OVEREDGE - Maphead - page 146

wakeupforlessthan$10,000aday.”Thirtysoundsprettygoodtome—itwouldbeatleast
triple my own daily record—but hundred-cache days aren't unusual for megacachers like
Alamogul. “Sometimes it's a chore,” he concedes. “More than twenty-five caches in a day,
and it starts to get boring. But if you've driven a long ways to go somewhere, you want to
get it done.”
So megacachers will cache long past the point of pleasure, because they know the with-
drawal would be worse? It's hard not to see at least a smidge of compulsion in their de-
votion to the game. When van der Bokke discusses caching, he has an almost Howard
Hughes-likepropensitytousetheword“clean”—he'smotivated,hesays,bythedesire“to
clean out an area. I wanted to keep a ten-mile radius around my home clean .” This very
morning, he and a friend had been out “cleaning up” some new caches that had appeared
within this ten-mile safe zone—and were unable to find just one. “That's frustrating, be-
cause now it's sitting there. I'll sit at my computer being frustrated. It's still there on my
map.” You scrub and scrub and that nonsmiley just won't go away!
But I understand that compulsion now; it bothers me too when I look at my neigh-
borhood on Geocaching.com and there's the little green box of an unfound cache tucked
in amongst the smileys, taunting me. Oddly, the idea of unlogged caches doesn't bother
me much in real life; I'm fine driving past them and saving them for another day. But
something about seeing them on a map makes their presence almost unbearable. I wonder
if this is the dark side of maps, if their orderly authority can gull us into believing in the
rightness and importance of all kinds of iffy propositions. In 1890, for example, the dia-
mond magnate Cecil Rhodes was lobbying hard for Britain to connect her two territories
in Africa. Think how great it would look on a map, he argued, if British imperial red ran
all the way from Cape Town to Cairo! Luckily, Lord Salisbury, the foreign secretary, was
no map buff. “ I can imagine no more uncomfortable position than the possession of a nar-
row strip of territory in the very heart of Africa, three months' distance from the coast,
which should be separating the forces of a powerful empire like Germany and . . . another
European Power,” he told the House of Lords. “I think that the constant study of maps is
apttodisturbmen'sreasoningpowers.”Similarly,themapsmadebythegreat Serbiangeo-
grapher Jovan Cvijić after World War I showed the ethnographic divisions of the Balkan
peoples in neat stripes and soothing pastels. But in practice, that beautiful map helped in-
spire a century of brutal ethnic cleansing, an attempt to make the region's real-life ethnic
borders as clear cut as they seemed on the map.
WhateveryouthinkaboutvanderBokke'sobsession,there'snodenyingthescopeofhis
achievement. When friends or family scoff at the time he puts into his global Tupperware
hunt, he asks them, “Do you know anybody that's number one at anything in the world?”
There was,perhaps, onlyoneother geocacher whowasever inhisleague. Alamogul'spre-
decessor atop the caching leaderboard was one “CCCooperAgency,” the world's most pro-
lific cacher for most of the last decade. CCCooperAgency was Lynn Black, an insurance