Caching Into the Past

 

                Dried hollow stalks crunched underfoot as I worked my way through the weeds. Lying in scattered piles, they disrupted my balance as I stepped on hidden branches underneath. Vines grabbed at my feet as I neared my objective.

                I could see walls ahead of me, I passed a couple toys half buried in the dirt along with some plastic bottles that had probably been manufactured decades ago. A green glass Coca-Cola bottle lay in my path, its top broken off long ago.

                Looking at my GPS, I saw that I was within 20 feet from what I was looking for. In front of me was a wall, partially covered with cement, concrete blocks and red bricks making up the uncovered portions. The walls came out towards me on the sides for a short distance before they tapered off to nothing. I was standing in what used to be someone’s basement.

                I was looking for a geocache, a container that had been placed there by someone who then listed the coordinates on-line to allow others to attempt to find his hide. This is part of a worldwide game called Geocaching. There are millions of caches hidden, some hard to find, others so easy it’s hard to miss them. Some require long hikes and others are hidden alongside roads and trails. Most caches seem to be plastic pill bottles and Tupperware containers. Some are the size of a pencil eraser. On the other hand, I have found a couple caches that were huge, one which looked like a treasure chest. To get to it, I had to first figure out where it was and then climb a steep hill to find it hidden in the cliffs above. It was worth the time I spent finding it! They have to be big enough to hold a log, a record of those who found it.

                Caches are rated by the difficulty in finding it and the terrain that it is hidden in.  The cache I was searching for was a 2 out of 5 in difficulty and a 2 ½ out of 5 in terrain. This shouldn’t be very difficult. The game is family orientated and the ratings help people choose what type of “adventure” they want to pursue. It is a great way to get the kids out of the house and it is also a wonderful way to avoid the pandemic blues. I rarely see others when I’m out searching so social distancing isn’t a problem.

                Some caches have small toys or knick knacks in them which can be taken if you leave something in return. This gives children something to look forward to when they find a cache. Myself, I go mostly to put my name in them and gain another number on-line. Once you find one, you record it at the Geocaching.com website. They keep track of how many you have found and the site also shows you where you can look for caches.

                Pittsburgh has lots of hills and so, there are a lot of houses built on them. Some appear to be hanging on the slopes! Being a major steel making town, “back in the day”, workers in the mills built their houses as close to the mills as possible. Time marches on and the once powerful mills decreased in number. The people who worked in them aged and moved elsewhere. Lots of the houses populating the hillsides fell into disrepair.

                `The city continued to grow with more and more people coming into town to work. The roads which existed weren’t large enough to handle the traffic. New highways were planned and the easiest ways into the city was through the valleys.  Houses and property was bought and even more people moved away. The houses and businesses were bulldozed and the land was smoothed out. The bricks and boards from the houses were carted away to landfills and soon only some walls built into the hillsides remained, memories of communities gone by. Over the course of decades what used to be someone’s house has become a spot to hide a geocache in. A busy highway fills what once was a place people raised their families. The walls have been taken over by Mother Nature, hidden in the spring and summer and revealed once again in the fall and winter.

                Nearing ground zero, I kept looking at all the possible places a cache could be hidden. It was an “average” sized cache so that gave me a reference point. Standing in the middle of what once was someone’s basement, I looked around. Something didn’t look quite right. Moving a bit closer I found a spot where I could get on top of the wall, to a small pad that probably had been a sidewalk to the backdoor. Being careful not to get too close to the edge, I saw what I was looking for.

                There it was, hidden behind a concrete block tipped on edge. A red brick further hid the cache, just a small portion of it was visible behind them. The block was frozen in the ground and I had to kick it a couple times to loosen it. A Tupperware container with a Geocaching emblem on it sat behind it. Inside was a log and a pencil. In the year since it was hidden, I was the 14th person to find it.

                I have always enjoyed searching for caches in places such as this, ruins from another time. Remnants of what used to be. I try to imagine what these places might have looked like whenever they were populated and active. Who might have lived here and what did they do to earn a living? Did they have children? This place must have since I stepped over old toys on my way in.  Now, instead of children playing in the yards, weeds have overgrown them. 

                Locating any cache is fun but finding ones hidden in places such as these are even more exciting to me.  A cache hidden in a guard rail is usually rather easy, these take just a little bit more effort to find!

                With a little burst of adrenaline from the find, I carefully made my way back to the car and continued on my way in to work. It had been a fun little adventure before I returned to my mundane regular life!