hauntings

sometimes you don't succeed.

this morning (wednesday) i woke up and i was thinking of going mountain biking in the pack forest, some forty minutes away.

but for some days now i have been living very close to this geocache, and for you to appreciate why this is important to me, i should back up and tell you that in geocaching each cache has a difficulty and terrain rating, difficulty being how hard it is to FIND the cache, and terrain rating for how hard it is to GET to the cache. it's based on a scale of 1 to 5, with half-point gradations.

geocachers being who they are, they tend to like statistics.

it is a sort of totally a badge of honor to have completed a grid of all the possible difficulty/terrain combinations. the name for this among geocachers is the "fizzy grid", named after an old-time cacher named fizzymagic who is generally credited with being the first person to begin to compile statistics on such a thing.


i am only missing one square on my fizzy grid; one that would be filled very nicely by finding this cache that's been on my way to my campsite or even to the outhouse i'm using these days, so i go RIGHT BY IT an average of four times a day.

problem is that it's been cold and rainy and overcast and finding this cache involves putting on your mask and snorkel and fins and going for a little swim.

so this morning i decided just to go DO it. enough whining and justifying why i wasn't doing it.

i go all suited up and into the water and it was COLD. and did i mention that even more than i am afraid of closed spaces, i am afraid of submerged objects?

so. dark, scary, cold.

and cold.

did i mention cold?

i did not find the cache. i am too buoyant to stay down without a lot of effort, and effort clouds the water. if there had been strong sunlight i might have been able to see it, but in the end i reached my turnaround time as measured by how cold i was starting to feel.


i am satisfied with my attempt. i know now what is involved to find this cache. i know what the terrain looks like underwater near the cache. i know how much light i will need, and how deep the container is.

and it's still going to dog me until i find it, but this kind of haunting is much easier than the kind of haunting in which i don't really try but stand around wondering if i could.