Eraseek's Blog

[+EraSeek]

Hijack away Great story! I agree with your paradox of wisdom as well "Wisdom comes from experience, and experience is often gained from a lack of wisdom".

[+EraSeek]

“Light is sweet and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun”

The warmth of day enters fully the heart that has passed through the shadows of winter.

The breath of heaven fills the body that is tested and found to be vital and sound.

No greater love hath a man than he who stands in honesty alone before his God.

 

So it was that I came to this place. A prairie of some expanse, upon a plateau where I stood alone and unseen by any other human being. This was the treasure of this place. Sure to be missed by others who wonder through. Some would avoid the slight strain to get here. Others would come and pass through unseeing, unaware that here was the treasure, not at the place where they were told. But treasures are often not where they are placed. In seeking a treasure one may find truer treasures. The place where Providence has led you. The thingless gem. The unspoken word. The miracle hidden in the everyday.

 

I had come before and failed. I had come willing to swim the river, but upon seeing the river I was wise enough to know life and death and there is a difference between the two. I tried again. I followed the paved paths of men and came close, but each way was blocked by fence or canal or dead end. I came a third time by the advice of another and found a way true and clear and full of adventure. I left the path when it was required and made my own way. One that was not the easiest but the clearest to me and was rewarded by what I was brought to. This place. This wonderful expanse of light and warmth and presence. A presence of being. Alone yet wrapped into the all. The greater self of which I am but a grain of wheat in the wind in an endless boundless field of wheat. Golden sea waves bending this way and that forever to the horizon, at the whim of where the warm winds wish to go.

 

This is why I loved this cache. This is why I held it in so high a regard. Thank you Hazard. I will stand there forever in my heart. Soaking it all in.

[nolenator]

I admire you E, from one thread that has got to make you boil like it does myself, you come back with such a great description of what life should be really about. Life is beautiful, I wish there was a way to easily get rid of the ugly stuff. Peace, Nolenator

[+EraSeek]

Good caches, bad caches, and really stinky ones

 

Everyone knows it, not all caches are, well, great. Some are down-right, well, bad. Maybe even nasty. I’ve seen my share. So have you. What percentage would you say are, hum, below the waterline? 40%, 60%? Not to discourage but I’d say maybe half. One of the early bad ones I found was, well, bad. My daughter and I had to jump over a dead rat to get to it. Not in a place I’d go at night either.

 

But one cache was soooo…bad! It was actually good! Yes one of the worse caches I ever found! Still, I’m glad I did it. It stunk, it reeked, it was covered in, well, dung. Death was all about. Yes, the dead and almost dead. And, it was a, yes, MICRO! Yes a micro. Sheesh.

 

This was on one of those trips I did with my brother and mother to Eastern Washington. We had hit some fairly nice caches, and avoided some that showed little promise. Don’t know why we did this one. It was close and part of a series we had been hitting along the way. Somewhere south of Yakima, along some of those back roads between here and nowhere. Indictor points down a side road that went behind nowhere. It soon turns into gravel and dirt mix. Great. I don’t much like bad roads even in great country, which this weren’t. So here we go down this road and things are looking bleak, but more than that, they smell a bit bleak as well. The cache is just ahead and I see why things are smelling bleak. It’s a cattle yard. Not just a cattle yard, but a cattle yard attached to a slaughterhouse. Hmm. Well we’re driving by this stuff and the distance zeros out. Yup, right there behind the dungyard and the railroad tracks. Ok. I pull over and look around and watch where my GPS is pointing. Gees. That post there. The one holding up the stuff in there from spilling out here onto this lovely dirt and *#$@ road. Ok, look at the post. Ahaa. There’s a hole, an empty knot hole down there right at the base of the post where all that stuff (dirt?) is. Only it ain’t so empty as one might think. It’s got one of those shiny little trinkets in it. Yup. Found it alright. It was a thing of beautiful, that cache... in a class of its own.

 

Some caches are a benchmark for all others to try and meet. Some are a different sort of benchmark. It’s nice to know where the limits of my addiction lies. (someone, please tell me!) I need help.

Edited September 12, 2005 by EraSeek

[+EraSeek]

The Earth travels 18 miles per second around the Sun.

The Earth rotates to the east at a rate of 1038 mph at the equator, and about 718 mph here at 48 degrees north.

Absolute zero is -459.67 degrees F.

the Moon moves away from the Earth at a rate of one inch per year.

The next U.S. total solar eclipse will be on Aug 21 2017.

The last one was 1979.

8.4 million possible mixes between father's genes and mother's genes make a baby.

1 out of 7 people in the world is a Chinese peasant.

70 - 100 billion people have lived on the Earth.

Moun10Bike has found a total of 3251 caches and planted 92 to date.

[+EraSeek]

~what you might find in a graveyard may surprise you

 

There are many mysteries of how we live our lives. Of what medium we swim in. Time and choice are tangled together. What I do here and now affects where it is I go and what I find. One choice will lead me one way, but surely some other choice would bring a different result. What is the nature of it all? Do all these strings of choice exist at once and always? If time exists as a string of multiple realities where each and every choice is made and has its own reality and ever exists, think of how it is. A tangled web of continuous branches crossing and re-crossing perhaps, certainly a complex thing that would boggle our minds, for every moment is a choice and a new path to endless other paths, ever divergent from itself, ever confused, ever existing, ever new, ever lost from true purpose.

 

But if time and choice are made as a linear thing, where choices are yet made endlessly and at every moment but only one line of choice exists (the one made) then it is a simple thing, a dynamic thing, leading to a true result even if that result simply be the path made. Then time is single dimensional and of a single reality.

 

Yet the question remains, does the past exist? The place where you and others have traveled? Or has it vanished like mists as if it never existed at all? A false memory? And only the 'now' exists, and only the 'now' ever has? Then time is a solid thing. Unchanging, unchanged. It is not at all dynamic. There are no choices.

 

I think time is linear, a single dynamic reality of endless choices made and followed to where it leads. Where we pointed it. I think the past exists like a residue, an ingredient that flavors the present, and affects where we take the future. I think it is a dynamic world and there are lessons to be learned. It teaches us where to step. Which may be the better chosen path.

 

There is a graveyard in Juneau. I used to wander it at midnight when summer was at its peak. When the last light of dusk had just faded and the first glow of first light was just a mere hint. In this graveyard there where many markers in the Russian language; a remnant of Alaska’s past. And many markers which mentioned a ship, the Princess Sophia, which ran aground, and slipped below the waves during the night when a storm blew up. Where all lost? As I recall they where. At least those who stayed aboard which were nearly all, if not all. I remember one marker in particular. A man and his wife. Together they died beneath those cold Alaskan waters. I myself have pulled many, both living and dead, from those same waters.

 

Many see graveyards as a dead thing. A dreaded thing. Certainly there is tragedy there, but life as well. The residue of heros and fathers, mothers and sons. Builders and writers, philosophers and teachers. Past loves. Past contributions to the ingredients that make us what we are, and where we are bound. Some question why others lead us to the dead as if it were a blasphemy. I have always found old graveyards a thing of interest. There is value there. If we forget the ingredients of our lives and our world, the flavor will be lost. Our paths will become tangled and confused. Our history will exist not at all.

 

Sometimes caching takes you back to who we are.

 

The Princess Sophia and her story

Edited September 17, 2005 by EraSeek

[+EraSeek]

Those lost at sea~

 

The glass falls and in that time when it is falling it has found an uncertain freedom. It floats weightlessly to its destiny turning and tilting this way and that, measured only by the resistance of air. But when it reaches the pavement, its self is shattered, its continuity is no more. It explodes into a thousand pieces, mere remnants of what it once was. It is shattered. Its pieces are shattered. It is no more. It is a violent thing and a thing of great sadness.

 

I was on the searchlight. The night was as black as it ever could be. There was no surface to the water. No telling the night from the water. I caught her in my light. She floated in space, a black void of no dimensions. Her hair spread out from her like an angel, each strand floating to a different current. She was beautiful, and she was dead.

 

They had hit an iceberg and sank in twenty minutes. Time enough to make a mayday call and rope together some crab pot floats. There were five of them. The water, of course, was frigid. In another twenty minutes she was the first to die and float away, and her boyfriend shortly thereafter. They made the call at midnight. They had done a foolish thing. They had put the boat on “Iron-Mike” and went below to party, leaving the boat to steer itself. A course unguided is a course foolishly followed.

 

When the iceberg was struck and the boat sank they could see the lights of the boat still alight, below the berg, below the water. The survivors described it as an eerie ghostly thing. The survival time was rated at about 15 minutes or less unprotected in these waters. She made it to twenty and drifted away. Her boyfriend made it maybe 40 minutes and did the same. After finding and recovering her body it was perhaps another twenty minutes until we found the crab pot raft. “There’s people! I see people!” our engineering chief shouted. I quickly donned a wetsuit and was in the water, helping the first man into the litter that had been lowered over the side. He could not have lasted ten more minutes. He was that close to loss of any strength to hold on. Then the lady, who was in surprisingly good shape despite her heart condition. We got her on board. I thought my task was done. I was climbing back aboard when we realized there was another. A man. The husband of the lady with the heart condition. I quickly made my way back to the raft, really just a thing to hang onto, and retrieved him. He was lightly tied to the rope and unresponsive. We got him aboard and found him without heartbeat or breath. We worked to revive him but were unsuccessful. He was dead. We believe he had been dead less than thirty minutes. Perhaps we were in sight when he passed away. The surviving man said, “Do not believe that dying of exposure is like falling asleep, it is a painful thing. They moaned until they died.” It was 5:30am in the morning, if morning is what you can call 5:30am in Alaska. These people had been in the iceberg laden waters for 5 ½ hours.

 

The next morning, (when there was light), another 95’ patrol boat from St Petersburg and ours did expanding square searches of the area. They knew all the people, dead and alive involved. St Petersburg is a very small town, a village really. They found the remaining body, a man, and we transferred all to their boat. I will not describe my duties of tending to the bodies during the night. Suffice it to say it is strange to deal with the lifeless.

 

In Anacortes there is a cache. I only had the coordinates and the name for it. Nothing else. No size, no hint, no text. I went looking for it. It took me to a memorial for those lost at sea. I searched and searched and could not come up with it. It was not by the column, so I searched the nearby statue of a woman holding a baby looking out to sea. Her hair and dress taken by the wind. I search everywhere. Nearby people were watching me. I even reached up the statues dress from below looking for a micro. One old man got up in a huff and walked off. The cache was nowhere to be found. I did not have enough to go on. Only then did I really stop to look at what it was I was searching and the significance of it. It is a wonderfully done work of art. It captures so much. I thought of those searches in my past, of those I found, living and dead, and those loved ones they were connected to. There never were any that we did not find in one state or another… eventually. At least those loved ones had something returned to them. How difficult it must be if that were not so.

 

Thank God my searches are not so vital these days.

[+EraSeek]

Shakespeare and particle physics~

 

“Were Man but constant he were perfect!” So said Shakespeare in Two Gentlemen of Verona in a tongue in cheek line regarding the conceit of men and the obvious, that the male gender is hardly constant, as many women know.

 

The electron on the other hand is constant. Every electron in the universe is exactly the same in every way as every other electron. One of my favorite thoughts to ponder was a quip by a theoretical physicist when he jokingly said “Every electron in the universe is identical to every other because they are the same electron.” Frankly I find this a profound idea that may have some merit.

 

This is the story of the cache that made the light bulb come on for me. Caches, of course, are not constant. Everyone of them is different from every other one. Many may fit neatly together in the ‘boring’ category, or the ‘another micro’ category, or as I like to put them the ‘yard sale on a hill’ category. Of course what may bore me may do just the thing for you. Often it is not the cache but the events of the finding of the cache that makes it work for you and not me. So this is the one that happened for me.

 

My wife had told me about something in the press called Geocaching. A game. I already had a GPS and had played with it often, I had even input random coordinates and followed them to their location. Geocaching sounded silly, but I gave it a try. My first find was Lion’s Gate in Everett. It was OK. Felt a little sneaky. I didn’t really care for that part of it, but using the GPS for something did fell right. I don’t know how many I had found, but I eventually did a cache called the Tie Mill. The clue got me to the right trailhead. It was a foggy day and the trail climbed up a small mountain through the forest. Fog in the forest is always kinda special. My GPS was a terrible thing. A Garmin 45XL. One of those 8 channel multiplexing things that read one satellite at a time then switch to the next as I understand it. Needless to say it would lose lock if your own shadow was close to the unit. Somehow this thing kept a lock to the top of the mountain, and then lost it. I knew I was close to the cache site but had no idea where or in what direction it might be. I stood there alone in a foggy forest with my hand extended high over my head below the tiniest of openings in the canopy trying to get the hint of a lock just so I had a direction to go. It was perhaps 45 minutes of this tortured pose. Then miracle of miracles I got a brief lock! It told me I had passed the cache and it was about .02 miles away. I backtracked and managed to come up with the box. I was so impressed with the trial of it and experience that I left my compass in the cache. Thus began my addiction, which was supplemented by a new Garmin 12. (such a big difference!)

 

So though no satellite signal, cache, nor man is constant, it is my considered opinion that our addiction is one and the same.

[+EraSeek]

~taking a quantum leap toward great caches

 

In a past writing I have said that each and every electron in the universe is the exact same as every other electron, and spoke of my delight in an off-the-cuff statement by a physicist that “I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass…because they are all the same electron!” This quote was by Wheeler. I said I feel there may be some profound truth to this statement. Of course most know these days of the bizarreness of the quantum world. But still, how could such a thing be. Well, consider this; shatter a hologram and each piece has all of the original image.

 

Now there are some qualifiers on the statement about electrons. First of all, there are no isolated electrons. Each particle, electrons included, exists in a cloud. Surrounding the electron, ghost-like Virtual Particles pop into and out of existence all the time, this cloud affecting the properties of the electron by their existence. So although every electron is the same, they never exist totally alone, or without being influenced by other things. In effect, one must consider the influence of other factors on ones existence as a part of who we are as whole.

 

Now mostly I just like to delve into such things, but to translate this to geocaching terms, each cache is pretty much the same. A box, a logbook, and perhaps some swag. Of course what makes or breaks a cache are the surrounding factors, without which the term “lame” comes to mind. These factors can be something on the cache page, such as a puzzle, or history, or the factors can be in the landscape, or some surprise factor such as an unusual box. It is these surrounding and influencing factors that makes a cache special. And I must say I have found a few of them and heard of others.

 

One cache that is near the top of my list is one where the box was little more than an afterthought to the extremely wonderful and unusual adventure one passes through to get to it. Many or even most of you already know of it, but I do not want to give any part of it away. If you ever have a chance to do this cache, do it. And go with as little knowledge of it as possible before hand as I did. It is near Hood River Oregon and is called PIPELINE*. This one is a classic proof that “it is not about the box!” Although caches all have the same basic elements to them, they are not a thing unto themselves, but a core of probabilities, the heart of possibilities. It is the surrounding body of factors that make them unique or just all the same.

 

Cache with class.

[+WeightMan]

I might add that two of EraSeek's caches that are on my favorites list are just that kind of cache. The box is nothing special, but the area is. Those two are not far from each other on Whidbey Island. Those who have done them will know which ones I mean. The rest of you should find out which ones I speak of and do them. In keeping with the spirit of the thread I will leave that to the reader.

[+EraSeek]

How it came to be that chasing crows ends with a dead dog~

 

The cache is gone. I visited the Murder of Crows site to replace it. But the forest has retreated even further. The land is mud. Commercial trailers dot the landscape. Piles of debris lay about. Realty signs have replaced hawks. They are selling the valley. The farmlands are fading.

 

They may put new homes here. They will be a misery with the first flood. Things are changing. This place has lost its presence. Its isolation. Its primal feel, its primitive creatures. No birds, not even crows will seed this landscape with their existence. God is laid waste by his most proud creation.

 

I have visited here many times. Awed by that thing in the dark forest that sent shivers down my backbone. It sounded like a dying thing in labor. Today I found only a large black hunting dog recently dead. Perhaps put down in a meaningless way. Tomorrow I shall chase the crows again. Perhaps they have found a new remnant of woods to roost in. I will listen in the growing darkness to the mayhem and be awed by the primal feel to it all.

[+Prying Pandora]

I feel your pain, Eraseek. There is... no, was... a big field down the street from my neighborhood. Almost every day I could expect to see a red-tailed hawk sitting on the streetlight above, watching for little critters to hunt in the grass. At night I would often see barn owls flying past and once I even saw a bald eagle fly over. I had always looked forward to passing by and seeing what wildlife would be there.

 

Now the field has been raped and pillaged and they are building a bunch of new homes there. I will never see raptors hunting there again.

[+EraSeek]

It seems the same everywhere. Dam shame.

[+EraSeek]

Well, I guess the grass "IS" greener on the other side of the fence:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/...p3?img_id=17094

 

How'd they do that?

[+AnalogDog]

Well, I guess the grass "IS" greener on the other side of the fence:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/...p3?img_id=17094

 

How'd they do that?

Well, what they do is send up sattelites that have a "thematic mapper" on board, that takes images in very discrete bands of light. Using these images allows one to differentiate pavement, trees, rooftops, water, snow, all sorts of ground cover including turf grass.

 

All they did was take exactly the spectral signature of turf grass, and process all the thematic mapper images that they needed to cover the US, then have it print in grass green to a image, and send it to a webserver.

 

Using multispectural images is now old school stuff, its been going on since the 60's or 70's and now modern goverments are doing the queries on land use patterns. Its actually really fun stuff.

 

Check out this page http://edc.usgs.gov/products/satellite.html, its shows all sorts of imagery that can be bought from satellites, and the thematic mapper is only one, the one I knew of off hand.

 

Rob

[+Prying Pandora]

Well, what they do is send up satellites that have a "thematic mapper" on board, that takes images in very discrete bands of light.

Be still, my heart! That's the first time I've ever seen anyone use the word discrete correctly! WTG, AnalogDog!

[lucyandrickie]

I hope you don't mind if I hijack your thread Mr. Eraseek...

 

Today I was driving home along Bothell Way north of Lake Washington. It was nearing dark and I was stopped at a light. I was alone, my mind wandering, and I happened to look up at the sky. There I saw a murder of crows. They were flying to the northeast. Where are they going? I turn off Bothell Way and follow them to a spot very near Fenny’s House of Omelets.

That is where I stopped and took this picture.

I wonder if this is their resting-place so I drive around the block to the north but still the crows are flying past this wooded area to a spot further afield.

 

It is still closer to dark and I must be on my way home, so I did not find their nightly home.

 

Now I get off track....

 

When I was in my twenties I lived just north of Denver, Colorado. During the summer in Colorado, thunderstorms form almost every afternoon over the Rockies. These storms move down over the plains north and east of Denver. Occasionally, these storms become quite severe and throw off small tornados. Even back then, tornado forecasting was fairly advanced and warnings were broadcast alerting the affected area. If you've ever been to the high plains of Colorado then you know that if you are on top of even a small rise, say a highway overpass, you can see for many miles. This lends itself to scanning large areas of farmland for tornados from a safe distance. During this period in my life, it was one of my goals to observe a tornado in action. When I would here a tornado warning in a nearby area, I would jump in my car and drive toward the storm. I became quite knowledgeable of all the hilltops where you could see for miles. Usually I would arrive at a selected hill, where I thought that I would have a good viewing angle, only to find that the storm had moved many, many more miles to the east. Once in awhile I would find myself in the middle of the storm but all I ever saw was rain and occasionally hail. Not once did I ever track down a storm and see what nature could produce in its most severe way.

 

In the summer before moving to Seattle, I was playing golf in the late afternoon. The course I was playing was located atop the highest hills northwest of Denver. From the high points on the course you could see the entire South Platte River Valley from south of Denver to the eastern suburbs. An unobstructed view of more than thirty miles. On this day, quite by accident, upon reaching the high point of the course, I could see not one, not two, but three funnel clouds forming on the eastern horizon. Two of the funnels reached only halfway to the ground, but the third was definitely on the ground and turning up dirt. I did not fear for my life, they were much too far away and moving away from me. Nor did I realize that I had achieved my goal of finally seeing a tornado. My only thoughts were of the people close to the twister and their safety. Later I learned that no one was hurt and only minimal damage was done.

 

Back to the crows....

 

Now, thanks you Mr. Eraseek (and geocaching in general), I realize that my storm chasing days are over but my crow chasing days may have just begun.

 

Thanks, Rickie.

[+EraSeek]

Great story Rickie. I've also been fascinated by tornados, but never been anywhere close to one.

 

Well, there was this one time when one of my kids was little and we were at a baseball practice near Brier. The clouds got dark, lightning and thunder. Then I noticed the clouds were going north over there, and south over there,... a big circular motion. No funnel, just a wanabee. Then golfball sized hail hit and hit hard.

 

By the wya, check these tornado tracks from space: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/...p3?img_id=17100

Edited November 20, 2005 by EraSeek