Geeks in the Woods – An afternoon with veteran geocacher John Carvin

7/1/2003

David Medaris

Copyright Isthmus Publishing Co. Inc. 2003.

There is a cry in the wilderness. “Found it!” The voice belongs to “mudbug,” and the

exclamation point connotes her excitement and accomplishment.

She has found her first geocache.

Under the watchful eye of veteran geocacher John Carvin, Mudbug and I – both rookies – have been tromping around Magnolia Bluff southwest of Evansville with a GPS receiver in search of the cache, a green .30-caliber ammo can.

Armed with a printout containing the latitude longitude (42° 43.838′ north by 89° 20.644′ west) and a handful of other hints, we’ve used the Global Positioning System to close within 15 or 20 feet. That’s about as precise as my Garmin Geko gets, so we search for another few minutes before I hear that cry in the wilderness.

Geeks in the woods. That’s what some people call geocachers – one of those insults that has its roots in contempt and envy by gains currency only to be co-opted and worn as a badge of honor by the abused.

Scuffing my boots through leaves left over from last autumn, squatting to better survey the ground and then standing up to get a good head rush, I feel like a geek.

But with the explosion in sales of GPS units and the attendant growth in geocaching, geeks in the woods are cool.

Carvin, 53, has been an avid geocacher long enough to embrace the epithet. Known in geocaching circles by his sport-specific alias, Cachew, Carvin works at Affiliated Engineers by day but spends much of his recreational time in search of the next cache.

He’s brilliant at guiding a couple rookies through the experience: affable, easygoing, avuncular, straightforward with his explanations of the activity’s protocols and ethics. He instructs when appropriate, stands back and quietly observes at other times, allowing his charges to find the appeal of geocaching – an the cache itself – for themselves.

Mudbug opens the ammo can to see what’s inside: a logbook and pen for signing in, a train keychain, a seed packet, some playing cards, a tiny lamb figurine and a dozen other items of nominal value.

No telling what you might find in any given cache, and the contents are always changing. Surprise and mutability are cornerstones of geocaching’s appeal. If you take something, you’re supposed to leave something. But you can also take nothing and leave nothing, or TNLN – a staple of geocaching lingo.

Carvin points us to a handful of caches in one afternoon. At the Shag Bark cache in south-central Dane County, I straddle two pieces of a downed tree’s trunk and peer intently into the dark gulf below but somehow miss the Tupperware container that Mudbug finds a few minutes later. Among the treasures in this trove are a pair of corncob holders, a luggage tag, a golf ball, a video and a plastic piggy bank.

At Brooklyn Prairie, we visit a virtual cache with no container, only observable answers to a series of questions posted for the site at geocaching.com – the mammoth site where you can find information on any number of geocaches hidden in 175 countries, including some 40 in Dane County alone, and then log your finds. With its authoritative list of FAQs, instruction manual, ethics guide, calendar of events, GPS shopping links and other resources, geocaching.com is the portal through which countless cachers, including our guide, have been introduced to the sport.

I was surfing the Web and found geocaching.com, Carvin says a few weeks later over coffee at 43° 02.893′ north by 89° 28.441 west, more widely known as the Sunprint Café on Odana Road.

He bought his first GPS receiver in 1998 or ’99 as a navigational tool for the annual Jeep camping trips he takes with his brother out in the California desert.

But geocaching grabbed him when he came across the Web site two years ago, and it won’t let go.

First of all, someone took the time to hide something in nature, he says, enunciating the appeal of going off to search for a cache, and I’m going someplace that someone wants to share.

Carvin has logged nearly 300 caches since his first find two years ago – a modest total compared to the thousands some have posted. The quantity isn’t that important to me, he says. It’s the surprise. The nature, and sharing where someone else has led me to.

He has also led people to the handful of caches he established himself, including one on a quiet place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and a wheelchair-accessible cache for a co-worker who kept pushing him to introduce her to the sport.

His enthusiasm for geocaching has infected his family as well as friends. That’s his word, infected. I really enjoy going with someone else, sharing the experience, he says, adding that the activity has changed him in fundamental ways. I used to think a hundred-yard walk in the woods was a long walk in the woods, he says, No more.

The River Cache up by the Wisconsin River was the most strenuous effort so far, he says. The least fulfilling was a cache 200 feet from where he parked his car, in a small tree stand by the Interstate – a cache he dismisses as “stupid.” The most rewarding was in Massachusetts, off the Appalachian Trail.

We planned our vacation to the northeast, to New England, as an opportunity to go geocaching, he says, “we” being himself and his wife, Heidi.

With latitude and a longitude, your GPS receiver can take you places you might never have found yourself, Carvin says. His Magellan Platinum and Garmin GPS V models, for example, have led him to an old phone booth called Bucky Walter, near Boonville, Calif. – a quirky, little-known bit of California cultural history.

With more than 55,000 caches established around the world, there are plenty to go around. And new caches “keep popping up”, he says. There’s a whole bunch toward Milwaukee and Door County that are on my list.