A true story that starts in a Belltown basement in the autumn of 2001 and ends in an Amsterdam park twenty-five years later. The duck is real. The logs are quoted exactly as they were written. The National Park Service really did confiscate him. The rest was reconstructed this month out of a database that has been quietly keeping the receipts since before any of it seemed like it would matter.
In July of 2026 I was standing in Vondelpark with a phone in my hand, checking for nearby caches, when I got the distinct feeling I had done this before.
Not déjà vu exactly. Something more specific. The unshakable sense that some part of me had already stood in this park, holding a different device, on a much colder day.
It turned out I was right, though not in the way I expected.
I hadn't left a piece of myself here.
I'd left a very angry rubber duck.
I worked at the Westin Seattle for twenty-one years as a Bell Captain, and in all that time I can count on one hand the number of occasions the hotel felt genuinely strange.
September of 2001 was one of them.
The towers came down on the 11th and the entire American travel industry simply stopped moving. Flights were grounded, then nobody wanted to fly anyway. The conventions cancelled. The tour groups cancelled. A big hotel discovered it did not need very many bell staff for people who were not arriving.
I went down to a day or two a week. Eventually I went on unemployment.
What I got in exchange was something I had almost never had during those years — an enormous, unwelcome, wide-open surplus of time.
I had a basement studio at the Arkona in Belltown, a bicycle, and a GPS receiver that needed a minute or two of standing perfectly still before it would admit where on Earth the two of us happened to be.
Geocaching was brand new then. Brand new in the sense that the entire hobby was about sixteen months old.
For most of the GPS era the military deliberately degraded the civilian signal — a policy called Selective Availability. A handheld could tell you roughly where you were, give or take the length of a football field, which is fine for a boat and useless for finding a bucket.
At midnight on May 2nd, 2000 — geocachers still call it Blue Switch Day — the government switched it off. Civilian accuracy improved roughly tenfold overnight.
The next day, a computer consultant named Dave Ulmer hid a black plastic bucket in the woods outside Beavercreek, Oregon, posted the coordinates to a Usenet group, and called it a GPS Stash. It is still listed today as GCF — one of the shortest cache codes in existence. Somebody found it. Then somebody else hid one. That was the whole origin: a policy change and a bucket.
By the fall of 2001 there were a few thousand caches in the entire world. No app. No statistics worth arguing about. You printed the page, or wrote the numbers on a scrap of paper, and went and looked.
It felt less like a hobby than like membership in a very small secret society that occasionally left strange objects in the woods for one another.
I did not know how literally true that was. I'll come back to it.
Nine days after September 11th, I found a cache called Golden Child.
I remember beating around in the brush at dusk, waiting for the GPS to settle, working my way around the target zone and hoping I was not about to wake up something that lived in entirely the wrong tree. I took a sticker and a Where's George dollar and left a Club Cal-Neva coin from Reno and the finest watch anybody ever did see. Good sunset. A nice way to end the day.
Then I did what we all did back then. I went home and read the logs.
That was the whole ritual. Come in, kick your shoes off, dial up, and read what everyone else had written about the same handful of caches. Fifty people in the region, maybe. You knew their handles the way you'd know regulars at a bar.
And then one evening about ten days later, there was something in the Golden Child log that had not been there before.
A new kind of thing. Not a trade item — something with a number stamped on it that you were supposed to move. An object that was going somewhere and wanted a ride.
I want to tell you I thought about it. I didn't. I got up, hauled the bike up the basement stairs into the daylight, and rode north out of Belltown to go get it, on a weekday afternoon, in a city that had gone very quiet, because I had absolutely nothing else to do and nowhere else to be.
Why that one? Why then?
Who knows.
Its name was Deadly Duck: Anger. TB1A.
The entire trackable system — every travel bug and geocoin that millions of people have moved around the planet for twenty-five years, including the one bolted to a rover on Mars — begins with seven rubber ducks.
Jeremy Irish, the co-founder of Geocaching.com, released the first on August 30th, 2001, and wrote a story to go with it about travelling north through New Mexico and encountering a vortex, out of which came seven rubber ducks from the gates of hell.
Not Hell the flaming sort, he was careful to specify. The lowercase hell, where all the mischievous critters live.
Envy. Sloth. Pride. Gluttony. Lust. Greed. And Anger.
The rules were straightforward. If you wanted to travel with a duck you had to confess a sin of the appropriate variety — but only a small one. Heavier sins, according to the listing, caused the poor ducks to burst into flames, and the serious material was to be left to the big flaming ducks from the capital-H version.
I've thought about this off and on for twenty-five years and it still makes me laugh. Somewhere in a Seattle apartment a man wrote several hundred words of demonology for a bag of rubber ducks he'd bought so people would move them around.
The portrait on the duck's page, incidentally, is a photoshop of a mug shot — a well-known Seattle software entrepreneur, arrested in Albuquerque in his younger and wilder days. Which is also why the vortex is in New Mexico.
For a duck named Anger, what followed would turn out to be one of the gentlest stories I know.
Here's mine, from the evening of September 30th, 2001:
People that talk on their cell phones, while they are driving, and don't pay attention to you, while you are on your bike! It's their world, and we are just in it? This duck is leaving town. Will he come back? Who knows.
Cell phones. That was my great sin. I confessed to being annoyed by traffic.
Over the following fifteen months, five more adults on three continents were required to unburden themselves to this duck, and here is the complete accounting of the darkness they produced:
People who ride an escalator to the top and then just stand there. Cache pages that don't say where to park or whether you need a permit. Geocachers who log finds on caches they were never at. Having to do somebody else's job because they won't do it themselves.
And my favorite, from a man in Louisiana who is well known in the hobby for having built the difficulty-rating calculator half the world still uses. He confessed to a lifelong grievance with smokers who unerringly position themselves upwind of him. He noted that had he been thinking clearly he could have filled the duck with water and squirted their cigarettes out — but he was too busy making mean faces behind their backs to remember he was, in fact, holding a glass of water at the time.
He signed off hoping to be rid of the duck before his cat decided that jealousy trumps anger and took a liking to the little guy.
Six people. A hell-duck. An explicit mandate to confess.
Not one real sin among them.
That's my favorite part of the whole thing. You hand a group of strangers a devil and demand their worst, and what comes out is escalators and parking information. Nobody was actually angry. Nobody has ever really been angry. We're all just standing behind somebody on an escalator.
In January I went to Amsterdam.
I want to be clear about how this was financed, because it is the single most 2002 detail in the account: I was collecting unemployment as a result of the September 11th attacks, and I used the time to go to Europe.
No defense offered. The hotel didn't need me, and it turns out that when the world stops and hands you a season of unstructured time, you either fall apart or you go somewhere.
I took the duck.
Amsterdam Urban 1 was one of the earliest caches in Europe — the kind of thing where you genuinely didn't know whether anyone had been there before you. Perfect sunny day, cold, one of those low northern winter lights coming through the bare trees.
I left him in the park and wrote:
This park is great!! Yea, there are ducks in the water, and they seem to be having too much fun. I left the Anger Duck, but don't think the duck fits the mood. Why don't you take it to a volcano!
I still think that's a reasonable instruction. He was a wrath duck, dropped among a population of genuinely contented Dutch waterfowl, which struck me as an insult to everyone involved. Somebody should have taken him somewhere with geological activity.
Nobody ever did.
Then something happened that I didn't think was possible.
He came back.
A cacher picked him up in Vondelpark a week later — their confession was the escalator people — and mentioned they might be heading home before long. Home, as it turned out, was Washington State.
In February he surfaced in a cache called Disappearing cache — a virtual out near Port Angeles, one of the early three-character listings, hidden in March of 2001 by a couple called Carol and Aaron. About seventy miles northwest of where I'd first picked him up.
There are hundreds of thousands of travel bugs loose in the world. I have held exactly one of the original seven.
And somehow I held him twice.
Getting to him was its own small adventure. I wrote two logs that day, one for the duck and one for the cache. The cache log is the better one:
Had to find the Travel Bug I left in Amsterdam. I'll be damned if it didn't come back to Washington!! Very strange, but really cool! I found the cache easily, but may have started from the wrong area. Instead of a nice railroad bridge, I had to negotiate with semi-wild dogs. The alpha male was tough, but once we discussed the hunt; he and his buddies were game, and no more worries from them. However, I couldn't log in the book, as the pen is dust, and the paper wet. You will have to trust me, and figure, I really did find the travel bug …
I would like the record to show that I successfully opened diplomatic relations with a pack of semi-wild dogs in order to retrieve a rubber devil from a wet logbook on the Olympic Peninsula, and that the dogs, once briefed, were entirely supportive of the mission.
And then the duck log:
Bam! I took this thing all the way to Holland, and then it came back to Washington. I found it again, and took it further into the wilds. Pretty cool to think how many miles this duck has traveled. Is it a record?
I asked that question in February of 2002 and nobody answered it. Hold that thought too.
The cache itself is gone now, archived years ago. The owner's closing note reads: This cache has disappeared and reappeared so many times I can't keep up with it. It currently is gone so I'm archiving it.
A cache called Disappearing cache, which disappeared. Everything in this story eventually goes missing.
Faced with a duck that had crossed the Atlantic, crossed the continent, and returned to me like a stray cat, I concluded there was only one reasonable course of action.
Somebody had to take him somewhere he couldn't get out of.
I was already most of the way out there, which is probably how it happened at all. I drove west, and then kept driving west, out past Port Angeles and down the long road toward Ozette, which is about as far west as you can go in the lower forty-eight before the country gives up and becomes ocean.
Peter Roose came from Bollnäs, Sweden, and settled out past Ozette in 1907. He cleared a piece of the rainforest, built a cabin and a barn and a root house out of cedar, raised sheep and potatoes and berries, and lived there largely alone until he died in 1944.
His neighbors were a handful of other Scandinavians and the Makah community at Ozette. It's the last homestead of its kind in western Washington — which is why it's still standing, and why it went onto the National Register in 2007.
The cabin is there. The fence posts are there.
The last two tenths of a mile I crawled army-style. No worries — I'm from Yosemite, and I grew up crawling around in the woods like that.
What I wasn't prepared for was the silence.
I wrote at the time that it was the quietest place I had ever been, which probably says more about a man who lived in downtown Seattle than about the Olympic rainforest. But I stood in a dead man's yard at the edge of the continent and could not hear one single thing.
I left the duck and wrote:
I figure it will be safe out here for awhile.
Famous last words.
Ten weeks later the National Park Service found him.
Let me put that another way, because it deserves the room.
Jeremy's log, dated April 24th, 2002, notes that the good folks at NPS were able to force Anger duck into an envelope to ship back to me
, and that he was now hanging around the Groundspeak offices until the Louisiana trip the following week. The duck seemed a bit miffed about being shipped that way, he added, but that was his general attitude anyway.
There are photographs. He's lying on the envelope. He looks exactly as annoyed as you'd expect.
Somewhere in the spring of 2002 a park ranger stood in an office at the edge of the country holding a small rubber duck with devil horns, and had to explain to a colleague what they were doing and why postage was involved. I'd pay real money for the transcript.
It's also, quietly, a piece of actual history. In 2002 the Park Service was working out its position on people leaving containers in national parks, and the position it arrived at was no. My duck was evidence in that argument.
I thought that was a coincidence for twenty-four years. It wasn't. More on that shortly.
Then he lived at Groundspeak for eleven days. The wrath duck went home to head office and cooled off.
After his detention, Jeremy carried him personally to Louisiana, which is where the smoker business happened.
From there: Georgia, where a man at a geocachers' meeting picked him up and confessed to caring too much about his find count, then explained that getting over it had been a twelve step program
and that he now just enjoyed the hobby and competed only against himself.
I liked that man immediately.
Then Connecticut, carried north on somebody's work trip. Then a short hop into New York, into a cache named for the dog that guards the underworld — nobody planned that. Then a couple spotted him there, were frightened by his hissing, left him where he was, and reported that he began appearing in their dreams insisting they keep him moving, until they gave in and drove back for him.
They took him to Australia.
In Melbourne he was retrieved from a hollow tree beside the Yarra River, where he was reported to be extremely frustrated at being so close to the water and unable to reach it, which is a fair complaint from a duck. He spent a week on Port Phillip Bay, requested that his hosts photograph him enjoying the view, wrestled a Dalmatian named Jessie, and won.
There's a photograph of him sitting on the dog's head.
His last cache was in Royal Park, Melbourne.
On Christmas Day of 2002 the man who had placed him there posted his obituary. The cache had been plundered. The duck was gone. He noted, with what I've always read as genuine affection, that the duck's anger may have played a part in this cache's demise himself
, and gained his freedom.
He extended his sympathy to everyone who had crossed the duck's path.
Fifteen months. Three continents. Six confessions. One federal deportation. And then, on Christmas Day, an anger duck escapes captivity during a burglary and is never seen again.
You couldn't write it. If you put it in a story, they'd cut it.
Here's the part I only learned this month, standing in Vondelpark and then not letting it go for a week.
I went looking for the other six.
They're hard to find, which surprised me. Groundspeak sold thousands of commemorative Deadly Duck tags for the fifteenth anniversary in 2016, so searching the name buries you in replicas. But the codes turned out to be readable: a trackable's code is just its database ID written in hexadecimal. TB1 is number one. TB1A is number twenty-six.
Which is the first thing I found out, and it stopped me for a minute.
Anger was the twenty-sixth trackable ever activated. Twenty-five existed before it. When I got on my bike that afternoon, I was riding out to intercept one of the first two dozen objects of its kind on Earth.
And the ones on either side of it are a museum exhibit. Number twenty-four is Kermit the Frog. Twenty-five is Tigger. Twenty-seven is Fozzie Bear. Twenty-nine is the second geocoin ever minted — the first is in a private collection, and the second went into a cache near Deception Pass, in Washington, the same week I pulled Anger out of Golden Child. Numbers thirty through thirty-five are all more of the same man's coins.
So in the fall of 2001, the complete population of trackable objects on Earth was roughly thirty, most of them were within a hundred miles of me, and a good number were Muppets.
That "very small secret society" was not a figure of speech. It was a headcount.
Then I found the others, one at a time.
Sloth went out on October 12th, 2001, into caches on Whidbey Island and around the Sound. It managed seventy-seven miles. Then on October 29th, 2002, a cacher climbed nearly five thousand feet to the fire lookout on Sourdough Mountain in North Cascades National Park and found a devil duck up there. He and his companion were both Park Service employees. His friend, he wrote, almost sent Sloth to the slammer for good
, and it took some pleading to keep it in circulation. Then he turned to the geocaching community and told them to stop leaving things in national parks.
Sloth never moved again.
So it wasn't a coincidence. Two of the six ducks were intercepted by the National Park Service in Washington national parks in 2002 — mine deported from Olympic, Sloth pardoned at North Cascades. Two out of six, same state, same year, in the exact season the agency was making up its mind. We weren't near the argument. We were the evidence.
Sourdough Mountain is where Gary Snyder sat as a fire lookout in the fifties and wrote the poem about it. Philip Whalen manned the same tower. Kerouac was across the valley on Desolation Peak.
The last recorded act of Deadly Duck: Sloth was being carried up to a Beat poetry landmark and nearly confiscated by a ranger.
Gluttony survived. It's in the founder's hands, on display in a case at Geocaching HQ in Seattle, and people log it constantly on the office tour — the most recent a couple of weeks ago, from a visitor confessing to ice cream after a large meal, twenty-four years after the mission text asked them to. Lust survived too, registered to Jeremy, though I can't tell you where it's sitting.
Pride is missing. Envy — TB1, the first travel bug ever made, the object this entire system descends from — is also missing, and has zero recorded miles. It has more than a hundred logs and every one is a note: people writing that they saw it in a film reel, or in a case at HQ. Nobody ever carried it anywhere.
Greed never left Virginia. On December 16th, 2001, Jeremy and a friend placed a cache in Franklin County — an old wooden decoy duck, the Greed devil duck, some trade items, a logbook — down a hill beside a small pond, on a short loop trail in one of two parks he can no longer distinguish between. The coordinates were lost before he could list it. Twenty-five years later it has never been published, never been found, and quite possibly never been touched.
Three of the seven have listing pages that no longer load at all. The data's still in there — the mileage is right, the dates are right — but the pages have been throwing errors for long enough that nobody has read those ducks' histories in years. Which is why nobody's ever written about them.
And then the number.
| Anger | 24,011 |
| Gluttony | 11,898 |
| Pride | 6,432 |
| Lust | 5,369 |
| Sloth | 77 |
| Envy | 0 |
| Greed | 0 |
| All seven | 47,787 |
Anger did slightly more than half of it. More than the other six put together, by a couple of hundred miles.
Is it a record?, I asked, on a Friday in February of 2002, into a form field, of nobody.
Yes. As it turns out. By a mile, and then twenty-four thousand more.
(For the sake of accuracy, since I do this for a living now: the 24,011 is wrong. The site credits a four-hundred-mile hop from Louisiana to Georgia with more than two thousand miles, and I caught the same page reporting different figures for the same events two hours apart. The real total is nearer 23,600. It still wins comfortably. I've written to Jeremy about it, which is a sentence I did not expect to type this year.)
The duck's been gone for twenty-three years.
People still log him. Someone in 2023 turned up his tracking code by accident and left an apologetic note. This past February, someone logged a single word.
Nähty. Finnish. It means: seen.
Which brings me back to that park.
I was in Amsterdam in July for Aimee's fiftieth — nine days, Amsterdam and London, the sort of trip you plan for a year. And on one of those afternoons I stood in Vondelpark with my phone out, feeling like I'd stood there before, and eventually went and looked it up.
I had. January of 2002. Same park. Different device, different century, more or less. A younger man on unemployment with a duck in his coat pocket, who had no idea what any of it was going to turn into and no particular reason to be there either.
The older I get, the more I think travel has less to do with the places than with running into whoever you were the last time you visited them.
And I keep coming back to how thin the whole thing is.
If the towers don't come down, I'm working. If I'm working, there's no free afternoon. If there's no free afternoon, I don't read the logs, don't get on the bike, don't ride north, and somebody else — probably somebody perfectly nice — picks up TB1A on the second of October and this is their story instead of mine. If a stranger in this park hadn't happened to live in Washington, he never comes back and I only hold him once. If a ranger hadn't gone out to Ozette that spring with a mail run to do, he's still lying in the grass at a dead Swede's homestead, stopped for good, like Sloth at seventy-seven miles.
Remove any one of those and none of it happens. Certainly not twenty-four thousand miles.
Which is the actual point, and it took me twenty-five years and a week of database archaeology to see it:
Two of the seven never moved an inch. One made seventy-seven miles and got stopped by the government. The difference between them and the one that went halfway around the world isn't the duck — the ducks were identical, out of the same bag. The difference is that eleven strangers happened to be going somewhere and had room in their luggage. A work trip. A vacation nobody could afford. A ranger with paperwork and a mailing envelope. A burglar in Melbourne on Christmas Day. A guy on a bicycle who had nothing else to do that afternoon and still can't say why he went.
Not one of them was trying to set a record. That's the only way anybody ever does.
The duck disappeared a long time ago.
The story didn't.
Somewhere in a database neither of us could have imagined in the fall of 2001 — a database with a few bad rows in it, in a system whose first object never travelled at all — he is still, technically, in transit.
And every once in a while, someone still finds him.
Nähty.
Seen.