Interacting with others' personal stories and spaces

On Friday, I had a job interview downtown early in the morning.  I left home extra early in order to ensure I wouldn't be rushing and could find parking close by.  After I parked, I still had about an hour to kill, so I went looking for my daily geocache.

A friend asked me what happens if I can't go for an adventure in the woods that day, due to being at work during daylight hours or some other reason.  Geocaches aren't all in the woods.  I like to say there are two main kinds of geocaches - one kind is like hunting for treasure.  The other kind is like being a 'spy'.

Image courtesy of cachcrazy.com.

Geocaches in highly populated areas can be hard to find, not to mention hard to hide in the first place.  Your container needs to be small enough to blend in to a highly populated area and avoid discovery.  Many of them are magnetic, and no bigger than your baby fingernail.  They contain a tiny rolled up logbook, and that's it.

It was one of these I was searching for today.  The pleasant walk on paved city sidewalks meant that I was not getting my interview clothes dirty.  When I got to where my GPS was zero-ing out (i.e. it was saying I was 0 metres away from the cache), I saw the most likely hiding spot - a lamp post.  As you can see from the sample photo, lamp posts often have skirts which, unknown to most people, can easily be slid up to reveal a hiding spot.

Since I was fairly certain where the container would be, you'd think it would be easy and quick to retrieve it.  However, with this type of cache, you don't necessarily want other people to see what you're doing.  Not only will you look highly suspicious and arouse concern, but 'muggles' (a term geocachers have adopted to refer to non-geocachers) may very well go back and remove, damage, or vandalize the container.

So, what to do?  Well, the best option is just to wait for a pause in the walking throngs of people, so that is what I did.  A quick lift of the 'skirt', and the container was revealed and in hand.  I signed in, and then pretended to be looking at my phone while some more people walked by, until I found another moment to quickly return the container to its location, none the wiser.

I had a similar experience with my cache find yesterday as well.  I was in Hamilton for a birthday party, and on my way home, I stopped at a park and playground very close to my friends' home.  The write-up about this location was interesting.  A simple playground in a little park on a side street likely would not have caught my interest had I just taken a walk by there.  However, the person who wrote the 'cache description' on the website explained that this area has many group homes, and that they actually hid this container with some of the individuals from the group homes who work there.  They had adopted geocaching as an extra element to their group walks, to give their walks a purpose.

While my finding of the container was relatively quick and uneventful (besides having to pretend to artistically photograph my keys on a tree stump in order to camouflage my removal of the container from the lone woman sitting on the swings nearby), the experience of being in that space with the knowledge of how other people use it made it stand out in my mind.  A simple park in a nondescript neighbourhood suddenly had a rich tapestry of meaning revealed to me.

The one I had found downtown the day before also revealed aspects of the downtown that were previously unknown to me - a small park/garden amidst the tall office buildings that I hadn't known existed, and some newly planted trees and interesting signage explaining a revitalization project.

I was reading an academic article on geocaching this morning (Zeng, 2011).  It was a fascinating exploration of the deeper reasons and meanings behind this unique activity.  One idea that stuck out for me was the one I was exploring above - this concept of rich meaning of 'spaces' being revealed to me through geocaching; meanings that would otherwise remain completely hidden from me.  Geocaching allows anyone from anywhere to hide a container of their choosing, in a location completely of their choosing, and write whatever they want on the cache page for others to read (within limits - mainly, it must be family-friendly and non-commercial).

Zeng says, "Geocachers, as ordinary practitioners of the everyday world, challenge the technocratic - reductionist space by trying to transform it into an existential space."  In other words, we take the precision of military GPS technology - the ability to use electronic and satellite devices to minutely track the exact location of something using latitudes and longitudes - and we in a way rebel against this concept by creating spaces rich with meaning (geocache containers/hiding spots/write-ups) that are un-trackable; that exist as a variety of super-imposed layers intertwined with the physical space itself.  In Zeng's words, "...Geocachers reject this top-down management (...) and insert into the operational space of grids personal stories" and "... participants shift their identity from passive users of high technologies to active creators of their own experience [emphasis added]."

This interaction with others' stories of seemingly 'mundane' spaces seems to be a vital part of geocaching for many people.  We are drawn to geocache not only abroad when visiting new places, but also in our own backyards, for it allows us to discover hidden nooks of our own neighbourhoods that we otherwise never would have discovered.  It also allows us to "...weave [our] personal narratives with those of others."

Sometimes, our personal stories interact with the stories of others in more than a theoretical way, as happened for me this morning. I went for a quick drive to go find a newly published geocache.  New caches often result in multiple people rushing to go find it at the same time, because another aspect of the game is the 'race' to be the "First to Find" (FTF).  This results in many unexpected surprise encounters with other geocachers, and today was no different.  As I was signing in (first!), a couple and their child approached me.  I had run into them at an "FTF" once before, so we were familiar to each other.  We greeted each other as friends, not strangers.  Accidentally running into another geocacher, even if it is a complete stranger, often feels like running into a friend.  There is something about this unique game of ours that draws us together with a bond of understanding.  

Having interacted with each other's personal stories and spaces by finding each other's hidden containers and reading each other's cache descriptions or "Found it" logs, a live face-to-face meeting results in a kind of familiarity that is hard to explain, but nevertheless a vital  aspect of the game for a lot of us.

*all quotes are from: Zeng, M. (2011).  Examining Geocaching Practices through a Mobilities Lens.  Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, 12, 113-121.