody ever travels this road and if they do I’ll let them by.”

“How did it get to be a road if nobody travels it?” I asked.

His GPS displayed a map and he put the van in reverse and turned around.

“One street too early,” he explained.

“This is a street?”

“Of course!”

Little did I know that in geocaching terms this street was a highway. But I couldn’t really blame Twiggy. I was the one who chose the caches we looked for. I just had no inkling where they were. I chose them because they sounded fun.

Twiggy drove back to the pavement, turned right and skipped a paved road, then turned right on another dirt road. I gawked at all the lush forest plants that crowded the road. Plants even grew in between the tire ruts. It felt like we drove for miles on the dirt road but it couldn’t have been miles because this place was four miles from Donner’s. When Twiggy stopped the van and turned off the engine I could hear water. I looked around to see where the noise was coming from as Twiggy popped open his door and slid out.

“Ahhh, fresh air, green trees, and not a textbook in sight!” he said as he stretched. “Do you want the GPS?”

“No, I’m just along to help out and learn a thing or two about what we’ll be doing the next couple of days,” I answered.

“Then take the GPS. You need to learn how to use the number one tool of the trade. You can see the cache icon. The triangle is you. The line shows you which direction to walk in.”

“I thought you said to look for places I would hide something,” I said.

“And you did that very well, my lady. Now it’s time to add a new dimension to your geocaching experience.”

He handed the device to me and I looked at the screen. It was pretty self explanatory so I began walking, following the line and trying make it match up to the land I saw before me. Twiggy laughed.

“You are such a newbie! Look at you! HA hahaha!”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I am a newbie.”

“You’re doing great. This is fun. How far away is it?”

I looked around on the screen for something that looked like a number that sounded reasonable but I didn’t know what a reasonable number was. There were coordinates that were very recognizable. And there was 800 feet. I didn’t have a good feel for how far 800 feet was so I read it off to Twiggy.

“Eight hundred?” he asked. “Which direction?”

“To our… left. I think.”

“No, which direction? North, south, east, or west?”

“How should I know?”

“Look at the map. What part of the map is it on?”

“It’s right there!” I said

“Okay, that is northwest of us.”

He looked to see what was northwest.

“I think we can get closer driving,” he said.

“How far is eight hundred feet?”

“A little hike.”

“Can we take a little hike?”

He glanced again the direction the GPS was pointing.

“All right. We’ll see how it goes. We can always come back for the van.”

Again I began walking in the direction the green line seemed to be pointing. It didn’t take long for us to be totally surrounded by hip high weeds.

“What does poison ivy look like?” I asked.

“Leaves of three, let it be,” he said.

“Leaves of three at the end, or leaves of three all by themselves?” I asked.

“We’ll have to look it up. It’s too late to worry about it now. If it’s poison ivy we’re goners already.”

“Do you see poison ivy often?”

“Can’t say I do often. Maybe a time or two… per semester.”

“Oh great.”

“But I usually don’t know it until it’s too late.”

Since there was no point in worrying about it I kept tromping through the weeds. Pretty soon the ground became rocky and weedy. I couldn’t see where to place my next step. I would take a step and my foot would slide down a rock into a squishy, muddy spot.

“I’m glad I only have old shoes,” I said.

Twiggy was wearing hiking boots. He wore them a lot. I think he owned three pairs of shoes: his hiking boots, sandals, and basketball shoes. He didn’t play basketball. The basketball shoes he wore when he wasn’t allowed to wear sandals and it was too hot for hiking boots to be comfortable. I just wished he wouldn’t wear hiking boots with shorts. It looked weird. People who wore hiking boots with shorts looked like they spent their whole lives hiking. People who wore hiking boots with shorts never seemed to have new boots. Maybe that’s why I thought they spent all their time hiking.

“How far is it?” Twiggy asked.

“Seven hundred and twenty two.”

I could still hear water but I couldn’t see it yet. The ground went up and I tripped over a rock while I was trying to watch the GPS screen.

“You can put it down and just check it every once in a while,” Twiggy called over the sound of the water.

The hillside was weedy, rocky, steep and I kept slipping. I think I traveled in one spot more than I propelled myself forward and I slipped and slid and climbed my way to the top huffing and puffing and watching the triangle on the screen grow ever so slowly nearer to the cache icon.

“Whew!” I gasped near the top of the hill. “That was quite a climb!”

“Keep going. The top is just up ahead. I bet that tree right there is on top of the hill. Then we can see where we are.”

“Next time tell me how far eight hundred feet is!” I said as I climbed higher.

“I told you. It’s a short hike. You’re the one leading us. You took the route you wanted to take.”

“No I didn’t! I followed the line.”

“Then perhaps you should use the GPS as a guide and choose your own route.”

“Now you tell m…” I looked out over the hill and a beautiful tumbling river flowed below us and a creaky old bridge was off in the distance. The road we left the van next to went around the bottom of the hill and crossed the river at the bridge.

Lesson one: use the GPS as a guide and look at the world around you. You might be able to reason things out better than a blind computer chip.

“That’s a very sunny bridge,” I observed. “The cache is supposed to be hidden where the sun don’t shine.”

“I think that means it is under the bridge somewhere,” he said.

“Do cars actually drive on that bridge?” I asked. It was made of wood and it was almost one car wide. It looked terribly bumpy. I thought we might find a troll under the bridge and halfway expected three billy goats to be trotting down the road. Before we could reach the bridge, though, we had to descend the hill. I always thought that going down hills was easier than climbing them and this hill started out being easier but quickly changed when we met a long drop off. A short one I might just sit down and scoot on my bottom but this was a sheer drop of about twenty feet. That wasn’t a distance I was willing to fall. We stood at the top of the precipice and looked longingly at the decrepit little bridge below.

“Follow the ridge,” Twiggy said. “It’ll be less rocky eventually.”

“Which direction?”

“Down. If it goes down it’s more likely to just join the hillside.”

I turned downhill and picked my way gingerly across the top of the cliff. A squirrel ran across the road below. It found a weed that looked tasty and nibbled at it while I tried not to fall off the cliff and turn into a human avalanche. I slipped and sent a shower of rocks down the cliff. The squirrel turned around to watch the show.

“Whoa! Gabby, be careful,” Twiggy said.

I must have spotted a dozen cool geocache hiding spots on that hillside: little holes in the rocks, viney roots that formed tiny, mossy caves, hollow logs and funny shaped trees.

“It’s weird,” I said as I crept along.

“What’s weird?”

“Geocaching makes you see things weird.”

“Why?”

“I see hiding places everywhere.”

He laughed, “This is only your first day!”

“I know, but look! Wouldn’t this hidey hole be a great spot to hide a cache?” I asked.

“Yes, it would except for one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“If you put one here then you’d be forcing other people to climb this hill, too.”

“Oh… yeah. I guess I don’t want to do that.”

“You wouldn’t want to maintain it either,” he pointed out.

“I’m getting thirsty,” I said.

“You didn’t bring any water?”

“No, we just left a café, we were only going to look for one geocache, and we were only going to be eight hundred feet from the car. Why would I need water?”

“Always bring water.”

“Do you have any?” I asked.

“Uh, no. We were going to look for a cache at a bridge over a river, so I didn’t bother.”

“Okay,” I huffed. “Next time we bring water. For now we must press on.”

Ten minutes later, “Now I see why you wear hiking boots.”

And half an hour later we stumbled out onto the road glad it didn’t have a lot of traffic on it.

“That water looks so good,” I said as I limped and jogged my way to the river bank. I stripped off my tennis shoes and stuck my aching feet into the water. “Ahhh, that’s better.”

“I thought you said you were thirsty,” Twiggy said.

“I guess my feet were thirstier than my throat.”

“I wouldn’t drink from this creek anyway, unless I really had to. Too many mysterious microbes.”

“I’ll feel better when my feet get a rest. The water’s nice and cool. You should try it.”

“You have ankles,” he said.

“Of course I have ankles!”

“You always wear pants. You’re always covered up. I just knew you had ankles under there somewhere but I’d never seen them.”

“I have elbows, too!” I joked.

“Ah, but do you have shoulders? What about knees? Do you have knees?”

I splashed a little water in his direction and pulled my feet out of the river to dry them.

“The bridge is…”

“I can see the bridge. It’s not far. We’d already be there if we had walked the road, or driven.”

“Sorry, guess I could have chosen better,” I said.

“It’s okay. I liked climbing a hill with you.”

I think I blushed a little. “So, are you ready to go find the geocache?” I asked as I began pulling on my socks and shoes.

“Ready when you are,” he said.

I tied my shoe laces and pushed myself up, then brushed off my pants.

“To the road?”

“Yes, the road seems a good choice, now that we have climbed the hill.”

“But we saw hidey holes and gnome homes and toadstools.”

“Oh my!”

The old bridge was rickety, patched, and reinforced providing hundreds of gaps and ledges that could hold a geocache.

“What does the GPS say?” Twiggy asked.

“Here,” I said as I handed it over. “You said when we get close we should rely on geosenses.”

“That’s right, but the GPS can still be helpful. It will at least pin it down to the right part of the bridge.”

“How can the cache be where the sun doesn’t shine if the river flows bank to bank?”

“That doesn’t mean the water level was that high when they hid the cache. What’s the terrain rating?”

He handed the GPS unit back to me so I could see for myself.

“Three,” I read.

“So that means it takes some effort.”

“We already did that climbing the hill,” I point out.

“But they thought we would drive to the bridge, so you can’t count the hill. We have to assume that even if we parked at the bridge there’s still some effort involved in finding it.”

“But how do we look for it if it’s under the bridge?” I asked.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m goin’ swimming!” he said as he took off his hiking boots. I began looking in the weeds beside the river when he started taking off his pants. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed he was wearing boxers as he waded out into the river.

I called it a river and he called it a creek. I didn’t see many rivers but to me a creek was a little trickle. This was a wide, flowing expanse of water and Twiggy was up to his hips in the cold water as he neared the bridge.

“I do declare this to be a three terrain,” he said as he slipped and slid over the algae coated rocks under the water. He craned his neck trying to see the underside of the bridge and remain upright. I decided, since he had the underside covered and there were a lot of spots you could see right through it, that I would stay drier if I searched from above.

“The sun shines up there,” Twiggy shouted.

“I’m using geosenses,” I called back.

When I stuck my arm through a hole in the bridge he said, “Whoa, do you think that bridge is safe?”

Just then a pickup truck came bumping down the road. The driver pulled to a stop when he saw me kneeling on the bridge with my arm through the hole.

He opened his door and got out. He stood there scratching his head.

“Miss? Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, just lost something. That’s all,” I replied.

“Maybe you oughta stay offa the bridge. It isn’t entirely safe.”

“Okay,” I said and backed off the bridge.

The man got back in his truck and drove across. When he reached my side of the river he asked, “What did you lose?”

“Uhh…” I had to think. I just used the lost item excuse because I wasn’t supposed to talk about geocaching. “Twig! What are you looking for?” I shouted down to Twiggy.

“My wallet!” He called back. “I was trying to get something out of my pocket and it slid over the side.”

“You might check around the bend,” the man said. “There’s a log jam and it probably got caught there. Might have to take a dive though.”

“Thanks!” Twiggy replied. “I was hoping it fell in the rocks.”

“Y’all have a good day.”

“We’re trying,” I said. “You have a good day, too.”

After the truck left I ventured out onto the bridge again.

“If a half ton farm truck can drive over the bridge, I think I can walk on it,” I said.

“Can you go get the flashlight?” Twiggy said.

“A flashlight? Why?”

“The description said we might have to bring our own light where the sun don’t shine.”

“Why didn’t you bring it along then?” I asked.

“I did. It’s in my pocket. Just pull it out and drop it to me off the bridge,” he said.

I felt terribly awkward and embarrassed to be going through a man’s pants. A flashlight? How would a flashlight even fit into a pocket? His wallet was safe and sound. I did find that. When I found the flashlight I wasn’t sure I had found it. I expected something long and heavy but the thing I found was only a few inches square and had straps on it. It obviously was a flashlight, though, because it had little light bulbs and a switch. I jogged back to the bridge.

“Is this it?” I asked as I dangled the thing over the side.

“Yeah. Hold on. Let me wade closer.” Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh went the water as Twiggy found a stable position beneath the flashlight. “Okay, drop it!”

I released the light and the breeze caught it. It was so light that it drifted as it fell.

“Oh shoot!” Twiggy yelled as he dove for the light. SPLASH! “OOohhh that’s cold. That… is… freezing!”

“Oh, no!” I called back. “Does it still work?”

“I... I…I… I think so,” he chattered. He splashed to a standing position and attempted to turn on the light while shivering. He was soaked from head to toe. “Here!” He said. “Catch!” He waited for me to acknowledge that he was throwing something and then flung the GPS up to me. I ran across the bridge to catch it and my foot went right through a rotten board. I was lucky I was young and healthy as I sunk to my knee and fell forward right in the middle of the bridge. The GPS clunked across the boards and fell off the other side. I was glad the farmer was gone as I pulled my leg out of the hole and pulled up my pants leg to assess the damage. My shin was scraped a little but I wasn’t really hurt. I’d frightened Twiggy a lot more than me. He came splashing up the river bank and tender-footed it up onto the bridge.

“Are you okay?”

“Better than the bridge,” I said. “Does the flashlight still work?”

“For now. Does the GPS still work?”

“I don’t know. It went that way.”

“Hey! You have shins, too!” he said as he gave me a hand up.

“I bet I even have calves attached to them.”

We climbed down the river bank to find the GPS unit lodged between two rocks, the water lapping dangerously close.

“It already took one dunking,” Twiggy said. “But they tend to be a little water resistant.”

Twiggy picked up the GPS and looked at the screen.

“Isn’t that just like a GPS?” he asked. “It wants new batteries.”

“We hope it wants new batteries,” I said. “And we hope I didn’t kill it.”

“It really does want new batteries. It has a ‘low bat’ message on it.”

“Well, where was it pointing to before it took up bridge diving as a hobby?” I asked.

“You’ll have to come under the bridge,” he said as he strapped the flashlight onto his head.

“Oh! So that’s how it goes!” I said. “That certainly looked like a strange flashlight to me.”

“It’s a headlamp.”

“It’s a geek label,” I said.

He just smiled because he thought it was a compliment.

“If I go under the bridge I’ll get all wet,” I complained.

“A little water never hurt anybody. Besides, I’m taking you back to your room after this.”

“No you’re not. I’m turning in my keys, remember?”

“Oh… yeah. So what are you going to do?”

“I was going to go geocaching with you.”

“Okay, well, hmm…” he said.

About this time I could hear my mother lecturing me about thinking things through before promising to go off on crazy hunts without having a plan in place, a destination in mind and funds to pay for it all.

“Let’s see what we can do if we only get a little wet,” he said as he dripped water all over the riverbank and my shoes. “Maybe the flashlight will help.”

I sat down and took off my shoes and socks, then pulled my pants legs up as far as they would go.

“See? I do have calves,” I said.

“Amazing,” he said. “I never knew.”

He put his arm around my shoulders and pointed the headlamp up at the underside of the bridge.

“See where the light is shining?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s where the GPS said ground zero was.”

I always associated ground zero with the spot bombs fall but I decided it was a geocaching term I better get familiar with.

“Okay, maybe it’s not too deep there,” I said.

“Come around here where it’s shallow,” he said as he led me back into the river. The rocks were slippery and I gave up very quickly on trying to hold the ends of my pants legs up. I needed my hands to balance as I slipped and slid my way under the bridge.

“See? Isn’t this fun?” Twiggy asked.

“There aren’t fish in this river, are there?” I asked.

“No, of course not,” he said, but I didn’t believe him.

“Trout and little guppies are fine,” I said. “I’ve even caught a trout once. But I don’t like those spooky catfish. They’re ugly. And they have wiggly whiskers.”

He laughed, “Never fear. I will protect you from the catfish. Now where is that cache? The description said a light should reveal where it is hidden.”

We heard a clunkada, clunkada, clunk as a vehicle drove over the bridge.

“I guess they know which parts of it will support them,” I said. The car stopped and somebody got out. He clumped over the bridge until he reached the hole I’d left behind. He gazed down through the hole to the river below.

“Howdy!” he said.

“Hi!” Twiggy and I chimed back.

“Old bridge gets older every day,” he said.

“Yeah, bridges do that,” Twiggy said.

“Havin’ fun down there?”

“Yeah, we are,” Twiggy answered.

Just then the man flinched like something hurt his eyes. He jerked back and we couldn’t see him when he stood up. He bent back down.

“What’cha doin’ with a headlamp on?” he asked.

“Snipe hunt!” Twiggy said. “They’re attracted to light!”

“Uh huh, yeah, right,” the man said. “Well, y’all take care down there.”

“Okay.”

After the man left I said, “Snipes don’t like light. You have to hunt them at night and they like bacon.”

He just looked at me as if he didn’t understand a word I said.

We waded around and Twiggy shined the light from every spot around ground zero that we could stand safely. My pants got soaked. The water was cold but after a while we got used to it. I was getting a stiff neck from looking up at the bridge. Then an idea hit me like a bright light in the darkness.

“Twiggy?”

“Yeah?”

“Where were you standing when you talked to that man?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. Why?”

“Well, figure it out. I think you shined the light on the cache while you were talking to him. He was talking to us just fine and then something hurt his eyes. Like a bright light appearing all of a sudden.”

“We should have seen it if that happened.”

“Not if it happened really fast and the reflection went through the hole.”

“If the reflection went through the hole then there has to be a direct line from where that guy was standing and the cache. Go up and stand where that guy was standing. I’ll walk around down here and try to line up on the hole again.”

“Okay.”

I waded to shore, climbed out, then climbed the bank to the side of the road and walked out onto the bridge. I looked around to be sure there were no cars and then looked for the hole my leg had gone through. I found it and waited for Twiggy to find it from underneath. I could hear the swooshing of his steps but I couldn’t see him to guide him to the right spot. While I waited I felt around the hole for anything plastic, metal, or loose. I didn’t know a lot about geocaching but I did know the container had to be retrievable. They didn’t plan on it being found through a nonexistent hole, but I still thought maybe I could touch it if the light from the flashlight had been spotted reflecting off of it.

“I see your arm,” Twiggy said from below.

“Yeah, it even has a forearm,” I joked.

His swooshing zeroed in on the spot where he saw my arm.

“Okay, stand up and do whatever that other guy was doing,” he said.

“He was just looking down through the hole. Walk around and look up like you are talking to me,” I said.

“I am talking to you.”

“Well, move the light around a bit and let me adjust my position.”

Unfortunately, my Geometry 101 class taught me that the likelihood of finding the exact angle to spot the reflection was slim. Repeating the feat was almost impossible.

I heard tires crunching on small stones and looked up to see a police cruiser pulling up to the bridge. It stopped and an officer stepped out.

“Good morning!” he said.

“Good morning,” I answered as I picked my way off the bridge.

“Hank Conrad was at the market and said there was folks on the old Miller Bridge. He was worried about you falling through or something. I just thought I ought to warn you that the bridge is old and unstable.”

“Okay, well… thank you. I think we’re fine. We’ll be careful.”

“What are you doing?”

Gulp, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t lie to an officer of the law.

“We’re geocaching,” I said.

“Geocaching? What’s that?”

“There is a container hidden here and we have the coordinates to find it, except that our GPS ran out of power. We know it’s somewhere close so we’re looking for it.”

“What makes you think there’s a container on the old Miller Bridge?” he asked.

“Somebody hid it here and posted the coordinates online.”

“And you believe them?” he asked.

“Oh yes! It’s a popular hobby. People do this all over the place.”

“What’s in this ‘container’?”

“Umm… I don’t know yet. There’s a log book that we sign…”

“Gabby! What are you doing? Watch for the light!” Twiggy called up from below the bridge.

“And some little things so we can trade if we want to.”

“Things?”

“Yeah, like little toys, foreign coins, erasers, that kind of thing.”

“Why do you do this?”

“Just ‘cause it’s fun.”

I wasn’t doing a very good job of explaining it to him. I thought I might know more about geocaching in a day or two but right now I could only tell him the very basics.

“Gabby! Where are you?”

“Who is that?” the officer asked.

“My friend. He’s looking under the bridge and I’m look on top.”

“Well, be careful. That bridge has rotten boards. The residents have reinforced it but there are still places a person could fall through.”

“Okay, I’ll watch for the reinforced spots then.”

“Have fun.”

“You too… stay safe,” I said.

He tipped his hat as he went back to his car and I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Sorry!” I said as I found the hole again. “The police showed up!”

“What!”

“He just wanted to warn me about the bridge having rotten boards.”

“Did you tell him you knew about them?”

“No, because then he would think it was even more unsafe.”

“Good. Now watch for the light.”

Ten minutes later, “This isn’t working. Maybe the man was taller than me. Maybe I should be down there and you should be up here.”

“It’s worth a try. I’m getting hungry. We need to find this thing soon.”

Twiggy waded to the river bank and we met half way and handed off the headlamp. I climbed down to the water again, then slip-slided my way under the bridge. Twiggy took his position above and I looked around for the spot of sky through the hole.

“I see the hole,” I said. “Do you see me?”

He walked around until we were looking at each other through the hole.

“AHhhh! Catfish!” he yelled.

“Where?!” I exclaimed, then promptly jerked around, slipped, and fell waist deep in the river.

“Okay, it’s gone now,” he said.

“Ha, ha, very funny,” I stammered as I attempted to stand. “That helped our search ever so much. The catfish swallowed the flashlight.” I brought the headlamp up out of the water and tried to turn it on. “I don’t think they planned on this being used on scuba dives.”

“Oh shoot. Now what are we going to do?” he asked.

“I guess we will have to rough it and find it on geosenses alone.”

He climbed down and we searched the underside of the bridge again but there were so many dark spaces under the bridge that there were hundreds of places to search and to reach them we had to stand on slippery rocks. I couldn’t reach most of the timbers of the bridge so I gave up and began looking amongst the rocks on the bank. Then I couldn’t help but remember that glint that came through the hole so I searched the top of the bridge and ended up with my arm through the hole in the bridge again. So far every car that had come through had been very slow, so I wasn’t worried about being run over, just making the neighbors think I was crazy. I didn’t mind being a crazy person to somebody I’d never see again. I reached, groped, probed. I found a stick and poked it around. I was just about to give up when the stick hit something metal and I heard a clunk, tink, tunk, tuuummbbble, splash. I yanked the stick out and lay face down trying to see what fell. All I could see was river rocks and water. I was so excited about maybe finally finding the cache that I dashed down to the river bank and saw a cracker tin with a mirror glued to one side lopsidedly floating down the river.

“Get it!” I exclaimed as I slipped over the slick rocks. “It’s getting away!”

The cracker tin seemed to mock us in slow motion as it quietly floated away. Little currents would grab the corner of the mirror and make it turn lazily as we half dashed, half swam down the river. The tin had a head start.

“Slow down you crazy r…” I stepped into a fishing hole and disappeared under the surface. I came up sputtering and attempting to swim.

“Don’t worry,” Twiggy said. “The farmer said there was a log jam ahead. It’ll get stuck there.”

“Why is it floating if it’s metal?” I asked.

“Because it’s full of air?”

“Oh, yeah, hehe. I hope it doesn’t leak.”

We waded to the river bank and followed the river until we reached the log jam. Luckily it was only a small one so we were able to walk out onto a log and survey the river upstream from us. I noticed that the log was very worn, like children played at the river bank, and fished for spooky catfish and trout. Seeing the worn spots on the log made the river seem a friendlier place.

“What?” Twiggy asked.

“Nothing. I was just noticing that people like this river. They come down here a lot. It’s like a member of their family that has been running near their houses for longer than they can remember and I like it. I really like it. Thank you for bringing me here.”

“Even after you got dunked in the creek?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t bring you here. The cache did. Look, there it is.”

We walked the log closer to where the tin was floating. We had to use a long stick to get the tin around a snag, but we eventually plucked it from the creek.

“You open it,” he said. “The first few caches are always more fun to open. Let’s see what’s in it.”

I pried and pulled, but the lid was really tight. I guess that was good. Had it been loose it might have leaked and sunk. Twiggy pried the lid off and handed it to me. I opened the mysterious box and looked inside. It was damp. Moisture clung to the bag the logbook was in, but the log was dry inside its baggie. The rest of the contents were a different story.

“I think we better take this to the river bank where we can spread things out and let them dry.”

We sat on a little grassy spot and dumped out the contents, then sorted and dried them as much as we could. We had to throw away a card and some stickers that were too wet and worn out to be any good. I found a little purple bendy rabbit, a squished penny, a kid’s meal toy of a colorful parrot, and a bottle opener. There was also an odd tag attached to a jointed metal moose.

“What’s this?” I asked as I held it up for Twiggy’s inspection.

“Oh cool! That’s a Travel Bug… or one of its cousins. Let me see.” I handed him the tag. “We’re going on the road so we should take it.”

“Why?”

“Because it wants to travel.”

“How do you know? Did you ask it?”

“We can ask it when we get online again. If it wants to stay in the area we can always drop it off locally.”

“You make it sound like the Travel Bug has an opinion about this,” I pointed out.

“It does! Though we need to read the site and see what it wants to do. If it is trying to go east we should drop it off in another cache. But if it wants to go west we should take it and log it at the caches we find.”

I was deciding I knew absolutely nothing about geocaching when he said, “Good find!” That kind of made up for my confusion about what a Travel Bug might be. How could a bug be a moose?

“Do I get to trade?” I asked.

“Sure, if you see something you like. What did you bring to put in?”

“I… uh, rats. I don’t have anything.”

“Is there something you’d like?” he asked.

“Well… I was thinking the bendy rabbit matched that green monster van we are using. Maybe he wants to go along.”

“Okay, here,” he said and pulled a keychain from our university out of his pocket.

“But that’s yours!” I said. “I don’t want you to give up something of yours.”

“I worked at the bookstore when the semester started. I got them cheap. I bought them to put in caches. So… add it and take the rabbit.”

“It’s probably been here since Easter. It needs rescuing.”

“Now you’re talking like inanimate objects have an opinion about what happens to them.”

We signed the log Team Twiggy, since it was Twiggy who was determined to win the trip.

“I’m hungry. I say we rehide this thing and go back to town,” he said.

“But we’re soaking wet. We have no place to change. We… we don’t have a shower! Or a bathroom! What are we going to do?”

“First things first. The cache needs rehiding at ground zero, where the sun don’t shine. Where did you find it?”

“I don’t know. I was poking through the hole with a stick and I knocked it loose. So I really found it floating in the river.”

“Gabby, this is not a river. This is a creek.”

“Okay, well, I found it floating in the creek.”

He turned the cracker tin this way and that.

“We know the mirror is meant to catch the light of a flashlight from below the bridge, so I say we find a spot at ground zero where the cache will be somewhat out of view, but where a flashlight beam might hit the mirror and when we log the cache we tell the CO what we did.”

“CO?”

“Cache owner.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“If he wants to check on it he can.”

We put all the contents back into the cracker tin, making sure the log book was securely wrapped in the little Ziploc bag. If it was going to take regular dunkings in the creek it needed that baggie. Twiggy gave me a hand up and stood there for a moment as if he wasn’t quite ready to go back.

“Was that worth a favorite point?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I think it would be better if the creek was lower and we had a working flashlight.”

“But did you have fun?”

I kind of got the impression he was asking a bigger question. So I kept him waiting a moment.

“Yeah, that was fun.”

“Even with the soaking wet search and the steep hill and falling and dancing away from catfish?”

“There wasn’t really a catfish, was there?”

“No, I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“It was fun even after all that,” I said. “And I even got a bendy rabbit.”

“I’m glad,” he said with a firm shoulder hug.