During this pandemic, I’ve been thinking about fun
activities for families that would keep them socially distanced from others,
yet provide a different kind of entertainment they might enjoy. One activity
that comes to mind is something called letterboxing.
Over the years, I have received many interesting invitations
from my readers. One woman invited me to
her house for tea and a tuna sandwich.
Another woman invited me to her birthday party.
I accepted many of the invitations and had a great time, so
when a long-time reader, Kim, sent me an e-mail and asked if I'd like to go
letterboxing with her, I was intrigued.
The problem was, I had no idea what letterboxing was. Visions of the two of us wearing boxing
gloves and swinging at giant cardboard cutouts of the alphabet immediately came
to mind (hey, shadow boxing is punching your own shadow on the wall, so my vision wasn’t all that far-fetched!).
Luckily, Kim's e-mail also included a website
link for letterboxing so I could read all about it.
Letterboxing actually turned out to be a form of outdoor exercise,
combining walking and searching for buried "treasure."
Letterboxers, the
people who engage in letterboxing, hide small, waterproof boxes all over the
country. In each of these boxes is a pad of paper, an ink pad and a rubber stamp. The goal is to find as many of the boxes
as you can by following specific clues, which are listed online at
www.letterboxing.org.
Letterbox searchers carry an inkpad, rubber stamp, pen and
pad of paper with them. When they find a box, they remove the rubber stamp
that's inside and use it to stamp their own pad to prove they found it. Then
they stamp the pad inside the box with their rubber stamp and date it (they also
can add a personal note, if they'd like), so the owner of the box will know they were there.
So basically what it all boils down to is the searcher takes a rubber-stamp imprint, and then leaves one in return, and puts the box back in the same spot for
the next person to find.
Kim, a seasoned letterboxer, told me she wanted to find a
series of boxes hidden off Podunk Road in Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown. The clues had grouped the boxes together
under the title of "Hungry?"
They sounded like the perfect boxes for me to try to find, seeing that
my nose and thunder thighs automatically lead me toward anything that's even
remotely associated with food.
So Kim and I met at the state park and set out to find the
boxes.
The first thing I learned about letterboxing is that it
probably isn't a good hobby for someone who can't tell left from right, has a bad back and is afraid of creepy crawly things like spiders and snakes.
Unfortunately, I fall into all three of those categories.
Kim and I soon discovered that some of the clues not only
were a bit vague, they also were really confusing.
For example, the first clue read: "There is an
orange snowmobile sign on a tree and a round blue XC on a tree to the right.
Salt Lick Trail is across from the snowmobile tree. Facing the sign, take the
trail to the right. Look for a pyramid rock on your right. On the back side of
the boulder, between a rock and a tree, you will find something to satisfy your
sweet tooth!"
The "facing the sign" part of the clue was what confused us. Which sign was it? The snowmobile sign, the blue XC sign or the
Salt Lick Trail sign?
To try to solve the problem, Kim and I set off in
two different directions to search for the pyramid rock. I found rocks of all shapes and sizes but
none, even in the broadest sense of the imagination, could have been considered
pyramid shaped.
Still, after a while, I became so desperate I
started to convince myself that every big rock, even the round ones, resembled
pyramids. I wedged myself behind a
couple of them and started to dig for the elusive box.
All I succeeded in doing was getting dirty hands.
As it turned out, Kim and I found the pyramid rock
by accident…to the left of the Salt Lick Trail sign. Immediately, Kim, who was wearing shorts, plunked down on the
ground, opened the plastic box and started stamping.
As I stood there watching her, I wondered about two
things: Was it still tick season? And should I, after seeing Kim's large,
artistically crafted rubber stamp, bring out my teeny, pitiful bear one that
was so small, it was difficult to tell if the image was of a bear or some guy in desperate need of a full body wax?
I decided to keep the bear in my pocket.
The pad of paper in the box contained pages of
interesting and colorful stamp imprints made by people from all over the
country and beyond. It was fun to look through
them, not only to see the variety of images, but also the notes people wrote, such as "I am visiting from Germany and am having a wonderful time...but you may keep your black flies."
Our search for the remaining boxes led us to an old
picnic table, four "sister" trees, and a tree shaped like an archer's
bow. The "hungry" theme was
evident in each box, as the images on the rubber stamps inside them included
cookies, watermelon, a barbecue and even ants (at least I hope the ants in the
box were rubber-stamp imprints).
I felt a huge sense of satisfaction after we finally
found all of the boxes, even though we did miss the bonus box "past a
small X and under a big X beneath some bark." We peeled enough bark off a dead, fallen tree to build a canoe,
but never did find anything (except for several of the aforementioned creepy crawlies).
"That was fun!" I said to Kim as we headed
back toward our cars. She said she'd been letterboxing with her family all over the state and they always really enjoyed it.
When I got home, I looked up more letterboxing locations and found them just about everywhere. One, not far from my house, was called "The Safari," and people who'd tried it said they'd had a lot of fun finding a series of seven boxes - each one containing a rubber stamp with an image of a different jungle animal on it. They said their kids especially enjoyed that one.
There even was a "hunt" listed for another location in Bear Brook State Park, on Catamount Trail. I was familiar with that trail - about 150 miles straight uphill (or so it seems). Years ago, when I was much younger and less fragile, I'd tried to climb it. After
only 10 minutes, I was clasping my chest and praying for a swift and painless
death.
Still, I just might consider downloading the letterbox
map for Catamount Trail and exploring it someday.
I’ll even bring an
appropriately themed rubber-stamp with me…one that has an image of a
defibrillator on it.
# # #
Sally Breslin is an award-winning humor columnist and
the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “The
Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation." Contact her at:
sillysally@att.net.
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