Visually, it's just a stick, tall, wooden, of irregular width. Though knotted, it looks smooth, oiled from the many hands that have touched it. It's called the Spirit of Florida, and it's a Travelbug.
Travelbugs are everyday objects that take on life through their geocaching travels. At their simplest, the bugs are serialed dog tags. A tag gains personality when geocachers attach it to something else, like an injection-mold T-Rex.
Rex0r wants to go to Hawaii because he thinks he might find the love of his life there, explains his detail page on the geocaching.com website. Those who find him try to think of ways to get him there. "I'm heading to Miami for the weekend, maybe he can jump on a plane to Hawaii from there," suggests one cacher. It's a mobilization of geocachers for a T-Rex toy with a made-up broken heart. Who cares? It's fun.
The Spirit is no different. It began its life as part of a black mangrove. According to its detail page, the walking stick wants to travel throughout Florida and meet cachers. Those who find the stick are invited to beautify it, mark it, carve it or otherwise leave an imprint that they were there. Initials, symbols, sometimes even representative items are embedded in the wood. Those who find the Spirit take pictures of it, sometimes posing it with family or friends, and chronicle its whereabouts by leaving logs about its endeavors on the website: "Retrieved the Spirit of Florida TB from a beautiful nature preserve, will add my mark and return it to the wilds as soon as possible," reads one of the Spirit's logs.
Granted, the staff is never going to stand up and walk around on its own. It will simply lie there until a human hand takes it and fills it with the spirit of the state again.
That's the great thing about Travelbugs. They're a means of sharing the world more completely than just by finding trinkets in an ammo can. They allow further connection between people through the objects they find, track and release.
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This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2006.
