A big surprise found in a small cache
On walk in Wellesley, writer discovers hidden treasure and a new hobby
As most children know, hiking can be dull.
Until you find that monster rock to scale or spot a furry woodland creature. Or better yet, until you unearth a container full of toys.
In fact, Christmas unexpectedly arrived early on my family's recent kayak trip and hike along the Charles River in Wellesley, a trek that our 6-year-old son, Duncan, labeled "boooring" at the start and one of the best ever by the end. His change of heart came thanks to his discovery of a secret geocache along the trail (our 9-year-old son Caleb, meanwhile, expanded his vocabulary via the colorful graffiti on the old cement Waban Arches bridge).
For the uninitiated, a geocache is a sort of hidden treasure planted by people who partake in a scavenger hunt for geeky nature lovers, called geocaching. The idea is for other players to then hunt for the treasure by solving puzzles and using clues found on the Web, including longitude/latitude coordinates that they plug into their portable GPS devices. Geocaching has been around since 2000, but I have been told it is a modern variant of letterboxing, which noblemen might have started in the 1800s on the moors of Scotland.
We have never taken part in a formal geocaching adventure -- you would be more likely to find me sporting a Yankees cap at Fenway Park than to see me finagling with a GPS box in the woods -- but I had been vaguely aware of the activity. A running companion of mine revealed before the hike that he regularly geocached and explained some of the rules. To my surprise, I must have been listening.
So when my youngest son stumbled upon a cylindrical plastic container beneath a dilapidated old structure along the trail, I immediately realized we had a geocache and not a lost potluck supper entry nor a reason to alert the bomb squad.
Geocaching protocol prevents me from getting too detailed about where we found the cache -- let me just say our son was doing his best to get our money's worth from his tetanus shot when he found the container.
Delighted with his find, Duncan spilled the precious contents of the cache on the muddy ground and examined a zebra finger puppet, rubber worm, and other trinkets.
My wife and I told each boy they could take one item, so Caleb took a big marble that he promptly lost and Duncan got an irresistible plastic alien.
My wife jotted a note in the enclosed log book about this being our first cache, and our older son, browsing through the log, lamented that so few people had visited the spot. We then returned the tiny treasure chest to its hiding place.
I ran back a few days later to contribute a couple of toys, aware that geocaching protocol requires leaving an item if you take one.
Our lucky find had me wondering the next day about how many caches might be in town, so I did a little detective work on the Internet. Soon I found what appeared to be the geocaching website (geocaching.com) and learned that several dozen caches exist in Wellesley's 02481 and 02482 ZIP codes. One cache is dedicated to those screaming Wellesley College students along the Boston Marathon route, another is on the campus of Babson College, and one is dedicated to all things Pokémon.
The real shocker though was that the cache we found had been planted four years ago by a local man I know through work, John Halamka, and his daughter. I relayed news of our accidental discovery to John via e-mail and asked him about his interest in the activity. Among other things, he told me that what he likes best is that "it's great to walk in the woods with a goal in mind."
This has my wife and I thinking that the next time we pitch going on a hike to the boys it probably will not be such a tough sell. It won't be the deer, blue herons, or muskrat sightings we had on this past hike that will do the trick.
It will be the prospect of finding another alien.
Bob Brown lives in Wellesley and runs The Swellesley Report website (theswellesleyreport.com). 