Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
nature will appear maybe one centimeter higher on a piece of paper that practically no one
will ever see? I dutifully trudge back upstairs and grab Dylan's piano topics. Then I race
back to the car and peel out.
It's pouring rain when I arrive at the bike trail, and the spot seems deserted. The cache is
now exactly four hours old—surely it's been found once or twice by now. I'm drenched by
thetimeIfinallyseethetinypillbottlehiddeninthetallgrassatthebaseofawoodenpost.
I unscrew the top with shaking fingers, and I'm not sure if that's from the cold or not. For
some reason, I find myself thinking of the explorer Robert Scott. When Scott journeyed
to Antarctica in 1911, he had high hopes of being the first to reach the South Pole. But
on January 16, 1912, his team spotted a rock cairn on the ice ahead of them, and dog sled
tracks heading north. The Norwegian expedition of his rival Roald Amundsen had beaten
him to the Antarctic FTF by a matter of weeks. “
The worst has happened
,
” he wrote in his
thenameofsomeGPS-totingAmundseninsidethecache,butinsteadIfindsomethingI've
neverseenbeforeinmygeocachingcareer:acompletelyblanklogsheet.It'sunspoiledter-
ritory, just like the white fringes on the edges of maps during the Age of Discovery, and I
dofeellikeapioneerasIproudlymakemymarkwiththetinyballpointinmySwissArmy
knife.
If geocaching really is a video game downloaded into our skulls, then the initials atop
its high-score list are undoubtedly LVB, for Lee van der Bokke, a retired telecom en-
gineer from San Francisco's East Bay. In his eight years of caching, van der Bokke, aka
“Alamogul,” has racked up a staggering 53,353 finds, more than anyone else in the world
and almost 15,000 more than his nearest rival. That number is almost certainly on the low
side,infact;he'sprobablyloggedthreeorfourmorefindswhileI'vebeentypingthispara-
graph. He cached for many years as “Team Alamo” but grew tired of skeptical cachers as-
suminghisunlikelynumberswerebeingchurnedoutbysomemassiveconglomerate.“The
'team' is me and my wife,” he insists. “And she hates geocaching!”
Van der Bokke began as a casual cacher; he was stuck at home all day with a grumpy
eightysomething father, and geocaching was a way to pass the time while walking his
golden retriever, Casey, in the local hills. As his numbers grew, so did his intensity; he
cacheeveryday,”hetellsme.“I'llnormallygoacoupledaysaweek,somewherewithhigh
numbers.”
“So you plan in advance? 'Here's the area we're heading for, here are the thirty caches
we're going to get'?”
He laughs dismissively. “Oh, no. We don't go
anywhere
for just thirty.” This must be
the geocaching equivalent of Linda Evangelista's famous dictum that supermodels “don't
