Читать книгу Geogirl - Kelly Rysten - Страница 12
ОглавлениеChapter 6
That first night didn’t go very well. I had hoped our easygoing friendship would follow us day and night. I took that as a hint that Twiggy might be a little more serious about actually having a real relationship than I was. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Twiggy. It was that he didn’t act like a person who had girl friends and relationships. He was one of the gang, with everybody he met. He would help anybody tie their shoe and handed out shoulder hugs to anybody for any reason. I even saw him hug a girl in line at the coffee shop who was happy to get a ten percent discount on Pink Ribbon Day. If you wore a pink ribbon to the coffee shop you got a discount and part of your purchase went to cancer research. She didn’t have enough money for the large coffee without the discount and she just had enough with it. She clapped her hands and clasped her coffee like it as a real treat and Twiggy high fived her and gave her a hug. So I didn’t read a lot of commitment into Twiggy’s shoulder hugs.
Right now I could identify with the girl who was happy to get ten percent off a cup of coffee. That was only thirty cents. Being a broke college student had its ups and downs. I was thinking it also had its looses and tights. I needed to be careful if I was going to eat and shower over the next few weeks. Laying in the van, I wasn’t sure what was more important to me. After climbing around muddy river banks and taking a couple of dunkings in the creek a shower was more tempting than breakfast.
Twiggy woke to find me attempting to put makeup on in the rear view mirror of the van.
“What are you doing?”
“Attempting to make myself presentable. Is my hair still sticking straight up?” I turned my head to see but the mirror was too small to see the top of my head if I tipped my head down.
“Not quite,” he said.
“I wish we had a place to plug in a curling iron. We should have traded your car for one of those new cars with electrical outlets inside.”
“Do you think there is a student that would trade a car like that for my car?” he asked.
“Uh… no. I guess there were some who had a car like that but they’d want to keep it for the summer.”
“Did you sleep okay?” he asked.
“It was a little chilly,” I said. “But after I warmed up my spot I did okay.”
“I could have helped in that department,” he said. “Ready for some breakfast?”
“No, but I don’t see any way to be ready.”
“Coffee?”
I huffed in frustration. I looked in the mirror.
“Hair gel?” he asked.
“Hair gel builds up. It might help for one day but it’s not a long term solution.”
“What is a long term solution?”
“A shower in the mornings.”
“I tell you what. We’ll get some breakfast and some coffee and we’ll hit the road where nobody will recognize us and we’ll find the next cache and then we’ll find a place with a shower.”
“I don’t want to be seen in there,” I said. “Let’s hit the road and find a place to eat breakfast where nobody will recognize us.”
“Gabby, you look fine.”
“I do not look fine! I look like I haven’t showered in two days and spent the night sleeping in a van. Guys are so lucky. They can go two days without a shower and spend the night in a van and they come out of it looking perfectly normal.”
“I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult.”
“It’s neither. It’s just a fact of life. Women need showers.”
“We could pretend it’s Halloween.” He took one look at me and changed his mind. “Okay, bad idea. Wait here while I walk down to the ATM and then we’ll go someplace down the road for breakfast. Did you still want to find that Pink Panther Cache?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a four/five.”
“I know. And that’s supposed to be really difficult.”
“Yeah.”
“Harder than the bridge.”
“Yeah, but one man’s two is another man’s five.”
“Okay, we’ll look at it again over breakfast.”
He walked down the street and I went back to trying to get my hair to stay down. I finally resorted to the hair gel. When he came back he was talking on his cell phone and stuffing his wallet into his pocket.
“Ready?”
“Yeah, what do you think this Pink Panther Cache really is?” I asked.
“I don’t remember the description. We’ll go over it again at breakfast.”
“What if we can’t find an internet connection?”
“Then we go by the one on the GPS.”
“Maybe we should eat breakfast here where we know we will have one. We can line up the day’s geocaching before we take off.”
“Okay.”
“Just point out people I know so I can hide.”
I looked at the menu, weighing all the options. I could get an entire breakfast for the price of the latte but it was the latte that I craved.
“What are you getting?” Twiggy asked.
“Shh, I’m sending out distress signals.”
“What kind of distress signals?”
“I’m hoping a latte down the street hears my pleas and comes to my rescue.”
“Ah, I see. And if it doesn’t?”
“Then I’m having the special of the day.”
“That’s just a two egg breakfast.”
“Then I’ll half the order. Will they half a two egg breakfast for me?”
“Why are you scrimping?”
“Because I don’t eat much in the morning and because I don’t want to have to ask my mom for more money.”
“Your mom’s the financier of the family?”
“No, not really. She is just the telephone answerer.”
“And if you were to talk to your dad?”
“He would be more willing to send some and less likely to tell my mom he did.”
“Well, if you need to call home let me know. I can get you through to your dad.”
“There’s only one problem with that,” I said.
“What?”
“They don’t know… um… they don’t know…”
His eye brow went up a tad.
“I didn’t tell them you were a guy. They think I’m trying to help a girl friend get home without falling asleep at the wheel and then visiting her family for a few days before I come home.”
“So, I learn something new. You know how to work one over your parents.”
“Do you think they would let me go if they knew?”
“No.”
“Where does your dad think you are?” I asked.
“No worries. He thinks I’m on my way home but he thinks I’ll stop in every town along the way, find a party to crash and get drunk every night. He knows I’ll show up eventually.”
“Doesn’t he worry about you if he thinks that’s the kind of lifestyle you live?”
“Eh, he figures he survived it. It must be what sons do after school gets out.”
“But you don’t want to party your way home?”
“I tried it once. If you crash a party you don’t know anybody. You can get free booze but the hangover isn’t worth it.”
“This must be boring to you.”
“Boring? No. Today we get to find a Pink Panther Cache. What’s boring about that?”
“What do we have to do to find it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s going to take a hike. We have to earn that five terrain rating.”
“At least we are used to walking from one end of campus to the other between classes.”
“It’s going to be a twenty minute drive to the next town.”
“Cool! Morrison will be happy to see a different cache.”
On the way to the Pink Panther Cache Twiggy drove through the Coffee Caboose, which is a little coffee to-go shop housed in a real caboose. Since trains don’t use cabooses anymore the orphaned train cars have been put to use in every little town in the area. One of them is even painted yellow, has a periscope attached and goes by The Yellow SUBmarine.
“Hold on,” Twiggy said as he pulled up under the big willow tree standing beside the Coffee Caboose. “You might as well get this one while we’re here. Look under the steps and there’s a black hide a key stuck to the underside.”
“It’s no fair if you tell me!” I said.
“Just hop out and sign it. It’s one more smiley.”
“What’s it rated?”
“Just a one/one but every smiley counts.”
I felt very self conscious as I went over to the steps and began feeling around underneath. I had to get down on hands and knees and look before I spotted it. I signed the log and replaced the cache, then jogged back to the van.
“Find it?” Twiggy asked.
“Yup.”
“When you go to log it, remember it’s called Caboose’s Caboose.”
“Okay.” I had to think about that one before I realized it was on the back end of the caboose.
We hit the road and put in twenty miles before we turned on our newly charged GPS and navigated to a parking spot. This time we did bring water. Twiggy had a book pack full of all kinds of geocaching things, including more of the little keychains from school. He also had a zippered pouch of what he called tools of the trade. I’d seen inside it and there were all kinds of little metal tools. I’d just have to see what kind of tools geocaching required. He also carried extra baggies, pens and little plastic containers. He seemed to be prepared for just about any geocache hunt.
It was a hot day but there were plenty of tall, shady trees and the trail looked well marked and well traveled. The sign said, “Lookout Tower .7, Kendall Remote Camp 3, Timberland Trail 4.5”.
“Look out, here we come,” Twiggy said.
“Is that where the Pink Panther is hiding?” I asked.
“That’s what I am guessing since the GPS says the cache is half a mile away.”
“But the sign says seven tenths.”
“The GPS tells us the distance as the crow flies. I think we learned from our last hunt that we should follow the trail and it obviously has some twists and turns in it.”
“I’ve got my walking feet! We brought water! Let’s go!”
We found that Twiggy and I have different hiking styles. The trail was very different from our hill climb the previous day. While we were looking for the cache on the bridge we were uncertain and just following the line on the GPS screen. This time we knew to follow the trail and the path was wide, firm and scenic. I was excited and when I get excited I have energy. We would start a conversation and I would hurry further and further ahead until it became hard to talk, then something would catch my attention and I’d look at tracks, or watch a bird, or notice squirrels playing in the canopy. Twiggy walked a slow and steady pace and caught up with me just in time for the bird to fly away or my curiosity to wear off and then off I would go again. So on the flats our conversation had a sort of yoyo effect. When the trail turned and began a steady uphill climb Twiggy’s steady pace kept up and my flightiness slowed down and I trudged along next to him. I became very grateful for the shade and stopped frequently to catch my breath and drink some water.
“Do you ever see wildlife besides birds on these hikes?” I asked.
“Oh yeah! I see lots of squirrels and chipmunks. If you watch the trail you might spot raccoon or possum tracks. I see deer occasionally, not that I have had a lot of time to go hiking. This is the first chance I’ve gotten in a long time because school kept me so busy.”
“Busy? You didn’t look busy when I saw you.”
“You saw me the few times that I wasn’t busy.”
“You mean you study, too?”
“You’ve seen me study.”
“You didn’t look like you were studying. When I study I look like I am going to have a brain implosion. You… must look like you are just reading a book.”
“Don’t you mean explosion?”
“No, it definitely feels like an implosion.”
“So what does an implosion feel like?”
“Like the sides of my head are just going to cave in and my brain is going to shrivel up and die from sheer trivialness.”
“Trivialness? What do you find trivial about your classes?”
“Like Forestry 101,” I said.
“What are you doing taking a forestry class?”
“I thought I might like to be a ranger,” I answered. “I like the forest. It’s friendly.”
“Okay, so what did you think was trivial about the forestry class?”
“Well… like plant densities and different kinds of forest canopies.”
“Gabby, what do you think forest management involves?”
“Uh… well… the only time I’ve seen forest rangers they were telling campers where the best trails were, or leading nature hikes.”
“And you think that’s all rangers do? You don’t need a degree to point out trails on a map to people.”
“I know, that’s why I thought getting my degree in forestry might be easy and I might enjoy the job.”
He just shook his head that I could be so naïve. “Who puts out a fire if the forest is burning?”
“Firemen.”
“And who do you think the firemen work for?”
“The fire department.”
“Some of them do, but many of them work for the Forest Service. Who stocks the outhouses?”
“Rangers, I suppose. At least the ones who manage the campgrounds.”
“And who maintains the roads and trails.”
“Okay! So they don’t just point out trails to people. What does plant density have to do with any of that?”
“The forest is an ecosystem. You did learn what an ecosystem is, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I learned that way back in Biology 101.”
“The forest service is in charge of this ecosystem and every part of it depends on a different climate to survive. Every plant that lives here is in balance with the nature around it…” he launched into a detailed lecture and I swore I was back in class again except that class wasn’t nearly this strenuous. “So do you see why forest rangers have to know about the different plants and where they live within the forest they are in charge of?”
“So forestry was going to get complicated, too?” I asked.
“If you stay in school long enough to get a degree any subject is going to get complicated.”
“Maybe I should be an artist. What’s complicated about art?”
“I suppose you will have to take Art 102 to find out,” he said sarcastically.
“People like you make me feel sooo, stupid,” I said with a touch of frustration in my voice.
“Hey!” He said and stopped right in the middle of the trail. “I… do not… have… stupid friends. If I thought you had even an ounce of stupidity in your little finger I would be outa here.”
He jumped on me so suddenly I didn’t think about what he was saying. I only knew I was being scolded and it took me by surprise and all I could do was react. I have to say my reaction wasn’t the best. My eyes teared up and I counted to four before I decided I better hike… fast.
“Gabby!” he said as he jogged a little to catch up. “Do you think our friendship was accidental? You think we’re out here just because I needed a partner for a contest? No! We’re out here because I chose you. There’s nobody I would rather hike with, nobody I’d rather ride with, nobody who I’d take pictures of a silly mooses and M&Ms with. You’ll figure out what you want to do with your life. Just don’t think it’s going to be easy. Every major you choose will eventually get very detailed and complex or they wouldn’t have to teach it at a university.”
“What about geocaching? Does it get detailed and complex, too?”
“Not enough to worry you. You will decide how complex you want to make it and you’ll settle at a level you are comfortable with.”
I held up my little finger.
“Nope, not even a little stupid,” he said and kissed it gently.
“Do you think it can find a Pink Panther Cache?” I asked.
“We’ll just have to see.”
“I wish we could find all the caches in these shady woods. I love all the ferns and moss covered roots and twisty branches. It’s a forest with character. Golly, this trail is steep.”
“The lookout tower is on top of the mountain so it’s bound to be uphill.”
“Oh yeah. One time I saw a tube of little plastic dragons and I thought it would be cool to put them in caches.”
“It would. I bet the other geocachers would like finding little plastic dragons.”
“But if I had them I’d be tempted to put them in all these little caves along the trail.”
“What caves?”
“Look!” I said stopping at a random place on the trail.
This forest was so full of interesting trees that any place had a tiny dragon cave by the side of the trail. I led him to a twisted, old tree, its roots covered with spongy, green moss. The roots were a tangled mass and glistened with dampness in the little bit of sunlight that broke through the canopy. “Can’t you imagine a tiny dragon living in a little cave like this?” I placed a rock on the mossy opening where a dragon might stand surveying the broad trail at his front door.
“I have to admit I never thought of them like that,” he said. “But if I was a tiny dragon I might choose this forest to live in. That’s one thing I can count on with you. Your imagination always keeps things interesting.”
“The two headed red dragon would live in this cave,” I declared.
As we neared the top of the mountain the hillsides became very rocky and the forest was more open. The lookout tower stood over the surrounding forest like a protective old guardian. It was an abandoned fire lookout tower, so it was a wooden structure surrounded by a metal catwalk and metal steps spiraling up to a room at the very top.
“Okay, where is the cache?” I asked.
The GPS led us to the corner of the tower. We looked up through the springed steel to the room above.
“Up we go?” I asked.
“Unless it’s right here, but I don’t think so. There’s no way to hide a regular sized container right here.”
“Yes, there is, if these boards are loose.”
We tested the boards but they were all too tight.
“Does it say anything about it being magnetic?” I asked.
“It’s too big to be magnetic. They posted a picture of the original cache and it is an ammo can full of fake jewels. At least it was when it was new. It’s probably got regular swag in it now.”
“Why would it be full of fake jewels, other than the fact that they would make okay swag?”
“Did you see the original Pink Panther movie?”
“That came out before I was born.”
“Me, too, but my dad likes old movies. The Pink Panther in the movie was a jewel.”
“So it’s named the Pink Panther Cache because of the contents?”
“I think so.”
“So now it should be called the cheap swag cache?”
“I don’t know. We need to find it and see.”
There was a gate across the metal stairs but it wasn’t locked and there were no signs warning us to stay out. As we climbed up we watched the wall beside us for nooks and crannies where a cache could be hidden out of sight. It didn’t take us long to reach the top of the stairs and our way was blocked by a metal grate. It was heavy, because it had to be built sturdy enough for a person to walk on. It appeared to be built so that the ranger on duty would come up the stairs, lift the hatch and then close it behind him so once he was in the tower he could walk all the way around the room watching for smoke or flames. Twiggy lifted the grate and I snuck through, then I held it up while he climbed through the gap.
“Wow! I can see for miles!” I said as I gazed out over the forest. “How far can you see?” I asked Twiggy.
“I can see for miles, too,” he pointed out with a hint of humor in his voice.
The door to the lookout had the glass broken out of it but the door knob still worked. I turned the doorknob and pushed but the door didn’t move.
“Try pulling. They would want a ranger to be able to push his way out.”
Glass and broken boards littered the floor of the room at the top.
“Why do people have to tear up a place just because it’s been left alone a while?” I asked.
“I don’t know. If it wasn’t such a long hike we could clean it up a bit but that’s a long way to carry some of this stuff.”
“Where does the GPS say to look?”
“It won’t work very well through the roof. I say we just look around.”
There were plenty of places to hide a geocache. There was about thirty feet of cupboards with a workbench top to them. Some of the doors were broken off and many swung crookedly. I looked in each one. There was one curious cupboard that was tall and narrow. The shelves had slats. Some of the shelves were missing and the bottom one had a chunk out of one corner.
“Do you know what that is?” Twiggy asked.
“No. I was trying to guess. If it didn’t have these weird shelves I’d think it was a broom closet.”
“It’s the refrigerator.”
“The… na uh! It can’t be. There’s nothing in there to cool stuff.”
“The shelves have gaps so the air will flow. Look up. I bet it’s got a chimney sort of thing. And if you look down I bet it is a shaft that goes all the way to the ground. They put blocks of ice in the bottom and the air flow brought the cool air up through the shelves. I am beginning to see why this is the Pink Panther Cache though. After I thought about all the doors opening in different directions it is just like the opening of the cartoon show.”
This was especially true when we lifted the bottom shelf of the old refrigerator and realized the cache was at the bottom of the shaft where the ice would be placed. I mentally went through all the doors and which direction they opened. The gate was left, the hatch up, the door in the refrigerator right, the shelf up. We had to go to the bottom and see what opened at the bottom to make an ice block shaped opening. So… push the door out, lift the grate up, descend the stairs, push the gate out, yes this was beginning to feel more and more like a Pink Panther cartoon. We searched the bottom of the lookout tower until we found a metal door, but it was locked.
“Shoot,” I said. “Now what?”
“Never fear,” Twiggy said. “There’s usually a combination in the hint or description.”
He brought up the hint and it said “elevator.”
“Well, I think we have the right idea,” he said. “We thought it was in a shaft. But what about a combination?”
He switched to the description. We found a story about hiding the cache and being confronted by a cranky…
“Uh, Twiggy? What’s that?” I asked.
Lumbering up the side of the mountain was a big, brown form. It was slow and it wasn’t coming our direction so we only got glimpses of it.
“I don’t know. Let me read the description. Let me know if it gets closer.”
He squinted at the screen.
“Want me to try?” I asked.
“If you want. It says they got up early in the morning to take a hike and they got to the tower. Then they got chased up by a…”
“Bear,” I said.
“Yeah and they had never seen a bear before so they were very excited about seeing a bear…”
“No, Twiggy, I mean that thing over there is a bear.”
“It is? Oh fuck. Sorry.”
“Maybe we can get to the cache from above? Or maybe the bear isn’t interested.”
“You read the description, while I watch the bear.” He handed me the GPS and I read the story on the little screen. “Quick, read quick,” Twiggy said a little nervously.
“I did. There is no combination. But… here’s something we can try. The story does have numbers,” I pointed out. “We just have to figure out how they apply to our situation.” I read, “‘It was the crack of dawn and the clock blinked six o’clock.’ So where is six o’clock on the combination lock? It’ll be straight down from the zero.” He twirled the spinner a few times to clear it, then found the number opposite the zero. “Then it goes into all the problems they had reaching the parking spot. Wow, a flat tire and …”
“Gabby, just find the next number so we can get out of here.”
“So they didn’t reach the tower until nine. What number is at nine o’clock?”
“I don’t know it could be one of three of four. The lines are so close together. So find the last one while I experiment.”
“Their little boy tripped and broke his finger. Aww, poor kid.”
“Gabby, the bear is getting closer.”
“Then there was a bear that chased them up the stairs and hung around for an hour. So I wonder if an hour represents the one o’clock position? But it does say they didn’t get home from hiding the cache until eight o’clock that night. That must include a trip to urgent care… Maybe they hid more than…”
“Uh, Gabby, go up the stairs.”
“Why?”
“Yah! Yah bear! Go away!”
He sat there at the door clearly bothered by the nearness of… Yikes! The bear! Oh it was so cool! A bear! Right there on the hillside with us!
“Try six o’clock, nine o’clock, eight o’clock.”
“Hurry, hurry,” he muttered to himself as I watched the bear.
“Don’t hurry or you’ll mess up. Take your time and think.”
“Nine…”
He fiddled with the lock as the bear noticed it had company.
“Oh shoot, oh shoot.”
“Oh look! Little ones!” I exclaimed excitedly.
The bear stood up and sniffed the air.
“Gabby, go upstairs. The bear will stop at the grate.”
“It’s not worried about us. It’s just here for a snack. There must be berries out there or something. You don’t have any snacks in the pack do you?”
He fiddled faster and the bear wandered closer, sniffed the air again.
I heard the snap of a lock unlocking and the rattle of the metal door opening.
“Quick! Get the cache!” I bent down to retrieve the cache and he stood up to get out of my way. “Yah! Yah bear! Back! Back I say!”
The bear was making conversational noises and walking toward us. I had heard somewhere that bears could run very fast for short distances.
“Gabby! Get in! Get in now! Now! Ahhhh!” He shoved me gently toward the opening where the ice was added to the refrigerator. I glanced over my shoulder, saw the bear galloping our direction. I crawled in, realized Twiggy was crawling in, too, and stood up. We stood nose to nose. There was just enough space for two thin people to stand, but our feet were still exposed to the bear’s reach. The metal door banged as the bear tried to see inside.
“Can you climb the shaft?” Twiggy asked.
“How?”
“Push out with your hands and your feet. It’s called a chimney climb.”
“Not with the cache,” I said.
The cache was beside me. I didn’t want to let it go and have the bear get it.
“I wanted to get closer to you, but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” he said. “Try climbing. I can do it but I don’t want to leave you here.”
“How?”
“Push out. Like this. Then while your hands are bearing your weight bring your feet up. Push out. Raise your hands. Push out. Just keep pushing outward and upward until you get to the shelf in the refrigerator. Push it up with your head and push the door open.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No!”
“O… kay. What if I fall on you?”
“You won’t. I know you can do it. If Santa Claus can do it you can, too. Push out. Now pick up your feet. Are you slipping?”
“No, wow, I never did this before.”
“So while you are stable bring your feet up. Push out. Got it?”
“Uh, I think so.”
I tried to copy Twiggy’s actions and it worked slowly. I heard the bang of the metal door at the bottom and tried to climb faster.
“I took archery for PE!” I muttered as I climbed. “Why didn’t I take refrigerator climbing?”
“Let go with your hands and find a higher spot.”
I couldn’t believe it! I was climbing a refrigerator!
“This is so weird,” I said. “This is going to make a great log on the cache page.”
“Just keep climbing. When you get to the tower I’ll follow.”
“Okay, too bad we can’t get pictures of this.” My voice started echoing in the enclosed space but there wasn’t enough space for a proper echo so it just sounded hollow.
The shaft seemed longer than the stairs but I thought that was because I was taking smaller steps and doing something new. If I was used to climbing refrigerators it would go a lot quicker.
“Ooo, ouch!” I said as I bumped my head on the underside of the bottom shelf. “I think I made it!”
I had to push out with my feet and wrestle the shelf. It didn’t move easily. I tried banging on it and it popped loose.
“Fore!” I yelled as it slid down the shaft. “Shelf attack!” Whack!
“Ouch!”
“Sorry, I tried to warn you. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I think so. It just surprised me.”
I bumped my head on the next shelf too, but I thought I had enough space to crawl out of the refrigerator. I was glad the door was not like a modern refrigerator. The door was more like a cupboard door and swung open easily. It took some squirming to get through the opening but finally I stood up once more inside the lookout tower.
“Okay! I made it!” I yelled down the shaft.
“All right, coming up,” called Twiggy.
Bang, bang, bang went the door as the bear tried to reach Twiggy’s feet. It didn’t sound like an angry attack, but it was too close for comfort. I ran out onto the catwalk and looked down. The bear noticed movement above and paced below. In the distance I could see two bear cubs alternately eating and batting at each other. I didn’t know if they were playing or irritating each other. Probably both.
It didn’t take Twiggy long to climb the shaft but he had a harder time climbing out the door. When he stood up he found me grinning ear to ear pointing out to the catwalk. One cub dashed away from the other then turned around and invited a new attack.
“There’s bears!” I said excitedly. “Can we take a picture? It’ll be great to post it on the log!”
“Hold on,” he said. “Let me get the pack and the cache.”
He untied a rope attached to his belt loop, then went back to the refrigerator and pulled his pack up the shaft.
“It does have a little food in it,” he explained.
When he had the pack in hand he unzipped it and pulled the cache out.
Clang! Cloong! The bear was trying to open the grate.
Twiggy pulled the lock out of his pack and carefully used it to lock the grate closed.
“At what point do we ask for help?” I asked.
“I don’t know. What about you? How long are you willing to be stuck up here?”
“She’ll get bored and leave, then we can hike back to the van.”
We sat on the floor of the watchtower and looked through the contents of the ammunition container. I still was not so entrenched in the hobby that I called it an ammo can. There were still a few of the big, plastic fake jewels, but the geocachers before us had traded for most of them and the rest of the contents were typical of all the other caches I had found: Three fake jewels, a Matchbox car, a little girls’ bracelet, a stubby screwdriver, a business card for an auto shop, two erasers, and a plastic lizard. I signed the log with an additional note, “We saw bears!”
“I think we should trade for a jewel. It’s the one thing that will remind us of the cache.”
“Okay, sounds good to me. I don’t usually take things anymore. Just looking for them is the fun part.”
“Even if you get chased up refrigerators by protective mother bears?”
“Yeah, though I wish you’d heed my warnings faster.”
“I was more excited to see bears than I was afraid of them attacking.”
“If an animal has young, weighs four times as much as you and has sharp teeth and claws, I suggest not taking any chances.”
“Can I still take a few pictures?”
“From up here,” he said.
“All right!”
I was so excited. I had never seen a wild bear, much less taken a picture of one.
“Stand right here,” I said. “Let’s see if I can get a picture of you and a bear at the same time.”
I really couldn’t. The angles were all wrong. I could see the bear below the catwalk but in a picture there would be no way to tell. I tried sitting on the rail but Twiggy gave me worried looks instead of smiling. The best picture I could get showed a worried Twiggy with the rump of the bear sticking out behind the edge of the catwalk.
“Okay, my turn,” said Twiggy. “I want a picture in the watchtower. Sit on the counter. Here, we want the cache in the picture, too. Okay, turn a little bit.”
He looked past me to the forest below.
“Okay, look at me. Smile. Smile! Come on I want to see it in your eyes. I like happy eyes… Thank you.” He pressed the shutter release. “Do you want to see it?”
“Okay!”
He showed me the picture and then we clicked further to see the picture I took of him.
“Maybe I need to take Photography 101.”
“It might help if I hadn’t been worried about you falling over the rail into the jaws of the bear.”
“Okay, then… let me take a different one. Show the camera how to climb out of a refrigerator shaft.”
The bears were very content to hang around under the watchtower all day. We ate little cupcakes, granola and drank two pints of water we had packed. We lowered the cache back down the shaft on a rope so we wouldn’t have to spend time replacing it on the ground. We could just close the door, snap on the lock and take off quickly for the van. We unlocked the grate. We checked the ground for bears. Time after time they were still there, just quietly laying about in the berry patch. We caught a couple of glimpses of the cubs. I even got a pretty good picture of them. If I was going to continue geocaching I was definitely going to have to get a better camera. And a GPS. Finally, as the light was failing, we couldn’t see any bears. Maybe they had gone to wherever bears go to sleep. We crept down the stairs only to be met by mama bear walking out of the woods toward us.
“This is ridiculous. She isn’t scared of us. Bears are supposed to take off running if you threaten them,” Twiggy said.
“Maybe they are braver when they have cubs.”
“I don’t want to spend the night here. We have no sleeping bags. The windows are open to the elements. It’s summer, but it’s still going to get cold.”
“I’m willing to risk it if you are. Maybe if they see us leaving they’ll let us go.”
“Do you have any experience with bears?”
“No. Do you?”
“No. But I’ve seen online videos of bear encounters.”
“Yup, they always run away.”
“Except for that one guy who got mauled and ended up losing his leg.”
“It wasn’t this bear that did it. The rangers got that bear.”
“So…”
We crept down the stairs again. Twiggy insisted on going first. He stood there in a fighting stance daring the bear to come close.
“What do you think?” he whispered. “Are they gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whatever you do, don’t run toward the van. The tower is better protection.”
“Right.”
We walked toward the trail gawking around like two little kids in a haunted house. The light was dim and we really only decided to try the trail because we thought the bear had gone home and we had the head lamp. We just passed the first bushes and had started to relax when there was a snuff and a whuff from the brush and we both jumped and dashed back to the lookout tower. Twiggy was nice enough to let me jump over the gate first and we stopped at the grate huffing and puffing. It was twice as heavy this time and we ended up back in the office room sitting there collecting our thoughts and giving our confidence the little boost it needed to spend a night in the tower.
“So, which side of the bed do you want this time?” Twiggy asked.
“The linoleum. The wood is too hard.”
“You got it. Gabby… I’m sorry I got you into this. If you would rather I take you home…”
“No! No. I want to keep going. I don’t know how we can ever win the contest only finding one cache a day, but I do want to try. If I go home I’ll read books and listen to music and wish I could be doing something outside. But there won’t be anywhere to go and… here there is. There is always somewhere to go and something to do. I saw a bear today! That is so cool! And I found tiny dragon houses in the tree roots. I was really hoping for a shower but seeing a bear was worth it. I can’t wait to see what we find next!”
We ended up spooning that night. We started out just laying there side by side, shivering in the night. Tired and hungry but unable to sleep, we finally found a little warmth curling up together. Twiggy was surprised, but grateful, when I finally scooted over and he put his arms around me trying to conserve the little bit of warmth we had. We woke up often, still shivering. One of the times I woke up in the night I could hear howling in the distance.
“Can you hear that?” I whispered in case he was asleep.
“Coyotes,” he said.
“Or wolves?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen either in these mountains.”
“Maybe I do want to be a forest ranger after all.”
Dawn colored the sky very early in the morning atop the mountain. I had bed head again and no mirror or brush to help my attempts at taming it.
“It’s not bed head if you sleep on the floor. Then it’s floor head.”
“We’re lucky we got chased back. We almost left without locking up the cache again.”
“Oh yeah.”
We took a look around the watchtower and didn’t see bears anywhere so we descended the stairs once more and checked on the cache before locking it up safe and sound.
“Take a picture of the tower so we will remember it always,” I said as we found the trail again. He turned around and lined up the camera for the picture.
“You too,” he said. “Stand next to that rock and you’ll be framed right.”
And so we had our second adventure captured in pixels, and we hiked down the mountain to the awful green van. Home sweet home.
“That thing is so ugly,” I said as we approached it. “But it sure is good to see it again.”
“I agree one hundred percent.”
“What do geocachers call their cars?”
“Usually geomobiles or cachemobiles.”
“With this avocado green van I think it looks more like guacamole than a cachemobile. Maybe it’s a cacheamolé.”
“I don’t know, but it’s the pits,” he joked.
“There’s enough dirt in it to grow an avocado tree.”
“I’m starving and talking about Mexican food isn’t helping. Let’s go eat.”
“It’s a deal.”
We were so hungry that I didn’t even think about my hair. I don’t know what the other customers thought when they saw us at the closest café. We looked like drifters, which I guess we were, temporarily. But we were very hungry, happy drifters with a goal in mind.
“Insane Asylum is next,” I announced after three quarters of a huge burger had been devoured.
“Oh man, are you sure? We just lived through a bear encounter and you want to find Insane Asylum?”
“It’s got a good rating. We need all the good ratings we can get.”
“You mean difficult ratings. Would you allow me to define difficult?”
“We found the Pink Panther Cache, didn’t we? And that one was supposed to be harder.”
“It was harder. We got trapped by a bear and spent a freezing night on the mountain. I’d say we earned that one.”
“Well, maybe I’m crazy, but I want to find Insane Asylum.”
“Okay, you’re the boss.”
“And after that I want a real shower.”
