The Travels of Mickey Tom (1)

In the second part of this two-part series, I’ll introduce you to a handsome fellow named Mickey Tom. I’ll tell you where he started out, where he is now, how he got to where he is now, and where he’s headed.

But before I can do any of that, I need to provide some background for readers who might not be familiar with a particular, some would say peculiar… hmm… pastime? hobby? obsession? adventuring nerd’s side quest?

Any of those terms might suffice as a descriptor for the mysterious word geocaching.

If you’ve paid attention to car commercials in the last couple of years, you probably already know the phrase “GPS unit.” This is a small boxy electronic gizmo, typically mounted on the dashboard, which displays a real-time map of the route you’re currently driving. Sophisticated GPS units allow you to specify a destination, for which the machine will select an optimal route to follow; some of them even “talk,” instructing you audibly to (for instance) “Turn left here.”

The main technology which allows car GPS units to work is a network of satellites, collectively called the Global Positioning System. The idea is fairly simple; at root, it’s just geometry: If you know the positions of at least three objects, and can determine your distance from each of them, then you can determine your own position. As the GPS satellites circle the globe, they beam down to earth a signal reporting their current positions. Any device which can receive those transmissions thus can figure out — to a more or less accurate degree — the device’s own latitude and longitude.

That’s all you need to understand in order to “understand” how geocaching works. But that still doesn’t say much about geocaching itself, does it?

Read on.

That these GPS satellites’ signals were actually made public rather than being held secret by the military is one of the great unremarked public-policy marvels of the last ten years or so. But public they are — which is why the dashboard units work at all.

And in fact, the popular dashboard units were preceded by smaller, handheld GPS devices. (That’s the main screen of one such device above — not far from actual size.) As with the ones made for cars, a handheld GPS unit enables you to pinpoint where you are relative to the satellites — but also relative to other known fixed points on the Earth’s surface, like monuments, libraries, and other buildings, interstate highways and county roads, parks, cellular antennas…

Unlike the units made for cars, though, handheld GPS units don’t tie you to roads. If you can get somewhere on foot — and with some other minor restrictions — your handheld device can tell you where on earth you are, within a few feet one way or another.

And that’s what some genius took advantage of when s/he came up with the idea of geocaching.

In its general form, geocaching resembles participating in a scavenger hunt. The difference is, you know (more or less accurately) exactly where to find a “treasure”; you just don’t know what you might find when you get there.

This is the moment, probably, to introduce you to the Grand Central Station of geocachers, the site known (duh) as geocaching.com. From that home page:

Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment.

Got that? Not only does a geocacher operate outdoors; s/he also contributes online. (At geocaching.com, obviously.)

How many geocaches — hidden treasure troves — are there? As the home page says, they currently number almost 700,000, spread all around the world. You can key in your postal code or address, and find out just how many are within a few miles. For instance:

• Tallahassee FL: 443 geocaches within a 25-mile radius
• San Francisco CA: 3,283
• Central City KY: 81
• 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington DC: 2,039
• The Kremlin: 19
• 10 Downing St., London: 2,583
• Reykjavik, Iceland: 45

When you decide to look for a particular geocache, you go to its page on geocaching.com. There you’ll find (in most cases) the cache’s latitude and longitude, as well as (often) some other hints; plug these into your GPS unit, take your car, bike, or public transportation to a convenient nearby starting point, and off you go. Somewhere nearby, you’ll find the cache itself: a waterproof box, containing all manner of “treasures.”

Of course, the treasures in question aren’t gold doubloons, works of art, packages of money wrapped in plastic, Nintendo Wiis or iPods. They’re little souvenir figurines. Toys. Fake coins. Booklets in waterproof jackets…

That’s because the whole point and the whole fun of geocaching is getting there, not getting something once you do get there.

The small matter of what you find is balanced by an equally small matter in the other direction: what you leave behind. That’s how the caches build up a critical mass of trinkets, from people who take nothing but leave something else in the cache. As a matter of course, many items placed in a cache probably originated in other caches, a fact which will be more important in a moment.

(In the online notes for each cache, cachers will sometimes say, for example, “TNLN.” This means “Took Nothing, Left Nothing,” just as “TN, L toy plastic locomotive” means… well, you get the idea.)

Oh, as an aside, note the phrase “support for the environment” in the above quote from geocaching.com. Cachers are very conscious that traipsing around in forests and fields and even on city streets means they will leave even unintended footprints and other signs of their passing, and that’s why they’ve adopted the “cache in, trash out” slogan: On their way out of some area where they’ve searched for a cache, they often bear bits of trash left by careless others — cans, bottles, fast-food wrappers — to dispose of properly.

Others. Yes. Particularly, non-geocaching others. If you fit into this category, you are what geocachers call a muggle (sometimes the longer form, geomuggle).  (The word, of course, was popularized by the Harry Potter books: a muggle is a person who lacks the magical skills of a wizard or witch.) Cachers take great care lest their “treasures” be upset by someone who doesn’t know or care what s/he’s come upon, so the caches themselves are seldom sitting right out in the open. You must, in short, have some of the “magic” associated with a handheld GPS unit — and also associated with determination, since some caches are hidden quite well.

Among the treasures you might find in a geocache are some known as travel bugs (TBs for short). Each bug is attached via a small chain to a little rectangle of metal, similar to a dogtag. Its unique number having been registered at geocaching.com, the TB will have been placed by someone in a cache, quite possibly years ago, and as the travel bug is moved from cache to cache its movements can be tracked (also via the geocaching.com site). (There’s no particular hi-tech magic which makes this tracking possible — it’s not like a homing device. No, it’s trackable just by virtue of being referred to online by those who have found it in one place and left another.)

This is the point where I’ll leave off for now: Mickey Tom, as you may have guessed, is a travel bug. More in The Travels of Mickey Tom, Part 2, tomorrow.