Sandisfield - I spent a frustrating hour last month looking for a small blue cylinder at a location here in Sandisfield known as Tractor Ambushed Foreign.
My son Rupert, who was here on holiday, was just 50 feet away from me, engaged in a similarly fruitless search in a place identified by the three words Reimbursed Fend Courier.
The two of us joined forces and walked over to a third place, called Frill Guilt Crush, looking around and under every rock and fallen log. Eventually we harrumphed our failure, and abandoned the quest. We drove home to where I am now writing this in the place now known to me and my son - and in theory to the whole of the rest of the world - as Spilt Obstinate Scatter.
I will come to the small matter of my frustration and the missing blue cylinder in a moment. But first, these three-word place-names.
I am not, as some may suspect, losing the plot. For bizarre though these lexical trinities may seem, it turns out that they, their invention, and their use radiate logic and good sense. Soon, I suspect, a great many of us will be employing them as a failsafe way of identifying, in an instantly understandable way, any location on the planet.
What its creators have done - they are mostly young British mathematicians and geographers and mapmakers - is to divide the world into a series of 3-meter squares (for the benefit of citizens of the world's three remaining nonmetric countries - Liberia, Burma, and yes, our dear old and supposedly highly advanced USA - that is squares of roughly 100 square feet).
There are 57 trillion such squares in the world. In tiny, faraway and remote Sandisfield alone there are 15 million of them. And using a clever algorithm that at employs some 40,000 of the English language's most commonly used words, the mathematician-creators back in Britain have assigned a unique three-word identifier to every single one of these squares, wherever in the world - or out at sea, indeed - each of them may be.
There is an app: what3words. It is free. And using it you can either have fun - finding out the three word identifier for the Statue of Liberty (it is Planet Inches Most) or our tiny apartment in New York (Other Honey Thus) or the Berkshire Eagle's parking lot (Grab Soap Album).
Here at home I can determine that the exact three-word location of the Sandisfield Library as Cheerily Implied Cornfield - a rather pleasing designation which I feel sure will delight Theresa Spohnholz, who runs the place. Pleasing - but also, if you take the system a little more seriously, as its creators hope and expect, an efficient and rather elegant way of writing addresses.
Falls into place
For by using w3w (as it is known to the geographically cool) there is no further need for the complexities of home addresses and street numbers. No need for zip codes. No need for country names, nor county names, nor town or village names. Nor for those cumbersome latitude and longitude numbers, nor for knowing whether we are west of Greenwich or north of the equator. All of that is now, in theory, history.
Once postal services and delivery companies and GPS designers - and yes, drone navigators - cotton on, then everything and everywhere will fall into place, literally.
There is only one location in the entire planet, for instance, that is called Cheerily Implied Cornfield. It is a location far easier for any machine-based system to find than it is to divine where the 14-locator code - count it, spell it out - 23 Sandisfield Road, Sandisfield, Massachusetts, 01255, USA might be.
A long while ago I lived in a cottage in Scotland that had the following supremely cumbersome address: Croft Number Six, Opinan, By Mellon Udrigle, Laide, Achnasheen, Ross and Cromarty, Scotland, UK. Fifteen words and numbers. But now under the new system - for it works anywhere on the planet, in every country: try it - this jaw-breaking confection is rendered as Rucksack Spearing Watch. Odd at first, I'll grant you. But simple, you have to agree.
And yet what, finally, of Tractor Ambushed Foreign; and Reimbursed Fend Courier, and our missing blue bottle?
Both of these locations are on Route 57, at the point just north of the Sandisfield Post Office where the road crosses the Buck River. The first location marks the guardrail on the north side of the bridge (yes, it is that precise) the other the rail on the south side. And somewhere very near to one or other of the rails is supposed to be, hidden well but not impossibly so is a small blue plastic cylinder with a screw-top. Inside it there is a logbook, to be signed by whoever finds it. And I very much want to sign it.
Because I have lately become a fan of the outdoor sport of geocaching - in which people leave small containers dotted around the world and offer clues as to how to find them. There are a number of geocaches dotted around the Berkshires, plenty of them in Sandisfield. But thus far, search we might, we haven't found them.
When and if we do, I will return to the topic and argue that geocaching is a wonderful new sport, an activity which encourages people who might normally sit inside watching TV, to get out there, exploring. But that'll be for later.
For now, all I know is that the pesky Buck River cylinder is somewhere inside a three-meter square at Tractor Ambushed Foreign, or perhaps next door at Spires Elevates Monitor or Solid Enables Ambient or - only 15 million more squares to go.
Sandisfield is a much, much bigger place than I first thought. So are the Berkshires. And so, for that matter, is the world.
Simon Winchester is an author, journalist and traveler.
