OVEREDGE - Maphead - page 137

A week later, Dylan and I drop sixty bucks on a kid-friendly Geomate.jr, which comes
covered in pale green rubber and preloaded with a quarter of a million cache locations. We
slip in a pair of batteries, and thirty seconds later its little digital-watch screen is telling
us there's a cache exactly 0.17 mile southeast of our front door. Maybe I shouldn't be sur-
prised, but I am. “It's only nine hundred feet that way,” I say as we strike out down the
driveway, with Dylan waving his GPS back and forth in front of him at arm's length, like
it's Fisher-Price's My First Dowsing Rod. “It must be on the back of that hill across the
road.”
Geocachers always talk about how the joy of caching is in the journey, in the chance to
stop and see the unexpected places right under your nose that you otherwise would have
driven right past. In fact, it's so axiomatic that geocaching will reveal the hidden secrets
of your neighborhood that there's even an acronym in the trade for it: YAPIDKA, mean-
ing “Yet Another Park I Didn't Know About.” This is the lasting appeal of the game to
Dave Ulmer, who now spends the entire year motoring around the West in an RV. (When I
spoke to him, he was camping in the Bradshaw Mountains just south of Prescott, Arizona.)
He doesn't log his finds anymore, but, he says, “The minute I get the slightest bit bored,
I'll bring up Geocaching.com and see what's in my area. I don't care about the box full
of trinkets, but I might find an Indian corral or a fabulously unusual geologic site or lava
cavesorabeautifulforestviewpoint.You'renotgoingtostumbleonthatonyourown.But
with geocaching, you just walk right up to it.”
I'mnotexpectingthewoodsacrossthestreetfrommyhousetohideanymysteriesgreat-
er than a few broken beer bottles, but once Dylan crests the hill I hear him yell, “Whoa,
Dad, come check this out!” The Douglas firs on the hillside—the same ones I can see out
my office window every day—conceal an elaborate network of wooden boardwalks and
ramps winding through the forest, sometimes as high as ten feet in the air. We've been liv-
ing across the street from an Ewok village for three years and never knew!
“Some older kids built this to jump their BMX bikes,” explains a neighborhood girl,
cutting through the woods with her friends. I'm trying to listen politely without taking
my eyes off Dylan, who is running up and down the ramps making rocket-ship noises
and—hopefully—not getting tetanus from anything rusty and pokey. “But they left and
went to college, I think. Nobody uses them now.”
I look down at our toy receiver. My coordinates have “zeroed out”; I'm now standing on
auniquely specified pointontheEarth'ssurface, rightdowntoone-thousandth ofaminute
oflongitudeandlatitude.I'munexpectedlyawestruckatsomethingItakeforgrantedwhen
I use GPS to navigate in the car: every time I take a few steps, the numbers change on the
toy in my hand, and that's because it's listening to machines in space . A $20 billion array
of sophisticated military satellites is helping me find Tupperware in the woods. Truly we
are living in the future.