On Being an Evangelist

I haven’t forgotten you all; I still have major plans for expanding this site to have more than just a few random bloggymusings and a list of the letterboxes I’ve planted. However, this past week, I was struck with The Major Migraine From Hell(tm), and ended up pretty much flat on my back for a few days.

Lovely, that. I blame the media. Or maybe the insane amounts of caffeine I’ve been ingesting to stay awake for the other stuff I do every day. One of the two.

That said, a lot of people are finding letterboxing via some talking one of my co-hosts and I did on the Lime & Violet podcast. (I’d wager that most of you reading this, in fact, are from that very podcast, but I thought I’d mention it for any wandering knitterboxers who found it independently.)

I am, to say the least, chuffed. I love it when new people find this activity and get all into it, carving stamps and placing new boxes and finding tons of them and bringing with them a general excitement that some of the old-timers appear to have lost on a trail somewhere.

However, I think I might be in the minority. There’s talk on various letterboxer gathering sites (more the traditional ones than AtlasQuest, which is really my online destination of choice) about how some people take great pleasure at being annoying or mean to newbies, to squelch out that New Boxer Excitement. They, apparently, are sick of answering the same questions over and over, and there’s even an attitude out there about how you shouldn’t even talk about letterboxing to people, because it’s a solitary, secretive activity, and that adds to the mystique of the whole thing, blah blah blah.

You can’t see me right now, but my eyes are totally rolling into the back of my head at that one.

I can kind of see how you wouldn’t necessarily want to see a feature on letterboxing on the NBC evening news or something. The more people that know about ‘boxing, the greater the chance of some destructive asshats finding out about it and vandalizing your boxes, or muggles finding the clues online and misunderstanding, or geocachers stealing your stamps and putting a rubber duckie in its place. (Oh, but seriously — a geocacher found one poor letterboxer’s intricately hand-carved stamp in a box and TOOK IT, replacing it with, I kid you not, a FLIP FLOP SHOE. That’s a geocacher that needs a solid beatin’.) There’s a certain percentage of the population who just wouldn’t get it, and another, smaller percentage of people who would want to find them just to destroy them or take them. I know this. But it’s a risk you take in putting your stuff out there for people to enjoy. Hell, an animal can take your box and chew up the contents, even. Nothing is SAFE unles you leave it in a closet, and what’s the point in THAT?

And I do understand that the same questions, over and over, can get annoying. We get that a bit on the podcast, in fact. But being mean to people just takes all the wind out of their sails, and discourages them from getting involved to begin with. Why deprive yourself of a heap of new boxes to find, or potentially nurturing some amazing stamp-carver, just because you’re annoyed at the questions? Seems a little pretentious to me.

Back when I started the IALC list over on yahoogroups, I did so because NOBODY was talking on the “big” list. (The LBNA group, for the record.) When I tried to get into conversation about the stamps, I was either ignored or told that the stamps didn’t matter — this activity was all about the hikes and if I was interested in the stamp carving, I could essentially find my own way to the door. I boggled a little bit, gathered together the other artsy stamp-carvers, and dragged them to a list where they could talk about whatever they wanted, with the frequency they wanted. Stamp carving, logbook making, or even which purple hiking socks were the best to wear on long hikes. Now, five years later, that group still talks about all the periphery, with a topic of the week and some fabulous people who have evolved into fabulous letterboxers, and who have spawned things like LTCs (we did an exchange of them long before the wiki on Atlasquest has them being “invented” by someone else), and the interest in postal boxes (which existed before, but nobody was talking about the really artsy ones, which seem to be more of the norm now in the wintertime).

My point is this — creativity is good. New energy is good. The more eyeballs and footfalls we can attract here, the more there is for the old-timers to do, too. And I admit it — I’m totally an evangelist. If you sit still around me for more than an hour or so, the chances that I’ll talk about letterboxing to you are probably pretty high. As soon as I know you aren’t one of the small percentage of freaks or destructive weirdos, I’m going to sing the song of treasure hunting to you. And those repetitive questions are JUST FINE with me. It means you’re interested.

And interest is the first step on the hike into being a great ‘boxer.

I, for one, am happy to usher in new blood.