By Cindy Currie | Fellow
When I left the STC Board in 2012, I was looking for something new to do in my newfound spare time. My sister introduced me to a hobby I am now quite passionate about—letterboxing. Letterboxing combines artistic ability with treasure hunts in parks, cemeteries, historic sites, hiking trails, businesses, and other places where they can be hidden, and you’d be very surprised at where people find to hide them!
Each letterboxer has a trail name (mine is “girlinthemoon”), a signature stamp that represents their trail name, and a logbook. Based on clues that are located online at www.atlasquest.com, I search for letterboxes at locations that are either provided in the clues or surmised based on the clues. When I find a letterbox, the “treasure” is always a rubber stamp, typically hand-carved (the artistic part) and a logbook. I use the rubber stamp in the letterbox to stamp my logbook, recording the date, location, and trail name of the letterboxer who “planted” the box. Next, I stamp my signature stamp in the logbook that’s in the letterbox and record the date, usually adding comments about the stamp or location. Then I repackage and rehide the letterbox carefully so that the next letterboxer who comes along can find it. Finally, I log my “finds” on the Atlas Quest website. As of this writing, I have 774 finds (in a little over three years)! Yes, the thrill of the hunt runs deeply through my veins, as does a love of the outdoors and history!
Letterbox trading cards (LTCs) are standard-size trading cards (2½” x 3½”), like baseball cards. To participate, you sign up through a tracker. Each participant creates a card with the image of a handcarved stamp on the front of the card and any other embellishments as may be appropriate for the theme. Card stock, color, layering of stock and paper, pictures, and so on can be included. It’s a complete design exercise to create an LTC. The back of an LTC contains the name of the tracker, a unique ID number (helpful for logging the LTC online), the trail name and signature stamp of the creator, and typically some information about the subject of the card. I’m currently participating in an LTC series called Decades of the 19th Century in America. There are ten LTCs in the series, with approximately eight participants per tracker. Each participant is creating an LTC about some aspect of American history that occurred during each decade of the 19th century, one decade a month, for ten months. By the end, each participant will have approximately 80 LTCs and will have learned quite a bit about 19th century American history.
During the recent Technical Communication Summit in Columbus, OH, I planned some time for letterboxing. There was an indoor letterbox in the gift shop at the Ohio State Capitol building, not far from the Hyatt. To get this letterbox, I needed to give a seven-word passphrase to the store clerk. To find the passphrase, I had to visit several other sites in the greater Columbus area. The first stop was the site of the former Camp Chase, which was a Union prison camp for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. The site is now a Confederate cemetery with 2,260 graves—an unexpectedly moving experience for me. I had to find the last names of two soldiers and was given the grave numbers to do so. (This is one of the beautiful things about letterboxing. I visit so many interesting and unknown historic places.)
With the soldiers’ names in hand, I continued on my quest. My next stop was the Heritage Bike Trail in downtown Old Hilliard. I needed the 30th word from one of the plaques on a memorial there. With three of the seven words of the passphrase now obtained, I headed for the State House. It was raining heavily that day, so I decided to stop in at the gift shop to be sure the letterbox was still there before romping around the State House grounds to get the remaining four words of the passphrase. The store clerk had the box and decided to give me a “rain pass,” as she called it, asking only for three words of the passphrase. What a treasure trove! This letterbox contained seven beautifully hand-carved stamps! And, as a bonus, there were old U.S. postage stamps to take as a prize for obtaining the letterbox!
You’re probably wondering what the significance of these sites are. The name of the Columbus letterbox is “A Journey with Abraham Lincoln.” You already get how the Confederate cemetery fits in here. The Heritage Bike Trail was built over old railroad tracks, the same tracks on which “The Lincoln Special” had traveled—the train that carried President Lincoln’s body back to Springfield, IL, for burial. Lincoln’s body lay in state in the rotunda of the Ohio State House for ten hours on 29 April 1865, with more than 55,000 people passing through to pay their respects.
While in Columbus, letterboxing also took me to James Thurber’s house (there’s a box in the garden beside the house), the Old Deaf School Park where there is a topiary landscape of a Seurat painting of a landscape (the letterbox is in the gift shop), and the Greenlawn Cemetery where there are 27 letterboxes. I opted only to find the Angry Birds series of ten letterboxes. That brought my Columbus total to 21 finds!
And, yes, I’ll be letterboxing in Anaheim, CA, next May. Care to join me?
