Again with the Jabberwock!

It's not just ugly tree — that is photobombing UGLY tree!

Too long it has been since Old Rob and I took a wee trip out of town to hunt geocaches, so since I was off work today, Old Rob and I took a wee trip out of town to hunt geocaches. The Lake Crabtree area, near Cary, NC, was our destination, for there one can find a plethora of trails and caches... or, as in a couple of instances for us, just trails.

Old man can't find geocache, commiserates
with ugly tree

We started out on a sour note, or two — a couple of long, ill-fated hunts, effectively tiring out the old men before we could even get started. Once we got moving on down the trail, though, the fairly rugged terrain tired us out even more. I had on relatively new boots that were still stiff, so my feet called me names for a while. And then...

Have you ever been bitten by a honey locust tree? Mother of Yog, these are evil trees. I described an encounter with a honey locust tree some time ago, here. I had another one today. Didn't even know the rotten bastard was lying in wait for me. At one point during a short bushwhack, I pushed my way through some spindly limbs blocking my passage, and as one of them whipped back toward me, it planted a two-inch long, molten hot spike in my leg.

Ask Old Bloody Rob whether I hollered. I might have hollered. I might have hollered ugly words. I don't know, I was too busy hollering. After a healthy round of hollering, I worked up my nerve and tugged the nasty little spike out of my leg and called it mean names. I'm pretty sure it came out cleanly, without leaving little fragments of itself lurking somewhere in my flesh (I should very much like to think the damned thing would have done nothing that hateful). Rob is the one who always says that, when geocaching, if you don't bleed you're not having fun. Today, at least one of us had fun.

We did find a fair number of fun little hides in the woods, so our day was tiring and painful but ultimately satisfying. At one point, I found an ugly tree with an even uglier head (see photo above), but there was no cache there. There should have been a cache there, as it was a pretty neat ugly tree. We didn't add a vast number of finds to our respective tallies — seven altogether; my find count now stands at 9,812 — but we had gone out looking to get some exercise, and I can tell you, some exercise we done got.

I sleep now.

A troll in the Upside-Down

Crabtree Creek to the north, with I-40 in the distance

Crabtree Creek to the south, with some dude wandering about in the water

Beware...the Jaws That Bite, the Claws That Catch

Have you ever had a run-in with a honey locust tree? Lord knows, these arboreal beasts are the work of Satan. So lush and green, so innocuous-looking, rather resembling the mild-mannered crabapple tree. Now and again, though, I find a geocache stashed in a honey locust, clearly placed there by some cacher in a misanthropic mood. Until you get up close to one of these cruel and devious monsters, you probably won't realize that they are bristling with two-inch-long, very pointy thorns that don't just lounge around in passive self-defense mode; they reach out, grab your ass, and stab you repeatedly until blood is gushing from your wounds like so many little geysers. I found a cache — which, for the benefit of future cachers, I shall not identify here — in such a host this morning. The cache was not named "Jabberwocky," but from here on, that is the name by which it shall be known to me. That's it there, in the above-left photo; you can see it peeking out from behind a branch. However, you might not immediately notice that the container is ringed by a crown of thorns. In my zeal to make the find, neither did I until it was too late. I got my signature on that log, all right, but there were utterances.

A few years back, my friend Bridget (a.k.a. Suntigres) and I found a geocache in a honey locust tree. It was a fun one. My online cache log read as follows: "When I reached to grab the cache, I realized what kind of tree I was facing. I might have spoken a dirty word or two." Bridget's log read thus: "When I heard Mark repeatedly crying for his mother, I knew he had found the cache."

There's just meanness in this world.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
—Lewis Carroll