Reflections on Sense of Direction

"It's that way, mom!" I shouted, pointing at the right branch of the fork in the road.
"I don't know," she responded, "I think it's the other way."

We were a tad lost in New Jersey and I was a giddy 7 year old anxious to get to the beach. The right branch seemed to take us to a lower elevation and the trees seemed to thin out, so even though I had no proof, it just felt like that was the way to the ocean.

But my mom went the other way. Soon she realized she wasn't getting closer to our destination and stopped for directions. This was 1984, before everyone had cell phones and gps. No we were relying on a good old fashioned paper map--you know, the kind you can unfold but then never figure out quite how to refold properly. 

Anyhow, it turned out that I had been right. Had my mother listened to me, my intuitive sense of direction would have led us straight to the beach.  She marveled at this briefly but to me it had seemed obvious.

Ah the 80s, when kids like me roamed around for hours in the woods unsupervised til our moms called us for dinner. And not "called us" on our mobile phones but "called us" as in shouted our names repeatedly throughout the neighborhood. If you took too long getting home you would get an earful, so it helped to know all the shortcuts through the forest, especially when you had a penchant for wandering much farther than your mom probably realized.

My sister and I and some of the neighbor kids would sometimes play kickball, but what we really loved to do was explore. We would pretend we were trailblazers on a new frontier and go deeper and deeper into the wild. We soon learned that the easiest paths were to stay near the creek that wound through the trees. This creek was a tributary of Brush Creek (aka Bushy Run) which was a tributary of Turtle Creek which flowed into the Monongahela River which joined up with the Allegheny River in nearby Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. The Ohio River then ultimately dumps into the Mississippi River whose basin is the deltas in New Orleans which flow out to the Gulf of Mexico.

I had never been to New Orleans (still haven't) but as a child I was utterly fascinated with how things were connected. It was so cool for me to contemplate sending a message in a bottle down our little creek and thinking that maybe one day it would be found by a child in Louisiana.  I was also naturally drawn to the water. Creeks, streams, rivers, lakes, and especially the sea called to my heart. I could spend hours listening to the water rush down a stream or the waves crashing to the shore. I felt at home wading, swimming and splashing. I never wanted to leave the water, even at a pool. When my mom would try to tell me it was time to get out of my grandparents' pool or the ymca pool, I would sneak under the water, acting like I didn't hear her-she literally had to drag me out! And when my recurrent ear infections would flare up I wouldn't tell my mom that my ears hurt because I didn't want to miss my swim lesson-I ended up needing tubes in my ears as a result. But every second I could spend in or near the water was worth it in my young mind.

So as we tread upon the deer paths near our neighborhood creek we would "discover" "new" features, mainly "waterfalls." We'd mark how far our explorations had taken us based on the number of waterfalls.we'd passed since the common entrance to the woods. If you passed waterfall #1 you'd embarked on a sizable journey, but if you made it to waterfall #2, you had done some serious exploring. Then there was the rare occasion when you could brag "I made it past waterfall #3!"

I believe these early explorations along with my natural attraction to water were what allowed me to sense which way it was to the ocean that summer day. Besides, I could just smell the sea with our car windows rolled down and notice which way the ocean breeze seemed to be blowing the leaves on the trees. It wasn't magic or divine intervention that told me, but rather, paying attention to nature's subtleties.

As I got older, I learned more about geography. I loved studying maps. Like those days in the woods, I turned my map into a journey. I imagined taking various roads or highways and pictured the towns and cities I would pass through. I would use the map's legend to give me an idea how big the town was, whether the road was two or four lanes, if there were parks or bodies of water nearby. I soon learned that many back roads seemed to meander along rivers or streams just as my paths through the woods meandered along the creek. I noticed that major highways more often took direct routes but sometimes had to wind around mountains or tunnel through them. I became proficient at estimating the distance from one place to another and even using the mileage markings to optimize a driving route from point a to point b. I could also come up with alternate routes in case of traffic or construction. And I could tell you which way was most likely to give you the most scenic route to your destination. All of this I could do long before I was old enough to drive.

Yet on vacations my mom & stepdad never listened to me. Every year they would have their maps and their AAA trip ticks and still get confused somewhere and end up arguing about which way to go. I gave up trying to talk sense into them and just tried to stay out of it.

Nor did they take my suggestion of booking a hotel room at a decent logical midpoint of our journey on two day drives. Instead, my stepdad insisted he did not want to be obligated to stop at some "arbitrary" point but wanted to see how far we could get the first day and then find lodging. It reminds me now a little of my 8 yr old holding her need to use the bathroom until she's desperate and then assuming there will always be a restroom available.

The flaw in this logic seems obvious, yet it took my stepdad seemingly by surprise one year when we were driving back from Florida. When he finally agreed we had driven far enough the first day, it was rather late and we were in Va.  We stopped at hotel after hotel but they were all without vacancies.  We kept driving north as we searched... and it got later and later... and eventually we were in WV...still no vacancies.  Finally my stepdad gave up and decided to just push through til we got home...  Thus he ended up driving the whole journey all at once and we arrived home at around 5:00AM.  It was absurd and completely avoidable.

The summer after I graduated from high school I got my driver's license and shortly thereafter entered college in the mid 90s, attending a small school in the central Pennsylvania Amish country.  It was the era of cheap gas and when my mom bought a new car she gave me her old 1989 Acura Integra and I used to take it on countless road trips.  My college sweetheart and I would spontaneously decide to drive to Maryland or New Jersey or just some obscure little town in Pennsylvania.  All we ever took with us were snacks and our PA Atlas and Gazetteer.  And we always found our way around.  People were amazed at our exhaustive knowledge of PA geography--we could pretty much tell you where just about any random town in PA was located.

When we married a few weeks after college graduation, we decided to drive to Sedona, Arizona for our honeymoon, a 2,000 mile trek.  We explored all over AZ for a week, and on the way home, we purposely took a different route home so that we could see more of the country along the way.  We never got lost.

When we separated and I took a job in Florida, I thought nothing of driving back to PA alone to visit family.  I also took random road trips alone when I lived in FL.  I loved going to St. Augustine (which was a really straightforward journey), but I also drove to Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando, and all over Brevard County where I lived.

Over the years, I continued collecting state atlases and using them to find state parks and campgrounds for cheap road trips.  Eventually, I did start using google maps, too, but usually just to plan my tentative route, always leaving re-routing options open in my mind for spontaneous changes of plan or to avoid congestion. The latest technological innovation of smart phones has allowed me to avoid traffic before I even get stuck in it, since google has real-time traffic, and I can re-route before we get snarled in it.  That said I hate GPS and never plan to own one.  I don't like to be told where to go and just follow like a mindless robot, thank you. I have driven alone to Chicago, Myrtle Beach, New York, Baltimore, Allentown, and countless other places.  I've also walked alone while pregnant all over Manhattan.  I can handle it and I trust my sense of direction.

So when my new husband's parents worriedly kept calling us when we were on our way to DC for my brother-in-law's wedding, to be sure to give us detailed directions, I thought they were just being overprotective of their youngest (my husband).  Thankfully he just went along with it, "yeah, yep," etc. but we were writing nothing down.  The route there was ridiculously straightforward.  I was not sure how anyone could possibly get lost on such a journey.  As we got closer to the metro area, though, the red spots started popping up on google traffic, as I had anticipated they might.  I'd already selected a plan b, and a plan c and d to re-route around traffic.  We had to go with plan c, due to plan b becoming red the closer we got.  But it was very simple to do, and even though it took us through a residential area with speed bumps and stop signs, we got there much faster than we would have if we'd have blindly stuck with plan a or whatever major highway directions my well-intentioned mother-in-law was giving us.

Then I came to learn that it's more than just overprotection motivating my in-laws.  When my husband showed me the typed up directions to their condo in the Outer Banks, I was just like, "wow, really??" They had sent them to be sure we had every step laid out and everyone's phone number in case of emergency. He went on to explain that they had a whole vacation binder of info at their house.

I was awe-struck. Part of me admired their planning ahead (unlike the family vacations I experienced growing up). But mostly I felt it was very ocd of them. I thought about the almost ritualistic vacation traditions they followed, as described to me by my husband, and began feeling anxious about our upcoming trip with them. This will be my first vacation with the in-laws and they seemed to have every last detail planned out in cookie cutter fashion.

Cookies-that's how it was! Like following a recipe. When I cook, I rarely follow a recipe strictly. I like to be able to tweak things or go in a different direction than I first thought I would. I like that kind of freedom and spontaneity.  So it is with travel plans-I like a little flexibility.

Don't get me wrong, I do like having a general plan (like booking a hotel room), but the details are better left to circumstance, in my opinion. Like when I took my girls to FL and let them choose which places to go to and when-we saw things I never knew existed when I lived there. Or the last minute re-routing we took on our way to my brother-in-law's wedding. Had we stuck with the "recipe" I can guarantee my husband would have been late for the rehearsal. Besides, hadn't my in-laws ever seen the National Lampoons Vacation movies?  Hadn't they learned anything from Clark Griswold about the pitfalls of too much planning?  The lesson I took away from these movies was that the more intricate your plan, the more bound it was to fail.

And what in life really follows our plans that precisely anyway?  Isn't it better to stay open to the possibility of re-routing or taking the scenic way or detouring or doing something else a little different?  There's almost always more than one way to get somewhere.  The coolest highway I found in FL is a little two-lane road through the sparsely-populated wilderness between the Atlantic coast and the Kissimmee area.  It has a speed limit of 55 mph and there are never any cars on it.  Plus, it's FREE.  You can totally  avoid the tolls and enjoy the quiet serenity of this region and get there almost just as fast as you could have on the major highways.  But if you go to google maps, and ask for directions, you won't see this pop up as an option.   Like Robert Frost, I prefer this less-traveled-by road.

So thank you to my in-laws for their good intentions in providing us fool-proof directions, but I like playing the fool sometimes--throwing caution to the wind, leaving doors open, and trusting my instincts and sense of direction.  We'll see you at the beach, but I can't say yet how we'll be getting there :)