The Nathaniel Trail consists of 17 caches. Because all 17 are part of the geoart, please don't forget to do your homework before setting out to find these caches. For 14 of them, you'll need to enter a simple solution into Certitude in order to receive the actual coordinates for those hides. To find caches 15-17, you'll need to carefully collect information from each of the 14 caches. Some of the trails are used by equestrians, so be prepared to yield to riders. And please pay attention to hunting regulations and schedules. Wearing international orange is never a bad idea. I've never seen one in Carroll County, but a bear was sighted in this area in December 2018, and others have been reported in backyards in Carroll recently. So be careful as you hike these woods. I strongly urge you to solve all the little puzzles BEFORE you head for the trails. All 17 caches could be found in a couple or three hours and three or four miles of relatively easy walking. If you love birds, remember your binocular. And if you don't love ticks, remember your Deet or chemical of choice. As you cache, may you find joy and peace.
Above, clockwise from top left: Bob the Bander presenting a barred owl to Nathaniel; Andy enjoying Little League; Dad with Nathaniel before the marathon; Jonathan grins at his first bird-in-hand, a chickadee!
My first child was born less than a month before I earned my BA from the University of Maryland. His mother and I agonized over his name for quite a while, agreeing that somehow we had to honor my stepgrandfather’s selfless decision to essentially adopt my brother, sister, and me in 1952, when I was six. But we didn’t really want our baby to be Charles, thinking he’d be called Charlie or Chuck or, worse, Chuckie. So we went with my stepgrandfather’s last name, Madison. Charles William Madison (1886-1966) eventually seemed a saint to me, taking on three grandkids when he was already a year past retirement age and continuing to work to support us until he was almost 80. He was 19 years older than my maternal grandmother, which meant the age difference between him and me was about sixty years. He had taught me much about hard work, compassion, and gentleness, and whenever I thought about my son Andy, I hoped I’d be able to nurture him as well as my grandfather had raised me. On what would two years later become the first Earth Day, Andrew Madison Jarboe was born, as I had been, in our nation’s capital. We chose his first name largely because we liked the sound of it, but also because it means manly. Later we learned that we had inadvertently (and ironically) named our first child after his paternal great-grandfather, Andrew Thomas (1884-1954). After a brief stint as a Marine, Andy earned a BS in finance from the University of Baltimore. He now lives in Cockeysville and has two sons, Andrew Madison II and Jeremiah.
Nathaniel’s other brother came into our family while I was working on an advanced degree at a state university in the Midwest. His mother and I heard on the radio what amounted to a public service announcement that there were thirteen thousand African American orphans in need of adoption in just the city of Chicago alone. Despite our limited resources (Brenda worked as a secretary for the Director of the National Council of Teachers of English and I was a teaching assistant), we decided we could adopt such a child. So in March of his birth year, Jonathan Todd Jarboe came into our family. Downstate, the weather was springlike; in Chicago, snow fell overnight and our spring clothes were not exactly appropriate for the Windy City. When we told the nurses at the hospital we were going to name our new baby Jonathan, they immediately grinned in a way that made us surmise that we were giving him a name (or a version of it) that he had already been given. On the drive home that day, I was tickled to realize we were traveling parallel to a train that had undoubtedly just pulled out of Kankakee and was now rolling along past houses, farms and fields, just as it does in the Arlo Guthrie song. A year later, as the third-year law student representing Jonathan’s interest in the official adoption proceeding read the documents to us, he inadvertently slipped and spoke aloud Jonathan’s birth surname. The law student was supposed to read “Baby X” but instead uttered “Baby Moore”—a name dear to me since my childhood, when Charles William Madison would ask me to walk with him the mile to the Ivy Hill Cemetery, where his first wife’s remains were buried. Carrie Olivia Madison’s maiden name was Moore. Her parents and brother were buried next to her where my grandfather and grandmother and brother would also be buried. So things seemed to have come, in a way, full circle: a kindness acknowledged and repaid—possibly. And after Jonathan succumbed to drugs in 2006, we learned from his birth mother that, indeed, her last name was Moore.
To determine the actual coordinates for this cache, you’ll need to determine Andy’s and Jonathan’s birth years and enter them as consecutive numbers in Certitude.
You probably don’t need to research anything more than you’ve already read in this description in order to determine Andy’s birth year, but in case you’ve missed the key detail already given, here are three more clues: it was the year Prague Spring was crushed by the invasion of 600,000 Warsaw Pact troops, and the year both Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were lost to the most vicious hatred.
For Jonathan’s birth year these facts will surely help: Shepard took the 5th; Nasdaq, Disney World, and FedEx came into being; gasoline was about forty cents a gallon; the average house sold for $25,250; and Lance, Winona, Mariah, and Tupac were born.
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.