The photo accompanying this post is the treasure map we drew on the walls of our cabin in West Virginia before putting up new paneling. We drew it with our gosh daughter in mind, but she’ll never find it unless, in some difficult to imagine future, she tears down or remodels the cabin. Also, there is no actual treasure. We were going to bury a jar of pennies in the area of the woods marked X on the map (assuming we could agree where that was: “is it right or left at the cat?”) but someone broke in and stole them before we had a chance. A couple years later, the GD’s parents bought their own cabin in our development, so we stashed a secret box of toys and jewels in the top of one of the closets, with a note from a mysterious “Judy.” We intended to create the impression that Judy was a kid who just moved out of the cabin, but things got a little warped when the GD started thinking of Judy as a spiritual entity, sometimes saying “Praise Judy.” You can’t always control these things.
There is nothing so thrilling as finding something that has been deliberately hidden. It doesn’t matter if the item is precious; what matters is that someone stashed it—and why. Is the object being protected or saved? Is the object forbidden or stolen? Or has it been hidden for the sheer joy of planting a secret, no matter how small, in the world?
Some of my best memories are about finding things. As a kid, I once found a panel in a home my friends were renting, and when we pulled it away we found a pair of turn of the century button-up shoes behind it. When my mother had her kitchen redone, we found Kilroy Was Here graffiti behind the cupboards (left by her uncle because that was his thing). When my husband and I lived for a summer in the upstairs bedroom of my parent’s house, we discovered a hole in the wall board that closed in the eaves; through that hole we could see that an old crib was back there. My mother’s explanation was unsatisfactory. She claimed that there was no other place to store it.
I’ve written a couple of times about that crib. Once in a ghost story called “Stickers,” which appears in my chapbook Curio, and another time in Crybaby Lane, where a character finds a long, lost journal wrapped up like a baby in a crib in a sealed crawlspace. In The Juliet, finding a hidden emerald is the novel’s driving force, and one of the main characters has waited a lifetime to pursue his theory of where the gem might be, based on clues from map pieces given away in cereal boxes. And as I’m working on a draft of my next novel, the third in the New Royal Mysteries series (title still secret), I’ve just finished a creepy scene where a serial killer has discovered a very weird collection tucked away in the ceiling tiles of an abandoned café.
Of course, all mysteries “hide” the truth, and I often tell my students that every character should have a secret, whether it’s revealed in the story or not. However, what I’m talking about now is stuff. Physical stuff, deliberately placed out of sight. Hiding stuff is a long game, and there may never be a payoff for the hider, but that’s part of the beauty of doing it. It’s almost an act of faith. Dread and Hope are just different versions of the same expectation: discovery. The important thing is what’s hidden is evidence of the imagination that’s a little shyer and a little slyer than what we usually call art.
So, go out and hide something today. It’ll be good for your existential anxiety, and you will make someone’s future interesting.