We don't need no stinkin' GPS

I so hoped "Waypoints of the Heart" was part of your recent April Fools’ spoof (HCN, 4/3/06: Waypoints of the heart). I was chilled by the words, "the unwavering locating and decoding of geocaching is like finding a rubric for the universe ..."

Here, in the increasingly mapped, sanitized and sold Southwest, geocaching is on a par with surveying. Some of those nasty zealot mesquite-huggers have been known to yank geocaches as gleefully as they once did stakes festooned with Day-Glo plastic.

The final insult to this ground on which we are blessed to live, was the yawp of our species, "Like a flag planted on the icy summit of Mount Everest, that scrawled signature announced that we’d come, we’d seen, and we’d conquered. If only everything were that simple."

Thank chaos and triple-digit temperatures and plain bad luck, it isn’t.

Mary Sojourner
Flagstaff, Arizona

• Letter to the editor