OK, I admit it. I went down to Crosby Park the other day and I poked around. So what? There's no rule against it. As a law-abiding, taxpaying citizen of St. Paul, I have just as much right as the next person to visit one of our parks.
By "poke around," I don't mean to suggest I actually looked for the treasure. I can't. That would be wrong. Rather, I went down there to see the crowds, take the pulse, feel the excitement.
That's all. A couple of particularly zealous clue analysts, Downing and Kelly by name — these guys would make good backroom trolls in the CIA — have been having a bit of sport with me and they are determined to make something of the idea that I was in the park. I don't even know if the treasure is in Crosby Park except that we have been hit over the head a couple of times with Crosby references, including the eagle flying with the dove verse from "Love the One You're With."
Ha! That isn't even a Crosby, Stills & Nash song. Yes, they might have performed it together and it was released on "Four Way Street," in 1971 or 1972, but that is a Stephen Stills song, the first song on his first solo album. I know my Buffalo Springfield lineage. A minor point of clarification, I know, but until the medallion is found I am keeping an open mind. The Treasure Hunt is the only event all year long that can actually get me looking at an online discussion group and when you go to the Treasure Hunt discussion group you will soon discover that there is still a Como faction out there, a strong one.
Then again, by the time this hits your doorstep this morning the loot could be found and all bets erased.
Now, for the 100th time, I don't write the clues. I don't know who writes the clues. I remain at odds with the clue writer, though. To me the clues were once analogous to oil paintings that you could actually understand, trees and park benches and stone bridges and the like and today they have become the modern art equivalent of clocks popping out of eyeballs.
The first clue refers to the old curmudgeon in high dudgeon as a result of a critter running off with the loot. While I have been pointed in my remarks from the cheap seats I don't recall that the medallion was ever taken or moved by an animal or ever accusing the clue writer of a double cross as a result of such a disturbance. That first clue might refer to the habit over the years of placing the medallion in an object, diaper or White Castle box, for example, that could be transported by a critter.
In 2002 the Hamiltons of Woodbury found the treasure in near record time, after clue No. 6, when they tripped over a tortilla chip can liner in Merriam Park, a tortilla chip can liner that might have been disturbed by a critter who ran off with the loot.
We are to understand that this year the medallion has been placed in or on something substantial so that a creature cannot move it or eat it. That's an improvement.
Clearly our author is a bit hung up on music this year, helter skelter, Bing and David Crosby, Graham Nash and Neil Young, Peter Yarrow — Yarrow, in this case, either important as a musical clue or merely identifying a type of flower. I don't know.
As early as Clue No. 3 we got:
"What's that you hear?
Please, have no fear.
It was there before we
Moved in."
I'll tell you what that is. That sounds like somebody wrestling with a song they can't get out of their head. Five will get you 10 our clue writer is an old hippie with untold sheets of rejected songs propping up the legs of a few chairs in the house.
Copyright 2005 Pioneer Press.