Author: Katherine Glover

There were five people at my wedding: Me, my husband, two witnesses, and the minister—our roommate Eugene.

Eugene is a minister of the Universal Life Church, a group that supports freedom of religion and says they will ordain anyone. It takes three minutes and can be done over the Internet. But the website warns, “This is a serious matter and should not be used to play jokes on your friends. In our experience, people become very upset to find themselves ordained without their permission. It is not worth broken friendships, so just don’t do it please.” Because ordainment is so easy, and because there are no ritual requirements dictated by the state, the same process makes it virtually possible to marry people without their knowledge.

After being ordained, Eugene ordered a Universal Life Church ID card for $12. He brought the card to city hall and paid $5 to be officially registered in Ramsey County to perform weddings and other religious ceremonies. A week later, he married us in our dining room in a silent Buddhist ceremony, which was his idea. My husband and I entered the room between the two witnesses and bowed to Eugene. Eugene poured a glass of wine. We each drank from it, then bowed to each other. The ceremony was over; all that remained was to sign the paperwork.

Eugene’s friend Samantha has already married three couples. She became a minister of the ULC to help out some friends who wanted to get married but didn’t have the money to pay a real judge or minister. Her most recent wedding took place in the couple’s kitchen with the bride’s parents on speakerphone from Seattle. At her second wedding, which took place in a park in front of a large group of friends and family, she recited a speech she memorized 30 minutes beforehand, and then the couple jumped over a broom.

Samantha had some legal troubles before her first wedding. She brought in a printed email from the Universal Life Church to verify that she was an ordained minister, but this was insufficient proof for the county. She ordered a certificate from the church, which would arrive signed but blank, so she would have to fill her own name in, but it didn’t arrive in time for the wedding. She finally took a picture of the certificate from the ULC’s handbook, enlarged it at the copy store where she worked, and put her name on that one. The county accepted it. That afternoon she signed her first marriage certificate, in the presence of the bride and two witnesses. The husband was not there, but apparently he had consented beforehand, because he never contested the slightly questionable wedding. Whether he realizes it or not, he and his wife are legally married in the state of Minnesota.—Katherine Glover

Kati and Steve were standing at the foot of a fallen tree, its roots casting spiraled shadows onto the beach. Its trunk stretched a few yards out into the lake before disappearing under the surface. According to their global positioning system, the coordinates of the hidden treasure would put them 20 yards further into the water. Maybe the lake had risen. Maybe the cache was visible at first, but now they’d have to swim for it. They figured something had to be there, because it was registered at Geocaching.com, the official website of the world-wide, high-tech scavenger hunt called “geo-caching.”

The primary equipment for this new form of recreation is the GPS receiver, a digital navigation device which triangulates satellite signals to determine its exact location on Earth. Geo-cachers use the web to index their hidden treasures for each other. There are more than 400 caches in Minnesota, and dozens around the Twin Cities.

Kati said nearly all caches up in Ontario require hiking rough terrain and wading through marshes. Here in suburban Minneapolis, Steve took his shoes off and crawled onto the log, but he couldn’t find anything. On the way back he slipped and fell in the water. But as he was about to swing around the tree back to the beach in his wet jeans, he spotted the cache tangled in sprawling roots. It was a square Tupperware container bound in rubber bands, filled with cheap trinkets to take as souvenirs, plus a notebook and pen to record their successful trek. They left a plastic blue stone and took a small stuffed frog. A cryptic tag was attached to the frog with some kind of identifying number.

From the website, they learned that the frog’s name is “Dig ’Em,” and he is a “travel bug”—an itinerant little fellow that geo-cachers are supposed to move from cache to cache. Dig ’Em’s purpose is to see as many states as possible. Up to then, he had traveled 30 miles and been in three caches, all within the state of Minnesota. Now Dig ’Em was in luck. Steve and Kati were planning a trip out east, and they would have time for some geo-caching. Eventually they left him in a hollowed-out flashlight hidden in some bushes in Boston. Dig ’Em has now logged 1,153 miles. That’s impressive, but other older bugs have been through dozens of countries. As they circle the globe, their owners hope they eventually will return to their home cache.

The bulk of caches are hidden in Europe and North America, but they can be found in 134 countries including such exotic locations as Kenya, India, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. The idea seems to be to lead people to places they wouldn’t otherwise see, places not typically highlighted on a tourist map. There are caches everywhere, frequently in the least likely places. On their trip east, Steve and Kati went geo-caching in Central Park, and their GPS led them to an isolated patch of trees and a mound roughly the shape of a human. When Kati approached, a swarm of flies flew up and buzzed angrily around her head. They gave up on that cache, deciding there is such a thing as too much adventure.