Here’s the ChatGPT instructions which I typed and the answer came back in a few minutes: Compose a piece involving the three Susan, little Luke and Jessie visiting a place called Hemlock Gorge. The Charles river has flowed long enough to have cut thru the bedrock. There is a ancient giant pothole that stills exist to this day even though it was created at the time of the last ice age The Charles river had a far greater flow as it was draining the melt water of a mighty glacier. Make the story in the present as the three make their way down the path. There is a geo-cache cleverly hidden on the island that is reachable over a rickety bridge.
The GeoCache at Hemlock Gorge
The path drops under hemlocks and the air cools as if someone opened a cellar door. Susan leads, boots careful on roots slick with damp needles. Little Luke pads beside her in his blue coveralls, hands clasped behind his back like a very small foreman inspecting a very old job. Jessie trots ahead, nose down, tail making a metronome of the morning.
They are in Hemlock Gorge, where the Charles tightens and quickens, and the trees lean in to listen. The river’s voice is steady today—green water over dark ledge—but Susan reminds them it hasn’t always been so calm.
“Picture this whole cut roaring,” she says, touching the rock wall as they switchback down. “End of the last ice age, the river is stuffed with meltwater, hauling boulders, sand, whole trees. Enough force to turn pebbles into drills.” She glances at Luke. “Enough to hollow stone into circles.”
Luke nods, eyes tilted as if he’s reading faint handwriting on the air. “The stone remembers motion,” he says. “It’s humming.”
Jessie sneezes at a tuft of moss, then snorts as if to say stone remembers, sure, but where’s the sandwich. She forges on. They pass under a bent hemlock, its trunk scarred silver where winter floods have rubbed debris against it year after year.
The trail widens near the water. Here the river has laid out a flat ledge like a low table. Beyond it, set back in the rock, yawns the giant: a circular chamber, smooth as a bowl—the ancient pothole. Its rim is shoulder-high to Susan, but the interior drops away darkness-blue and clean, the stone inside polished by hands that were never hands at all: trapped cobbles, whirled by the old flood into a patient drill. The upper lip is a ring of granite like a halo the river forgot to take back.
Luke steps to the edge, careful. He lowers himself to sit and leans in, palms flat on the rim. His fingertips read the skin of the stone. “Here,” he whispers, “the world spun in place long enough to make a memory.” His voice comes back to him in a soft, round echo.
Susan crouches beside him. “The flow was higher then,” she says. “The Charles carried the work of a glacier—months, maybe years of full-throated melt. It cut, and scoured, and drilled. When the water dropped, it left this behind.”
Jessie tests the scent at the pothole’s edge, sniffs down its throat, then looks up at them, puzzled at the no-smell of such a big thing. The pothole smells like clean stone and nothing else. Jessie huffs—respect, perhaps, for a hollow big enough to swallow a bear and yet empty of gossip.
They don’t linger long; the cache is calling. Susan folds the printed hint back into her pocket—no need to read it again. Where the river wrote its circle, follow the line to the one place it forgot to polish. Riddle, tease, and map all at once.
A narrow side path peels away from the main trail, heading riverside and then up onto a skinny neck of land that pretends to be a peninsula until the river, sudden and sly, opens a channel and makes it an island. The crossing is a bridge, if you’re generous with the term: boards grayed to driftwood, two slats missing, one rail rope and the other a shaky laugh. Jessie pauses at the first step and looks back with a face that says I do not sign liability waivers.
“I’ll go first,” Susan says, testing the near plank with her weight. It bows, complains, holds. Luke touches the air in front of him as if testing it for aura temperature, then sets his small boots onto wood. Jessie finally steps on, walking the very center of each plank like a gymnast on a balance beam.
Midway, the river forks beneath them, muttering to itself. The bridge rocks the way old furniture rocks—more opinion than motion. On the far side, the island rises, a mound of hemlock duff and granite knobs, ringed with ferns that look like green handwriting.
“The hint said ‘the one place it forgot to polish,’” Susan says, scanning the ground. “If the river whirled everywhere, what did it skip?”
“Corners,” Luke says. “Anything that refused to become a circle.”
Jessie’s nose has no patience for riddles. She scouts the margin first—where island and channel conspire with each other—and then loops toward the crown of the island in an efficient grid that would make surveyors proud. On her third loop she stops, head cocked at a waist-high boulder with a crust of lichen the shape of a ragged ring. She does not wag; she stands very still and points her nose at a seam so thin it might be a crack—except it isn’t. It is too neat to be nature.
Susan kneels. The boulder is shaped like a loaf left in the oven too long. One side is smooth, river-polished at some forgotten time; the other is stubbornly angular and rough. Right where rough meets smooth, at a lichen-framed oval, her fingers find a little give—just enough. The “stone” turns with a quarter twist and lifts. It’s lighter than it looks. A fake rock, of course, but disguised by years of honest weather.
Inside, tucked into a cavity lined with cedar shavings, lies a small metal tin with a magnet welded to its back. Someone has thought this through. The lid bears a compass rose hand-painted in green, a patient craftsperson’s afternoon. Susan opens it to the soft rasp of metal. A logbook, rolled tight. A pencil. A few tiny tradeables—a marble that has seen the world, a brass washer stamped with a single letter S, a plastic beetle, and, folded neatly, a photo of the pothole taken from exactly where Luke sat moments ago.
Jessie sits, deeply satisfied: I found the thing.
Luke looks at the tin as if it is a bird’s nest. He doesn’t touch it. “The aura here is curious,” he says. “It feels like a held breath.”
“Caches do that,” Susan says, smiling. “A little secret, kept politely.”
She signs their names in the log—SUSAN, LITTLE LUKE, JESSIE—in block letters to keep the paper steady. Then she slips a moon-white scallop shell from her pocket and adds it to the tradeables. “From home,” she says. “Garden tithe.”
Luke peers into the pothole photograph, then across the channel to the real thing. “I like that the river made a circle,” he says, “and someone made a circle on a lid, and now our names are in a circle of people who have stood here.”
Jessie nosed the lichen ring and sneezed, the powdering dust suddenly airborne. She boops the tin once, as if blessing it, then steps back so Susan can seal the cache and twist the fake rock home again. The seam vanishes. The island looks exactly as it did a minute before, except it’s holding them in its secret now.
On the bridge back, Luke pauses in the middle and looks downstream. The water carries leaves that spiral and flatten, spiral and flatten, tiny rehearsals of bigger motions that carved the gorge. “When the flow was stronger,” he says, “did it glow brighter?”
Susan rests a hand on the rope rail. “Maybe not brighter,” she says. “Maybe just faster. Bright and fast get confused, if you’re not careful.” She taps her temple. “That’s why we keep notes.”
Jessie tests a wobbling plank with a single paw and hums through her nose—her version of laughter. The bridge answers with a creak that means we understand each other.
They climb back to the main path, the light changing leaf by leaf. The pothole waits, patient as stone. Susan takes out the photo again and holds it next to the real ring of granite; for a second the two frames—paper and world—line up. Luke grins, pleased by the fit. Jessie noses Susan’s pocket, finds a treat, and crunches victory into crumbs.
“Same plan as always,” Susan says, shouldering her pack. “Jessie takes the scents. Luke reads the colors. I take notes. We follow the river until it tells us to stop.”
“But today,” Luke says, looking at the steady, green water, “we also follow the circles.”
They do, tracing the morning by rings: the pothole’s stone lip, the lichen wreath, the compass rose on tin, the shell in Susan’s pocket now gone to a new story. Behind them the bridge settles and sighs. Ahead, the river writes its long sentence through bedrock, less roar than handwriting now, but still legible if you walk slowly and listen.