N 44° 11.093 W 094° 00.191

from Local Treasures

N 44° 11.093 W 094° 00.191

Back in our early twenties, my friends and I used to like layered drinks, concoctions the bartender had to prepare carefully so the various liquors didn’t mix. Part of our pleasure was getting three or four drinks in one, a succession of tastes we knew were coming but which could still surprise. Partly, I don’t think we fully appreciated that different fluids had different densities, so we thought the drinks somehow defied the laws of nature, making them all the headier.

Geocaching reveals a thickly layered world. Often, the pastness of a place is part of what the cache owner is highlighting. But even when I think only about the present, geocaching reminds me that a place is always at least two places. On this rails-to-trails route in downtown Mankato, Minnesota, some folks are at a bike path, a few police officers are on a shortcut to their firing range, we are on the prescribed trail to a cache. That we are within feet of one another, but in entirely different places, is a point whose obviousness has not made it seem less profound to me.

More than this variety of ideas about what the trail is, what strikes me most on this hike is how place itself can seem to change moment to moment. Swirls of smells surround us, eddies by turns delightful or disgusting: the wet parking lot warming, the Minnesota River unfolding the piscine scent of potential, weeds tempting bees with their sweetness. And invisibly counterpointing these, the implacable rankness of waste being treated, startling soliton waves of dank protein (there must be a rendering plant we can’t see, a place where animals become meat), and bug spray, liberally applied. So much bug spray seemed awful until it offered relief from the odor of the abattoir. The waves of smells transform this place: when we like the smells, we say it is lovely; when the stench gets strong, unpleasant, we wonder aloud why someone picked such a repulsive place to hide a cache.

Those long-ago drinks, I think, were a primer in the physics and metaphysics of layers, hinting neatly—and sweetly—at what I’d learn later: that layers do not defy the laws of nature, but instead are everywhere the evidence of them, the intermingling, overlapping, often invisibly eddying strata of seeming, the thick complexity of what is.