Squamloonland

Since a portion of this new blogue of mine must needs extol the joys of the art of geocaching on a regular basis, I’d best get started.I originally took up geocaching as a solitary, secret-agent-man sort of pursuit. The idea of a society of hiders and seekers of camouflaged containers communicating over the internet using cryptic descriptions and code names, intermingled with an incentive to get outside and walk or hike, was irresistible to me. And when the street-routing GPS came into the mix, I was suddenly like Solveig Dommartin’s character at the beginning of the pre-GPS-craze 1991 film Until the End of the World, whose “Dashboard Computer System” took her where she wanted to go.

Only unlike in the movie, where a turn off the roadmoretraveled prompts the warning: “You are leaving the Map Zone Database”, my database is always with me.

And it’s taken me to some pretty special places.

Alone.

Which has, thus far, been the paradox of the pastime for me. Apart from my best friend, who lives several hundred miles away, and my father, who’s in a different stage of life, there’s not a soul in my immediate social circle who has much of an appreciation for my hobby. In fact, the general consensus of my family and friends is that the whole darned obsession is just a little bit strange. I guess I can see why, seeing as it’s not only one of the more antisocial means of being social that I’ve ever employed, but it’s based on quintessentially trivial pursuits as well.

I depend on the existence of a community of like-minded people to create escapist experiences and to experience mine, but the thrill, for me so far, has been in playing as an independent, fairly anonymous, loner.

I begin my geocaching category here only because I sense a sea change, and I have a need to get my bearings before I set sail.

Tags: dommartin, Geocaching, gps, until the end of the world, wenders

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 05:27:49 and is filed under Geocaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.