My own beloved newspaper did me a disservice last week by printing snippets from a number of columns when I had to write that I do not write the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt clues. I cannot now reasonably blame the average Treasure Hunter for thinking I doth protest too much.
The clues this year have had a kind of clarity and purpose that, for my money, and I cannot search, have been missing for about the last 15 years.
I am not much of a puzzler. I have never completed a crossword puzzle in my life and I shy away from anything where filling in the little boxes would require some semblance of mathematical discipline.
The true and mangy hunters know that I am unqualified. They dismiss me, charitably, and get on with their work. By the “true and mangy,” I mean the people who prepare for the quest starting in about July, reviewing topographical maps of parks and playgrounds and bluffs and creeks. The true and mangy have the clothing, the equipment, the resolve. They are not out there with a window scraper from their car. They don’t use a credit card to dig. “Mangy” is not meant disparagingly. It’s what becomes of you when you give up sleep and nourishment. The diehards end up looking like Leonardo Di Caprio in “The Revenant.’’
Technology? I would imagine the true and mangy have banks of computers set up that look like something from the Federal Aviation Administration.
And while it is true that the hunt attracts prospectors from all over the state, maybe from all over the country, it usually comes down to St. Paul’s hardiest souls to solve the mystery.
Pioneer Press employees and their relatives are, of course, disqualified from even looking. I have not been able to participate since 1984 when the bounty was discovered in Newell Park, attached to a broken 45-rpm record. But I used to be a treasure hunter.
In 1956, when the medallion was found in a hollow log in Como Park, I searched with my mother and probably a sister. I wrote about it once, but that was before we captured our clippings electronically, and since we have moved across the river from downtown, I am not sure if we even have a morgue anymore.
As we were not a particularly gifted family when it came to things like analytics, it speaks to the simplicity of the clues back then that we even found ourselves in Como Park. I remember hordes of people and have it in my mind’s eye that even though we were apparently nowhere near the hollow log, we were in the park with thousands of others clawing pointlessly at the snow in the middle of a large open field alongside Lexington Avenue.
I lost my glasses.
“Oh, no,’’ my mother said.
Eyeglasses were not an insignificant family expense in those days. I was terribly cross-eyed, to the point where I probably walked around in circles without my glasses.
“Dig children, dig,’’ my mother said, meaning for the lost glasses.
We dug, furiously.
“I found them!’’ my mother said, but too loudly.
We looked up to see the bearded and the unwashed trudging through the knee-deep snow to our spot in the field. They had shovels and muskets, or so it appeared. They kept advancing.
My mother took the glasses from me and held them in the air.
“No, his glasses,’’ she said. “We found his glasses.’’
The advancing column stopped and turned. They marched sadly back to where they were pointlessly digging in the snow.
We got out of there.
I don’t suppose it breaks any rules to say that from clue No. 2 this year I believed in my heart that I knew who the clue writer was. And where the treasure was, or is. Could be wrong. I could be way off and it’s still out there.
Copyright 2016 Pioneer Press.