Sky Walking

Sky Walking
Originally uploaded by Pretty Penny.

Go up high in the mountains, on a nice day late in the winter. Way up above the New Green leaves there are days of light that are filled with magic. On bright clear afternoons endless sunlight falls through the tall trees, through bare branches lifted high as if in the yoga asana of podestina. By late March the sun is up more than twelve hours a day, and its energy falls, unfiltered by any leaves, straight upon the earth with enough power to split seeds and stir roots.
The trees are tall way up here, and they are respectably placed, somewhat apart from one another, not like those found in lower elevations. Up here we walk through a spacious park, a deer haven, a great forest offering deep vision. We quietly walk up here late in the winter, exploring a forest high in the sky and new places in our own soul.

Geocache

Geocache. Not for everybody. That’s for sure. Some people are crazy though and they like to play games with themselves. Geocache is fine for them if they also like hiking, mystery, frustration, and getting excited over small things. Annie Dillard once wrote that “the world is planted in pennies.” That was her way of saying simple pleasures abound and we step on them all the time without even noticing them. That’s geocache. You can find more information at
http://www.geocaching.com/
I used to do the same thing, in a way, when I lived in Tallahassee. But I did that without a GPS. I would walk out into a huge field in Tom Brown Park and line up a radio tower about 4 miles distant with a light pole about half a mile away. Then I would walk up and down this “line of position” and find another two points at right angles to the one I had just created - a corner of a tennis court say, with the scoreboard of a softball stand on top of a hill. Then when I had verified both these lines were intact, I would carefully place a penny under the grass. After walking a short distance away and returning - and still finding the penny - I would call it a day and go home. The penny remained deep in the grass, all night long. After work the next day I would go look for that penny (my “constructive activity” was supposedly walking the dog). I was amazed when I could stand at the edge of a great field and know there was a penny somewhere out there and then go and find it. Of course, I was also working for the State of Florida as an auditor then, maybe there was some kind of a connection - but how would I know? As I grew more proficient I also became more bold, and attempted more difficult hidings. Eventually the dog lost interest in the walks and I moved to the mountains. So that’s why Tom Brown Park abounds in pennies today.
With Geocache, though you are using sattelites and GPS - not light poles or scoreboards to mark your positions. The game itself may seem a bit trivial but I remember last October out looking for a “penny” of a trail called The Connector - really looking for a way to spend the night in our own home instead of the cold dark woods. Geocaching is good practice for that, and a good sport too, a lot better than trying to photograph turks cap lilies when the wind is blowing. The website mentioned above has a listing of latitude and longitude (also UTM) specs of thousands of items that have been hidden by Geocachers all around the world. I thought I would be the first to hide one in Franklin, NC, but found there are already 26 of them logged here - most of them on the Greenway.
More on this in later posts