As I look back on my experience with our pastime of “using million dollar satellites to find Tupperware in the woods”, one thing is clear: it's getting harder and harder these days to find a “regular”, with most caches being at best a large pill bottle, and on the downside a centrifuge tube or magnetic nano. Now I have no basic problem with these approaches to a hide, and even have a number of my own, but one thing I'm really starting to miss is finding a nice big container full of trade goods. Reflecting on the name of our hobby, which derives from the French cacher (to hide), with the noun form used by the “coureurs de bois” starting in the late 1700's to refer to a hiding place for furs and supplies, one does start to worry just a little if there is nothing hidden in the containers in the woods!!!
Another facet of the problem is that, as described in the wonderful dissertation on our pastime, Local Treasures: Geocaching Across America, by Margot Anne Kelley, wampum provides the basis for one of the truly wonderful aspects of geocaching, that of what our friends the sociologists call “unencumbered gifting” (just where do they get terms like this from???). According to Ms. Kelley, that group also tells us that this trait tends to be exhibited by “advanced civilizations” (and what exactly that is one wonders...although, certainly ours must be one of them, of course!!!??). But, you know, I already knew about unencumbered gifting...from my earliest years, my mom made it perfectly clear that in giving a gift one could never have any expectations of what, if anything, one would receive in return; that gifts were given unconditionally (she did this, if one wasn't demonstrating the proper ethic, by taking away some gift that you had received; or worse by making you donate one of your gifts to a local charity!!!). But if one thinks about it, as Ms. Kelley points out, geocaching is truly one of the better examples of this trait: one stocks a cache without any knowledge of who will find it and of what swag, if anything, they will take. If someone takes an item and leaves one in return, they do so without any knowledge of who left the thing they took or of who might take what they left at a later date. Thus it is almost impossible for such “transactions” to be encumbered!!!
Sadly, though, these days when I am lucky enough to find a nice big "regular" hide, too often it is empty except for the log and a few moldy business cards, maybe a beat up Bible tract or some wrinkly micro-rubber bands!! Yet I have to think that the CO would have, as is my habit, initially set the cache out stuffed full of a wonderfully diverse collection of shiny new trade goods; and given the basic ethic of our craft (TSLS??), that's what any one of us at a later date should encounter. So something is fundamentally wrong, I'm thinking. Me, all I can come up with to do is to bring lots of wampum with me and load up caches at every opportunity (in at least one locale, I was referred to as “the Santa Claus of geocaching”!!!??). (“Ho, ho, ho!!!”) And, of course, to carry on in this Long Description. But, actually, all this carrying on isn't so much to lament the state of things, but instead to provide the conceptual setting for the experience at the GZ of this cache, which includes a striking example of the good old fashioned “regular”, as well as some trade good offerings in the form of home furnishings, antiques, and fashions!! Happy caching!!!