N 41° 18.477 W 073° 24.685

from Local Treasures

N 41° 18.477 W 073° 24.685

The last time I drove from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, a commute I made regularly for a few years, I stopped in Connecticut. I’d been meaning to do so for a while, but it’s a six-hour drive, at best, so I was usually loathe to stop more often than absolutely necessary. But on that Sunday I wasn’t in a hurry (my commuting era was over), and I knew it might be a while before I made the trip again. I left I-84, followed unfamiliar “blue highways,” those smaller roads I’d only taken when accidents made I-84 slow to a crawl, and ended up outside a middle school in Redding, Connecticut . Across the street was the entrance to an inconspicuous nature preserve, where “Planet” had hidden a cache. I don’t know Planet, but I’d chosen this spot because I know about two men who used to live nearby—Edward Steichen and Paul Caponigro, photographers whose work I admire. I thought it’d be poetic to geocache and make a few photographs in their proverbial backyards.

I love photographing where other photographers have been. The other person’s pictures feel like a gift, a way of saying “Here. Here’s what I encountered. And here’s what I made with the experience.” I can look at those photos beside my own, literally glimpse something of the enormity of seeing and being.

That impulse is common among photographers, but certainly not unique to us. A lot of geocachers, too, value such visual sharing. Many caches include a camera, and many people post pictures to “galleries” on the geocaching website. I think it’s because places bind people to one another, that when I walk where you have walked, we make more solid the bond between us. I hope that by walking where Steichen and Caponigro had, I’ll come to know them better, maybe even feel their presence in the woods. I imagined I’d begin to become acquainted with Planet, too. For with each step, we leave a trace on a place. Sometimes our marks scar badly; other times, they seem nearly imperceptible, like a scent that only creatures of some other species, endowed with keener senses, are likely to take in. But always, the trace remains, its reality no less for our oblivion—like a geocache one cannot find.