Today's Cacher: Your first log entries consisted of a single word: "found". At what point did you begin adding more details?

oregone: Actually, my first cache found was called something like “just browsing.” It was half geocaching, half Encyclopedia Brown mystery. It’s long been archived, but remains a favorite of mine to this day. Some of the other Portland old-timers might remember it, because if you lived within 50 miles of the city, it was at the top of your list back then.

About those “found” entries you see in my first 100 or so finds: I’m slowly trying to go back and delete all of my logs. My original plan was to make some sort of cafepress.com book with them, including a bunch of deleted stuff that I didn’t include in the original log. But that got really tedious and frustrating really quickly. When it comes to putting an entire book together that’s actually interesting to read or follows some sort of straight line of reasonable thinking, I don’t know crap. Nowadays, I just pretty much just delete them at random. It was kinda fun going back and deleting entire weeks of my life with a single keystroke, but I know I’ll someday regret the death of Soapy Boy.

But I’m not saying that my original first hundred or so caches had interesting logs. I didn’t own a computer until January of 2002, so I was logging all my caches at the library. Once I got a computer, I guess I felt comfortable enough to get a little loquacious.

Today's Cacher: What prompted you to create log entries that include details of which many cachers may not see the relevance to a particular find? Which cache first featured these details?

oregone: That first “interesting” log I wrote has been deleted, but I remember it being about trespassing into a motel hot tub and doing tequila shots with my girlfriend at the time. And boobs. Oddly enough, I had a horrible time finding the cache and spent two hours out in the Florence dunes trying to locate said cache. I don’t know why I didn’t just write about that. Maybe it was the boobs.

I figure that once you’ve offended someone to the point of unmitigated log-deletion, it’s best to just avoid that person’s caches Today's Cacher: Have you received any positive (or negative) feedback from cache owners after reporting your find on gc.com? And, have you ever had an entry deleted by the owner because of its wordiness?

oregone: There are probably more deleted logs than I know about, because I don’t think gc.com notifies you when your log gets skeeted. I have noticed a few that were deleted, but I figure that once you’ve offended someone to the point of unmitigated log-deletion, it’s best to just avoid that person’s caches and not say anything.

Many times, the owner of the cache emails me and politely asks me to clean it up a bit. A few have even flamed me using language worse than my original log. My rule is that if a cache owner doesn’t like a log, I’ll replace whatever I wrote with something else, but never a cleaner version of the original. It’s tough to make something I’ve already written morally acceptable to someone whom you know nothing about save their cache container, so I usually just delete the whole thing and replace it with a two or three line snippet about how I enjoyed the cache, and thanks. It’s their cache, after all.

But for every negative comment I receive, I get a dozen or so positive ones, [though] I tend to remember the negative ones better.

Today's Cacher: How do your online entries differ from those left in the log book in a cache?

oregone: Most of my caching seems to be done in the rain for some reason, so I keep my entries short and sweet, sometimes only signing my name. There is the occasional exception, of course: If it’s sunny and I’m in the middle of nowhere, I usually pop open a pbr, light a cigarette, and write a paragraph or two. Screw energy bars and Gatorade, I say.

I actually filled up an entire log book—from page 3 to the end of the line—at a cache outside of Gold Beach once. It took me almost three hours, but it was a nice day, I had nowhere else to go, and I liked the view. Plus I was between girlfriends at the time so I had a lot to say.

Today's Cacher: Do the descriptions of the caches you've hidden tend to be as verbose as those of your finds?

The other day I was doing a cache near some tiny Eastern Oregon town when I saw two teenage girls walking a sheep through their downtown area...I don’t remember ever getting to the cache. oregone: Oh god no. If someone wants to print out my cache, I want it all to fit on one page and not have 1000 words about what I experienced when hiding it. I figure it’s their job to make the experience their own, and not to read specific instructions that someone wrote behind the safety of their own keyboard. Who cares about what the cache contents were when I wrote the description nine months ago? Like that Liz Phair CD is still in there. My cache pages are quick and to the point: Here’s your coords, here’s your clue. Go.

Today's Cacher: Where do you get your inspiration for your entries?

oregone: The other day I was doing a cache near some tiny Eastern Oregon town when I saw two teenage girls walking a sheep through their downtown area. Instead of just driving on, I slammed on my brakes and asked them why they were walking a sheep through downtown. They looked at me as if I had just asked them the most ludicrous question they had ever heard, but I ended up talking with them for a few hours and meeting some of the other locals. Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever getting to the cache.

At any rate, it’s things like sheep-walking eastern Oregon girls that end up taking up more important parts of my brain than trading a pocketknife for a mini-compass or whatever. Memories of trails and Tupperware get filed away next to what I had for lunch yesterday, but things like dipping my butt into the Yaquina Bay just so I could say I had dipped my butt into the Yaquina Bay are still in my mind when I get around to logging a cache.

Today's Cacher: Are you, perchance, an aspiring author? Have you ever been published?

oregone: Aside from random college literary journals and the occasional letter to the editor, I’ve never written anything deemed publishable. I am, by no means, an aspiring author. I learned how to write a relatively entertaining story back in junior high because I realized that it attracted women. When Jamie Verboort kissed me on the lips in seventh grade because I wrote her a funny poem, I immediately forgot everything I knew about math, science, and computers and focused on how to trick the next girl into liking me just because I can string a few sentences together. Back in college, I had a ton of elective credits to choose from, so I took three Creative Writing classes and had a new girlfriend within three weeks of the beginning of each term. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), girls that like you for your prose are a fickle breed.

Today's Cacher: Apparently, you're considerably behind in logging your found caches. What has happened to prevent you from adding the reports of your finds, and do you anticipate a time when you will eventually catch up?

oregone: I’m never going to catch up. I average about ten finds a week and two online logs a month. The reason I’m behind in logging finds is painfully simple: I don’t have a computer anymore. The only time I feel comfortable enough to write a good log is when I spend the night at work or “borrow” one to take home. I’m hoping that my local geocaching friends will clean out their garages and build me a frankenputer soon though.

...geocaching, to me, isn’t the find at all. It’s the getting there. It’s the crazy one-armed girl at the bar...that challenged me to a match of arm-wrestling. Today's Cacher: Congratulations on your 1000th find! Of these, is there a particular find that stands out in your memory more than the others? A particular log entry?

oregone: So much of geocaching, to me, isn’t the find at all. It’s the getting there. It’s the crazy one-armed girl at the bar in Corvallis that challenged me to a match of arm-wrestling.

My favorite all-around geocaching experience was at a cache called “Pink Bucket Spring” up in the Cascades because it had everything (in descending order of importance): A great hike, a gory car accident, and two topless girls in a mountain lake with the same first name. That log has since been deleted, of course.

My favorite log (also deleted but still alive in the old nw forums), was the one for “Kalama River Road” up in Washington. It was right after Alayne dumped me, and I was pretty devastated. The cache was right next to a dead deer that had been recently hit by a car. I don’t know if the cache was intentionally hidden there, but I felt I had some sort of depressing kindred spirit in that forgotten, mangled animal. Yeah, Alayne was pretty hot.

Today's Cacher: What is your opinion of the log entries left by others? How do you feel about entries that read merely, "TNLNSL"?

oregone: I’m always a little disappointed when I get a “so and so found your cache” email and all they write is a TNLNSL. I mean, they could at least lie to me and tell me that a beer truck collided with a bus full of catholic school girls at the cache, couldn’t they? Then again, I understand that some of those same people are just as disappointed when they see that I’ve found their cache.

Maybe those folks just want to find a lot of caches and stay under the radar, or maybe they know something I don’t and decide not to include sometimes highly personal information about themselves in a venue as unlikely as a geocaching website. I don’t respect them any less for it. So like I said: I’m disappointed, but logs on gc.com aren’t graded on verboseness and creativity, right?

I guess that sometimes not a lot happens from car to cache. Maybe most caches don’t have a story unless you start writing from driveway to cache. I’ll go a step further and say that in order to produce a good (in my opinion) log, most caches need you to go from birth to cache.

Let’s say you find a micro-cache in the crook of a tree near a rest area. That takes—at the most—four minutes. Unless you’re extremely lucky or a character in a novel, nine times out of ten nothing outrageously interesting is usually going to happen to you between your car and the cache, so you have to draw on seemingly unrelated experiences from two weeks ago or 20 years ago to make your log worth reading. I mean, it’s not like your brain turns off while you’re following the arrow.

TNLNSL? Fine. But you can’t tell me that the dog excrement you had to step over to find some meaningless hide-a-key off of I-90 didn’t make you think of that apartment you used to live in near Tacoma... Maybe you notice an ’82 Chevy Cavalier in the parking lot and that reminds you of the car your friend Marino had your sophomore year of college and how you made out with Darlene Petrie in the back seat while waiting in the drive thru of Carl’s Jr. Maybe she had one of those bras with the clasp in the front. I don’t know. Throw it in and maybe it will be funny. There’s a couple of teenage girls walking a sheep through the drive-thru in front of you, and the girl at the window can’t make the correct change. It’s snowing—no—hailing and the sound the hail makes on the roof of that Cavalier reminds you of the rain falling on the ambulance that took you to the hospital after you, um, got attacked by a rabid beaver or something.

TNLNSL? Fine. But you can’t tell me that the dog excrement you had to step over to find some meaningless hide-a-key off of I-90 didn’t make you think of that apartment you used to live in near Tacoma that had the leaking ceiling, and how you had to use the actual towels your mother-in-law gave you for a wedding gift that you never liked anyway. And how you felt a strange sense of satisfaction when you soaked up the upper floor’s toilet water with them. C’mon. You were happy.

Today's Cacher: In your own words, how would you describe your log entries?

oregone: 50% truth, 40% kinda the truth, and 10% lies.

Today's Cacher: You're an icon in the geocaching community due to your (some may say) eccentric reports of cache finds? How does that make you feel?

oregone: I’ve never considered myself an icon. I know that every once in a while I come up with something kinda funny or sad or close to home, but I’m just a guy that finds boxes of crap in the woods like everyone else.

Honestly though, and don’t tell anyone about this, but I really do enjoy meeting a new cacher at an event like champoeg, and after they introduce themselves and while we’re shaking hands I say I’m “oregone” and their eyes kinda squint for a second and they say “oh! oregone!” Truthfully, I live for that [expletive]. I can’t just sit here and lie to you: I [expletive] ENJOY people that find me amusing more than people that find me offensive. I seriously love the attention, but I always shrug it off as if it’s no big deal to me. They’ll say something like, “I loved that log about the ex-girlfriend that had a thing for painting unicorns,” and I’ll pretend that I don’t remember said log even though I’m secretly hanging on their every word. Pretty sick, huh?