Treasure Hunting

One of the few lessons I’ve managed to learn in my time on this planet is that play is important. Granted, when you become an adult you have to call anything you do for play a “hobby,” and it helps if you sigh heavily about how much it costs, but the principle is the same: anything done for pure enjoyment lightens the soul. It’s easy to fall into the chore trap—that grout isn’t going to scrub itself and maybe this should be the day you finally change all your passwords to be sure no teenage Russian hackers are watching your Netflix… No. Let the grout turn gray as a November sky and give Ivan your blessing to catch up on House of Cards. It’s springtime in Louisiana, and you need to be having fun. My favorite “hobby” these days is geocaching. This new spin on the treasure hunt is the perfect outdoor activity for spring and one of the rare activities that truly is fun for all ages. All you need is a GPS-capable device (practically everyone just uses a cell phone), a pair of good walking shoes, and at least one fond memory of Easter-egg hunting.

Geocaches are, essentially, little hidden treasures, if you’re willing to be generous with your definition of “treasure.” The hidden item can be almost any container: purpose-built geocache containers exist (some of them trickily small), but pill bottles and magnetic hide-a-keys are most common, and I’ve found shotgun shells, Tupperware, and a plastic skull covered in decorative tape. All geocaches contain a log for finders to sign, and some contain little trinkets for trade. These are usually light-hearted little things like plastic animals or a DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY button, but more startling items like rain-rotted dollar bills and a travel-sized women’s deodorant show up occasionally. I keep hoping a wealthy eccentric of the kind I aspire to be one day will slip in a diamond or a bearer bond, but no luck so far.

Geocaches can also be found all over the world. Nuuk, Greenland? Lousy with ‘em. Réunion Island, former home of the dodo and current fancy-pants exotic getaway? More than you can shake a stick at. The Mongolian steppes? Not exactly thick with geocaches, but there are a few. There’s even one in the Gaza Strip, which seems like a bold place to hide anything. Louisiana, firmly on the beaten path compared to some of these far-flung hiding places, has thousands scattered all over the state, and Mississippi has plenty of its own. If there’s a corner of the state you’ve wanted to explore, geocaching is a great excuse—it adds a little structure so you’re not just driving around, but it’s flexible enough that you can stop and enjoy anything you find. Geocaching can also be educational; often, hiders will place caches at or near points of historical or scientific interest and write up a little explainer to go along with the clues. These factors, along with the ubiquity of smart phones, have contributed somewhat to a recent rise in geocaching’s popularity: tourism boards and visitors bureaus have begun creating geocaching tours that guide visitors to local points of interest, and canny bars and restaurants sometimes hide geocaches to get potential customers in the door.

I decided that I wanted to have a little adventure in Plaquemines Parish. I’ve always admired it—something about the way it defiantly stabs out into the Gulf appeals to me. I like edges and extreme points, as the many pictures of state-line signs in my photo albums prove, and I wanted to know more about this hard-to-spell, counter-intuitively pronounced, oft-nicknamed “toe” of the Louisiana “boot.” So, one Saturday, I put on my walking shoes, sweet-talked the photographer into driving us in her better-air-conditioned car, and headed out.

First-timers will want to do some necessary prep before walking out the door. Geocaching.com, a popular website at which caches worldwide are recorded, is your starting point. You will also need a smartphone or some other GPS-capable device that will help you to geo-locate the caches, but phones are probably easiest because their GPS functionality dovetails seamlessly with the app. Download the app and set up an account—a basic membership is free, but for thirty dollars a year you can get a premium membership, which includes more difficult and varied geocaches. (I’ve had plenty of fun just with the free version, so I’d recommend giving that a whirl before you decide if you want to pay.)

There were caches hidden on either bank, but as we got further out of New Orleans it looked like the little town of Pointe à la Hache was a good destination, partly because of the relative density of geocaches and partly because getting there involved riding a ferry across the Mississippi. Boats are old hat to a lot of Louisiana residents, but I grew up on flat, dry plains where the few creeks did double duty as storm drains. So I’ll take any chance to get out on the water. For a dollar, two people and a late-model SUV can cross the Mississippi at Pointe à la Hache—a one-way crossing that takes only a few minutes, great for commuters but a mild disappointment for me.

Our first attempted find was a bit of a dud. The clue made me think we were looking for a shotgun shell, and we did indeed find a spent shotgun shell, but that’s not exactly an exotic artifact in rural Louisiana. Others were less ambiguous, and we picked up a couple of finds near a small, picturesque marina and by some massive pipes, of unclear function, that ran over the road. I liked augmenting my total number of finds, but I was even more interested in looking at this little corner of the world. Huge piles of what I took to be coal lay alongside the road in some places, butting up against enormous tubes that must allow for loading and unloading on ships. The roads invariably parallel the river, reminding me that even in the age of flight and email and instant-everything, the slow and powerful river that Abraham Lincoln called the “unvexed father of waters” is a real economic and infrastructural artery—and one of the great natural wonders of the country.

The town of Pointe à la Hache, at least what we saw of it, was one of those small towns that seem composed mostly of little houses, and you wonder how it hangs on in a modern world. Here, in the fading tail of Louisiana, you also wonder how it physically hangs on, almost literally caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Not only is it still there, though, but it also has at least one resident who went to the trouble to plant little treasure troves for people passing through to find.