Sales techniques

When I was about twenty, I walked into a pricey stereo shop to buy a radio receiver. A salesman of about my age showed me around and began to explain my options, and then spotted a friend of his in the front of the shop. Anxious to fob me off, he pressed some brochures in my hand with a "here. You look like a woman who likes to read."

Ohhh, gentlemen, really. If you wish to avoid having the wiggly part of your anatomy slammed between two copies of the Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson — hardback edition — do not EVER let these words pass your lips. No matter how angular, bookish, sexless or homely, every player on the girls' team is expecting something more like, "Beneath that thick gray cableknit woolly v-necked pullover, I sense the beat of a fiery heart, a flame poised to burst into a bonfire of searing passion at the touch of the right hand. O, that mine might be that hand!"

Okay, probably it would freak me out if the stereo salesman said it, but he damn well better act like it's going through his head if he wants to sell me an AM-FM receiver at those prices.

Now I am an older and a wiser weasel, with a heart more likely to burst into a bonfire of searing agita, and I have come to appreciate the advantages of looking like a woman who likes to read. Nobody pinches my butt on the bus. If I frown and steeple my fingers, people tend to believe I know what I'm talking about.

But, most of all, I appreciate being able to fly under the radar. I'm invisible! With just a few accessories, I can pose as any sort of bookish über-nerd "ist", from a botanist to a microscopist. Ists well nigh vanish before the population at large. Straights look at geeks like me and think "harmless."

(That's right, Bucko. We can hear you think. It's one of the geek powers granted us when the gods took away our rhythm and our fashion instincts).

Becoming invisible is especially useful for geocaching. Though caches are placed in public space, it's sometimes space that isn't well known to outsiders, is arrived at by going through residential neighborhoods, or is, like schoolyards, not somewhere loitering strangers are appreciated.

...particularly strangers staring into their hands, muttering and walking in loose and erratic circles while peering under things (a maneuver known to geocachers as "the drunken bee dance"). When you glance up from this dance right into the eyes of a pair of frightenend teenagers, or a park ranger, or a pair of frightened teenaged park rangers, or a mob of howling frightened teenaged park rangers with baseball bats and dogs and a big net, that's when you really wish you'd thought up a good cover story ahead of time.

Pursuant to my geocaching career, here are a few of my secret identities:

Bird watcher

My first imposture, and it was accidental. I was driving through a nice neighborhood looking for a cache site, a little lost, and I pulled over and called out to a man on the sidewalk. He gave me that squinty ho-peasant! look until I asked him, "where is the Miswamacunniktikutamut Bird Sanctuary?" And then suddenly it was all, like, "awwwww ...a birdwatcher!" From suspicion to condescension in the blink of an eye.

I so wanted to scrunch up the front of his polo shirt and shout, "Yo, Fonzie! My nickname in college was 'Nine Hits'." But then I thought, "chill out, Nine Hits! It's cool. It's cool."

I took to wearing binoculars 'round my neck in some parks which, as it turns out, is all I need to complete the twitcher disguise. People are forever informing me that there's a nesting pair of spotted grackles right around the next bend. And the hardest part is not answering, "really? Do you think it's enough for all of us, or should we order pizza?"

Rockhound

My cousin is a trained geologist (she went to school for it and everything), so I know the heady exhilaration of riding in a car with someone who might at any moment screech onto the shoulder and whale on the embankment with a rock-hammer. If you need a cover story for acting stupid in the woods, 'rockhound' is as good as it gets. There's a spot on the way to our annual fambly reunion where she and I always stop to collect rocks which are called, wonderfully, "limonite pseudomorphs after pyrite." A pseudomorph is a mineral that flows into an area formerly occupied by something else, usually another mineral, and takes its shape. I went looking for a photo of limonite pseudomorphs to show you and found THIS!!!! >>>>>

Holy cow!!!! I want one!!!!

Wait! What? Oh, geocaching.

My hardest cache to date was in a Middle School playground, and it wasn't actually hard at all. Only, I just couldn't find the daggum thing. It happens sometimes. Three trips at an hour each, and it finally turned up under a rock. Just like the zillionty-jillion other rocks it wasn't under.

Now, even on Saturdays, a grown woman pacing a Middle School playground turning over rocks for an hour is begging to have "hey, lady!" shouted at her. Fortunately, sticking up along one whole edge of the ground was this unbelievably huge boulder streaked with milky quartz. If I were approached, I told myself, I would brandish a rock hammer swear to being a geologist. (Note to self: buy rock hammer).

The flaw in this plan, as in so many of my impostures, is that I don't actually know diddly about geology. If anyone asked me my official geologistical opinion what was so darn special about that rock, I'd have to say something learnèd like, "beeeeeeeg...shiiiiiiny." Or I could play my trump card, but I'm pretty sure nobody would believe it was a chalcanthite and atacamite pseudomorph after mouse.

Naturalist, Microscopist

Aha! I am a microscopist. I have a small but lovely stable of old microscopes, including several classic Bausch & Lombs and my beloved ancient but lovingly tended Leitz-Wetzler. I've been collecting specimens since I was a wee slip of a weasel, peering down Papa Weasel's med school instrument at poison ivy and pond scum. If I weren't cashing, I'd be in the same sort of places putting hapless bits of moss and pond-water into baggies and jars.

The problem with using "naturalist" as an excuse is that it doesn't really excuse anything, at least at the amateur level. There is no sane, sensible, grown-up reason to drag a Mason jar on a string through a mud puddle. One day last Summer, I tiptoed out my back door with a soup ladle and an empty aquarium, and tiptoed back again five minutes later with an aquarium full of ditch water and dead weeds. Then I spotted my next door neighbor. The look on his face told me there was no story that would make this nice, steady man from Cape Verde feel comfortable with what he just witnessed. So I did the only thing one can do: smile and wave.

Botanist

Mama Weasel accused me of having a purple thumb, by which she meant I was Death unto Plants. It's true: I don't like green growing things, they don't like me, we are supremely ignorant of each other. So it was silly of me to pretend otherwise while searching for a cache in the South of England, Land of the Nutty Obsessed Gardener. But the cache was in a hedge, and there were workmen about, and I couldn't think of any better cover than to walk along stroking the waxy leaves with my thumb and frowning thoughtfully. If anyone had asked me what I was up to, I would have to fall back on one of my two best strategies, "beeeeeeg...shiiiiiny" or smile-and-wave.

Fortunately, before too much time had passed, Uncle Badger's arm shot out and plucked the cache out of the hedge. Didn't even look up from his phone call. Stupid genuine gardeners.

History buff

A frequent necessity around New England, where the sites of old cemetaries, battles and historic markers (and the caches attached to them) are often ringed around with new residential neighborhoods and shopping areas. A book makes a good prop; around here, anything on King Philip's War is a good bet. Only, I should warn you, sympathies have swung rather to the side of the native Americans in recent years, so remarks like, "dang! That musta been one humongous pile of dead injuns!" probably won't make you friends in the field.

I haven't had the pleasure of caching in my native South yet, but I'm guessing on Civil War battlefields, "dang! That musta been one humongous pile of dead yankees!" would go over rather better.

Hippie

Easy one. Matter of fact, Auntie was adopted by a tribe of wild hippies as a child and raised as one of their own. It's true. If I were ten years younger, my name would probably be Polystyrene Lemondrop Weasel (Hm. Possibly an improvement, at that). Mother was a bit old for a hippie, but willing to work hard and apply herself.

Hence, I developed a taste for colorful glass beads, denim clothing and patchouli, an appearance entirely at odds with the radical right wing politics I developed at the same time for the same reason. I would make an excellent spy in the other camp, if hippies ever did anything that mattered.

Hippies are often to be found in the woods performing made-up cosmic boogita-boogita rituals they imagine mirror those performed by groovy primitive peoples in harmony with nature. As hippies are both harmless and pointless (with their clothes on), being mistaken for one is excellent cover. Praise Gaia!

Work-Release

Okay, this one suits well enough to hurt my feelings. One morning this Fall, I put on my orange safety vest and my shabbiest hiking outfit, grabbed a lawn 'n' leaf sized trash bag and a poky stick, and headed out to clean up the site of one of my own geocaches. Then it hit me, how much I looked like I had wandered away from a roadside chain gang, or had been left to do community service to work off a DUI or something.

For the record, Auntie has never technically been arrested for anything as an adult.

Geocacher

There's a reason this comes last: it doesn't work. Seriously. You can explain geocaching to people all you want, and most find the idea intriguing...in someone else's back yard. Once you get the, "wait a minute — you're playing a game that is going to bring more scruffy people like you wandering through my nice little neighborhood park?" you know the cache is doomed.

Or, as the first person I explained geocaching to said, "you people aren't doing nothing...stoopid, are you?"

Or, as the last person I explained it to said, "I see. And who do I talk to to get this stopped?"

So...just do us all a favor and pretend to be a well-read technophilic hippie mushroom picker on probation, okay?