Searching

Bunch of us went treasure hunting Saturday morning.
Me, a slightly hungover friend and our two very 'cited kids.

We were seeking a geocache, the altogether modern and less sinister version of the cold war 'dead letter box' or the blood gold of the unclaimed hoard. Geocaches are small containers hidden in distant carns, public buildings, crossroads, dead ends, secret gardens, derelict factories, galleries, ancient woods and lay-bys and...you name it. They are everywhere, probably one near you, but you will never find it, unless you are the sort of person who looks under things just because they have an underside. Or unless you are child.

Once hidden, their exact location is published on-line, on specialist sites, recorded using the GPS NAVSTAR Satellite system. This is used because the containers can be spectacularly small and inaccessible. They contain trade goods; social detritus, stories, gee-gaws, key rings, knick knacks, keepsakes, shiny things, poems, notes and chocolate. You can take anything you want from them but must replace it with something of equal or greater value, and you must not let any civilians see you. Cool eh?

Pause:
We were playing with a constellation of 30 odd satellites orbiting 20,000km above us, managed by the fucking United States Air Force 50th Space Wing (nope didn't make that up), picking up time signals accurate to within trillionths of a second on a tiny and cheap hand-held GPS receiver, giving us an accurate three-dimensional position fix to within a metre. To find a plastic lunch box full of the stuff that falls down the back of a sofa.
I love the Modern World.
Play:

So we crossed the moors, following but oblivious to the invisible lattice spun around the world by brilliant and unsung sorcerors, laughing and pointing and enjoying the beautiful May day, the molten yellow gorse and sparkling white hawthorn. We climbed one of the two loveliest hills in West Penwith and almost forgot what we there for. Around us, a turquoise horizon, defined by the Atlantic, above us, an endlessly deep and heart-breaking blue sky, pierced by swallows arcing across the many-coloured land, blacks, ochres, greens, dark reds, all the earth's shades; the shattered crumbs of the granite substrate, dragged to the fields edges and into a silicate lace across the moor, echoing the invisible web we followed here. And quiet, quiet enough to hear a cuckoo calling far across the hills. Can air taste, can it smell as blue as it looks?
Felt like it.

So yep, we found the cache; notes and poems were written, small goods weighed, examined and traded, all hidden from the eyes of the Real World and buried again with smiles and hopes, given meaning and worth by the quest and the act. All fun. But we also found the real treasure. Peace, beauty and the company of our friends in the sun, for a while.

And you know what? I really don't care how trite and commonplace that might look or sound, because it's true.
And worth searching for.