Story by John VonderlinEmai John ([email protected])
Those not familiar with this relatively new and explosively popular game? hobby? excuse to go on a mystery solving adventure?, should websearch Wikipedia “Geocache” to familiarize themselves with its many variations.
This geocache’s creators, Purple People, start their Coburn’s Folly site description with the following sentence, then go on to compactly and accurately describe the site and its relevant history.
“Little shows that this was once the site of a resort that might have rivaled the more famous Pebble Beach to the South. A few drilled or shaped chunks of sandstone, some long-decayed asphalt, and escaped calla lilies and periwinkle run wild.”
I had to join the Geocache organization to communicate with PurplePeople, but you can check out most of the other sites they’ve created at the URL above without doing so. They typically have composed an interesting historical summary about each site to go along with directions to find its location. Here are just a few of the titles I found particularly intriguing: The Lost Village of Lobitos, Toy Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Ghost Railway of Palo Alto, The Old Bay Bridge, Doughboys of Menlo Park, The Explosion of the Jenny Lind, The Lost Village of Searsville, and Moving Monument.
Finally, being old enough to remember the Purple People reference, which comes from a song performed by Sheb Wooley in 1958, I Wikipedia-ed it and learned that the decades old question of whether it refers to a purple monster who eats people or a monster who eats purple people has not been fully settled.
Coincidentally, the One-eyed, One-horned Flying Purple People Eater, was the inspiration for Lord LitterAll, my still-being-added–to Marine Debris artplay piece. Enjoy. John