The Cache
By the time we reached the bridge, we’d forgotten what we were searching for.
The location was new to us, a stretch of road off the highway about two miles farther than the GPS had directed us to go. We hadn’t crossed any bridges, where the cache was supposed to be, so we just kept going until we reached one. This wasn’t our first cache of the day; we had logged two others and given up on another when we agreed our choice of footwear wasn’t going to cut it. There was still an hour till dark and we were in the area, so we set out to find the next one on the list. The website had labeled it “Over the Bridge,” or something equally innocuous. We began calling it “the road that goes nowhere.”
We should have turned around, taken the U-turn the GPS kept shouting that we take. But the road eventually gave in and led us to not one but two bridges, the rusted monster our mother later remembered crossing years ago and its much newer, safer sibling. We parked on the shoulder and strode over the latter, wary of traffic and snakes. And after about ten minutes of peering into cracks and rolling over stones with the toes of our shoes, it was clear we weren’t going to find anything before the mosquitoes found us. With a collective sigh, we clamored back into the car and headed for home.
It didn’t occur to us until the next day that we’d had two other options. “Over the Bridge” was, as we’ve come to expect, a misleading title. The cache could’ve just as easily been placed in the shallow creek below or on the shaky bridge beside the road. Amusingly, we cross that stretch of road almost every day now. We mention it and point but none of us care enough to risk breaking a leg or having one bitten off by a gator just for a Tic-Tac and a scribble on a piece of paper. If we did manage to find it, we’d probably take it with us and lose it in a sea of junk. So for now, the cache remains safely out of our reach.
It’s also entirely possible we had the wrong bridge. But that doesn’t entertain us half as much.