In my last Thursday Thirteen, I mentioned the B I got on my first English Comp. essay. On Friday, my second essay was handed back with an A. I am marginally less angry.

I thought I’d post the second essay. My first essay is a little more personal in nature, so I’m not up for posting it, but if you think you’d like to read it, I do have an email address… I won’t guarantee that I’ll send it to you, though!

(Note: Before anyone gets excited, yes I refer to Dan as ‘my husband’. He technically is not. And, no, we’re not getting married, either.)

Geocaching And The Art Of Preparedness
Geocaching is the outdoor sport of using multi-million dollar satellites and a GPS receiver to find geographic coordinates. Tupperware, or more commonly, ammunition boxes, are hidden at these coordinates by other players. Geocachers fill these containers with all sorts of things, making the sport a high-tech treasure hunt. My husband and I enjoy geocaching because it gives us the opportunity to spend time together. We also get outside for exercise, and it’s always a surprise to see what items previous players have hidden in a cache. Like any outdoor activity it is important to be prepared for a variety of situations. These include possible injury, wildlife encounters, not having everything required for a pleasant excursion, equipment malfunctions, or failure to pack enough water.

One of our caching expeditions was ruined by our failure to pack enough water for the hike. Just what should you pack for a four mile hike with a 2300 foot elevation gain? Undoubtedly, you should carry more than a 32 ounce container of water. I’d feverishly checked online hiking guides for information about the Strawberry Lake Trail in the Jewel Basin. We expected the fridged, bubbling, mountain streams the guides had promised, but it was only the 25th of July, and the brooks had long since dried. All that remained were the shriveled detritus of once thriving mosses and the powdered dregs that were once soft mud. Normally we would have turned back, but the trailhead to Strawberry Lake is deceitful. It’s located in an old-growth, Hemlock forest. It is a chilly forest, free of mosquitoes, flies, and free of parchedness. The Hemlock forest belied the high summer waiting above us. Leaving the cool hideout of the Tsuga woodland, we chose to continue on the trail, which was now much steeper, to search for water in the more direct sunlight. It wasn’t long before heat exhaustion set in. Our muscles beseeched us to stop; our minds became obscured by confusion. Had we not reached the lake when we did we could have become extremely ill, suffered heat-stroke, or even died. At the lake we soaked our trail weary bodies in the water and rested. Later, we pulled out our reliable GPS and found the geocache that had brought us on this odyssey to begin with.

Before we left for our hike to Strawberry Lake, I made sure to put fresh batteries in our GPS; our painful trip was not a wasted effort. That doesn’t mean I hadn’t forgotten to make sure our equipment would work before. A few weeks prior to our poorly executed hike, we drove to a wilderness area west of Kalispell in pursuit of several caches we had not yet visited. There was no need to hike long distance to their locations or lumber up severe elevations. We did, however, spend several hours driving the maze of mountainous, forest-service roads. Our driving directions were complicated and the word ‘road’ was a generous descriptor for what we were driving on. The drive was slow-going, jarring and dusty. With every crater and hollow in the ‘so-called’ road that we hit, I worried that our filthy, old-beast of a car would rattle to the ground and fall apart. When we found the campground we were looking for, I nearly kissed the ground. After my sigh of relief, I focused on the task at hand. A GPS has a map function that will point an arrow towards a selected waypoint or coordinate. My husband and I checked the direction of the electronic arrow, gathered our bag of items to trade at the cache, and happily marched in our intended direction. After walking only 30 to 40 feet, and with only 100 or so more to go, the ‘Low Battery’ indicator began to flash. I habitually stowed extra batteries in the side pocket of my camera bag, but I didn’t that day. By the time I had looked through all of our bags, the minute amount of life left in our GPS’s batteries had gone. With a dead GPS we would not be able to find the cache we had come so far to find. My failure to anticipate the simplest of problems had turned this quest into a wasted effort.

While it may be true that the journey is no less important than the destination, the destination is why we ultimately make the journey. To us, an insignificant aspect of geocaching is the trade of items at a cache. This trading has never been the focus of why we participate in geocaching, and therefore, it is not the reason we make the journey. But it is fun. After opening the tight, weather-proof seal of an ammo can, there may still be the slight stink of gun powder and oil. The stench is forgotten as we begin to explore the collection of articles inside. One might feel like a crow, carrying off a set of dropped, shiny keys to a nest. Many times the items are utter junk. McDonalds Happy Meal toys are coldly referred to as ‘McSwag’ and quickly set aside. A cache is almost a miniature curiosity or junk shop, and every now and then a player will put a much desired item into it, like a rare, old, coin or a beautiful, beaded, bracelet. The rules to geocaching are simple: “If you take an item, you must replace it with an item of equal of greater value.” There are many times we have encountered items within a cache that we would enjoy or be able to put to good use. There are also many times that we have forgotten to take along our bag of trade items. Not being able to trade doesn’t ruin the experience for us, but it does sometimes leave us with a slight pang of disappointment.

Sometimes the failure to prepare may include necessities that could endanger our lives. After our Strawberry Lake hike, I never forget to pack an ample supply of water. Other times, my forgetfulness simply meant that we made a long trip for nothing or we weren’t able to participate fully in a sport we enjoy. With every mistake made along the way I’ve learned to pack one more thing, or now remember to double check one more bag. The lessons learned may have been dangerous or painful, but they were learned. As we said in Girl Scouts, “Be prepared.”

(I hate the last line, but everyone said I should keep it in!)