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TEDx Talks
Title: Not All Who Wander Are Lost...They May Be Looking For A Letter Box | Marisa Fink | TEDxRoseburg
Published: 2017-09-05
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb2IwmGqOb4
it was a cooling crest Sunday morning a perfect day for a treasure hunt my husband Marty and I were driving out along the north encore river and we're heading for the mill pond recreation site it was only twenty two miles outside of Roseburg but we never been there before and we probably would have been going there if we didn't have these clues when we got there
was easy to spot no creek sign for the Rock Creek sawmill trail who knew that there was a thriving sawmill in a community supported here not sixty years ago we're meant to follow the clues along the historic trail and about him into the trap we saw this we received the message in our clues said to stop cross the boardwalk bridge turn and face the bridge down
below in the right hand side of the bridge you'll find a pile of rocks hiding your treasure so I carefully stepped down long the ox Allison the wild flowers trying not to trample them and there I found it a small bit of plastic green plastic peeking out I found it I found the Rock Creek letterbox might open the box and inside I saw the small carved
rubber stamp the look like a miniature camp ground so I took up the stamp pad that I carried with me just for the occasion and I ended up and I place the image of that stamp in the log book that we carried with us we always recorded all of our live book finds in our lives kind of like the north like the national park passport program
if you've heard about that then I took out the personal stamp that we carried with it with us and also into the up and put our image in the log book that was inside the loud the letterbox then I wrote down the date our trail name and I probably recorded that we were the first finder's this letter box had been planted last August and we were
the first people to find it then I quickly packaged it all back up and tucked it into the into the box again and put it back under the bridge so would be safe and sound for the next letter box finders to find this is letterboxing you may have heard of its younger cousin geocaching the letterboxing spin around a lot longer and is a lot more interesting
I stumbled upon this hiking with the reward that seventeen years ago I was home recovering from an injury and I don't like me but I was reading everything in sight I was reading cereal boxes random magazine articles and I read this short but life changing article in the two thousand edition of the Rotarian magazine the author Brian slamming he wrote about participants called letter boxers who
were hiding weather proof containers containing a log book and a card rubber stamp in parks and forests in cities and towns all around the world in what was an early form of social media they were sharing their love of the outdoors with other adventurers through letterboxing you're probably wondering how this all got started in eighteen fifty four a British park guide named James Perot tucked his
calling card in a glass jar in a pile of rocks in what is now dot more national park he invited others who came with him on his fifteen mile hike to leave their calling cards as well over the years people began leaving their postcards adjusted themselves so that future hikers would mail them to them from their own hometown well some clever hiker thought you know we
ought to put a stamp in there that says dark more so that everybody knows that those postcards really came from dark more over the years another climber hiker replace the glass jar with a metal box in a journal where people can live their finds and by nineteen seventy nine there were a hundred letter boxes planted all over dot more national park and they are all contained
a lot richer log book in a stamp and British hikers were writing hand written clues to their friends or even mailing them hand written clues to help them find the letter boxes they don't play this letter boxes in the pups and you were meant to go and ask the bartender for the for the letterbox of course you had to have a pointer to so here in
the U. S. we heard about this in a nineteen ninety eight article by Chris again strong he wrote in the Smithsonian magazine about it an early adopters on this side of the pond promoted it for the wave as a way for your youth and adults to learn more about new England's history and wildlife and geology I love the idea of a treasure hunt don't you don't
you yeah we are fascinated with movies like raiders of the Lost Ark and national treasure in order to participate in letterboxing you have to channel your inner artist and you have to create a stamp that encourages people to come and find it the best ones are him carve like this one so to get started I had talked to channel my inner artist and I created a
stamp that we would use to record in all of the letter boxes that we found old and tell people little bit about ourselves we also had to come up with a trail name we decided to call ourselves to bend riders because we were writing recumbent bikes at the time and our stamp was designed so that we would tell others in any letter boxes that we planted
a little bit about ourselves so we told them how we like to ride recumbent bikes we rode a tandem back then how we like to cross country ski how like to swim and we like to cook and fly kites what would your stamp look like I told you earlier about our finding them that letter box at the Rock Creek trail but when we first got started
we lived in Indiana and we often height on Lake Michigan and we figured let's try to see if we can find out where some of those boxes are planted if there any there so we got ourselves a rubber stamp that I told you we carved we got an ink pad and note in a notebook and a compass and we looked up our first clues on letterboxing
dot org most clues here in North America are placed on that site as well as on atlas press dot com when we looked up to see how many letterbox is were planted in the state parks that we visited along Lake Michigan we were thrilled to find there were dozens there were dozens we'd probably hike to cross country ski past all of them and we had no
idea the treasures that were hidden in the woods maybe those letter those people that we saw hiking with notepads encompasses and were counting their steps maybe they were on to something not all who wander are lost he may just have been looking for a letterbox I walk in the woods can hold more treasure than you can imagine right here in Oregon there are three thousand six
hundred and sixty seven letter boxes just waiting to be found in many of them here in our own community this is an indication of some there within twenty miles of right where we are over the years three hundred and thirty eight thousand four hundred and ninety eight letter boxes happen planted all around the world that are listed just on atlas quest got dot com alone whenever
we travel we always look up to see if water boxes are planted where we were we were visiting because we always managed to find the most interesting and unusual places that we never would have gone had we not been looking for a letter box now I feel obligated to give you a few warnings here before we go any further letterboxing is contagious and it can be
habit forming letterboxing creates this chemical soup in your brain that makes you feel happy my husband says his favorite part of letterboxing is seeing the joy on my face when I find our latest letterbox find at the base of a tree and with this big grin on my face I hold up the box my shout I found it my favorite part is reading the letterbox journals
and seeing what everybody else had to say about their chip we got to we get to see on where they're from and what their stamp looks like and I'm really thrilled when we visit letter boxes that we've planted ourselves enter speak startled so many times by people who say I found this by accident this is a really cool idea I can't wait to get started and
I am there just anxious to get involved you're probably wondering why people get involved in this and I wondered the same thing so when I was a graduate student at Ball State University I was looking for a group to study for my research on communication and emerging interaction and I needed a human network to do that so I chose letter boxers I surveyed three hundred fifty
five letter boxers from all over North America and I asked a lot of questions but one of things I want to know is why they got involved and well I learned a lot about them a lot about letterboxing I didn't get a PhD in letterbox I did earn a doctorate of education and I learned a lot about them here some things I learnt that we are
always craving mysteries one of the participants told me I love the idea that there are hundreds of little mysteries are puzzles located in interesting places all over the U. S. just waiting to be solved and we are always craving something to get us to move more to stay active and one of my participants told me that her husband jokes that he had if he knew all
along all it took to get me active was hiding rubber stamps in the woods he would have done it a long time ago and sometimes you find treasure that you don't even know you're looking for a volunteer for local park stumbled upon one of our letter what but during letterbox during clean up day and he said I'm glad I opened it up and didn't throw it
away now I'm hooked on letterboxing and sometimes we are very drawn towards new and innovative ideas a young mom told me she'd heard about it on the local news program others heard about it on it NPR story and one where one reported to me that it was just so intriguing we couldn't not try it we found it to be one of the coolest things our families
ever done and like most ideas worth spreading word of mouth is sometimes the best social media so one of the participants said my partners in graduate school with someone doing research on letterboxing for dissertation that was me Brian carpenter is the creator of atlas quest dot com and he describes letterboxing as international treasure hunt he says that the best letter boxes the greatest letter boxes have
clues and they don't have directions so here's your clue for the Roseburg Ted X. Roseburg letterboxed I planted yesterday here on the I'm quick community college campus start at the camp compass and you're at your best then stand in the center and face the northwest walk one hundred steps and you'll end up backstage exit stage right and head for it tional skills to clinch the deal
to the sounds of the river and the road we will look left and look down and take a quick peek for there just below is the treasure you seek James Perot could not have imagined the evolution of his original idea we crave connections with others but we're not connecting in ways that we used to Facebook posts have replaced water cooler chats text messages have replaced phone
calls even to our mothers we have a whole generation of young people many of whom don't know what a postage stamp is for let alone what to do with a rubber stamp ink pad in the woods maybe letterboxing can get them and can get you connecting more with others and connecting with nature and simpler ways people have described letterboxing as hiking with a twist performance art
