Wrong Exit: The Other Way to Navigate
Directions are my kryptonite. Like I’ve been caught in a constant spin cycle and can’t pinpoint steady ground. I have no idea where to turn right and when to “bang a louie.” Northeast and southwest and due whatever points are all useless measures for me. Doesn’t matter if I’ve been there before.
The path has to be beaten to death before I realize I’m standing on it. I’ll hit something that looks like something else and wind up in my garage eventually, but it is an unreasonably circuitous route.
My mind repels a mental map to any place, leaving me constantly searching for a corner I can only vaguely remember or a roundabout that feels like a hamster wheel I’m not sure where to exit.
Slowly, the information oozes through, platting some sort of map along the gelatin of my deficiencies so that I wind up at a destination in the end. Doesn’t matter if it was my original one.
In the ancient times, my parents maintained a glovebox full of maps. It was my mother’s job to carefully unfold and refold them while keeping up a steady screaming at my father.
“Go left,” she would yell. “Jerry, for the love of God, at the gas station!”
My father mumbled something, but traveled with his own winds at his back and screeched right because he felt like it.
I contented myself by staring into my imagination out the window, one of two little unbelted girls in the backseat of my parents’ cavernous Cadillac, my face pressed into the glass, thighs sticking to hot, navy blue leather. Mostly, I tried to get my sister’s head out of whatever book she was reading and fight the curves in a bid to stave off boredom and injury. My parents listened to NPR and fought over what secrets the map’s legend was trying to reveal in the front seat.
We drove across the country using a triptick of maps offered with their AAA membership, on roads that were properly highlighted, each off ramp containing a mostly unrealized promise. All of it culminating in a quick pee break and the denial of snacks before the next meal.
From the bench seat in back, I witnessed the Painted Desert in Arizona earn its name out rolled up windows, though I had no idea where we were. We drove on to that picture spot of the Grand Canyon, through the salt flats of Utah, into one light towns in an attempt to get my father home fries in every single state. It was an arduously memorable journey.
Other times we took weekends and drove away from the city, the lights from skyscrapers giving way to endless, tree-lined highways. It was a different part of the planet offering so many possibilities on roads that weren’t under perpetual construction.
Did it matter which direction we were going when I knew there was a McDonalds or a Friendly’s or a Howard Johnson’s in the mix where I got to order what I wanted, even though I had to let them eat most of it while they lectured me on calorie counts?
The gridded streets of Brooklyn were a good introduction for me. I learned several clogged routes into Manhattan by the relentless repetition that comes from driving in one’s native land. New York streets made sense. Except when they didn’t. If I missed the entrance to the tunnel, my meanderings took me through sketchy, off-the-grid neighborhoods, where the names of dead heroes were as meaningless to me as bitching about how cold the winter is.
When I took off for college outside of Boston, I missed my exit nearly every single time I drove there, so that the way I learned the route included making my way back from that overshoot.
In Los Angeles, I navigated paths and alleys, freeways and overpasses. My parents bought me the voluminous, all-inclusive driving bible, The Thomas Guide. Each page was a different area, including a well organized index on a superbly reliable grid. Once I figured out that the ocean was on my west, the rest fell into place, but their optimism was more proof they didn’t know me at all.
In my late 20s I moved to Long Island to be an uncompensated chauffeur — I mean a mother. It took me two decades to figure out how to hopscotch supermarkets and soccer fields; restaurants and temple; walking trails in the woods or along Suffolk County’s sublime beaches. That’s not to say I knew where I was going when I carpooled my kids to the same camp, twenty minutes away, for over ten years. I needed directions, the route remaining amorphous once the Universe, and my ever patient husband gifted me a GPS.
Recently, we moved away from that place where the roads became as familiar as the accents. It’s a new route we have in mind now, where the living is different but the streets look similar to each other in their New England bucolic style.
Mostly, I have no idea where I am. My friend recently suggested I turn the opposite way of wherever I think I should go. I didn’t tell her I was sure that would make the right way, wrong. That just having a little faith that there is a right path is what keeps the immovable carousel of me, spinning.
Every road needs a navigator, you just don’t want it to be me, who took six months to figure out how to get ten minutes from the highway to my new house.
Google maps doesn’t always catch its signal here, and Waze never particularly liked me. This afternoon, I couldn’t figure out how to get to the library. The animated circle furiously failed to find its perch. Did I make it there right away? No, I didn’t. But I got there in the end.
Don’t feel sorry for me. Besides being a pretty constant ten minutes late, it’s a “quirk” I’ve found mostly positive. In fact, like my mother before me, I might hate having the wrong answer, but I do love the opportunity in being lost.
My son has a particular fondness for routes I’ve watched with delighted affection, but guilty disinterest. Do I want to plan how we get from the glaciers in Iceland to the white sands of Jamaica on a piece of paper? You and your father figure it out. I’ll meet you at the airport. I’ll pack the sunscreen. You can walk me to the buffet.
I’ve stumbled into thrilling places and people making the same wrong left for the fourth time. There are vistas on cliffs I would have otherwise passed right by, and I have been the recipient of endless moments of grace from well meaning, enthusiastic helpers along the road.
Once, I found a whole enclave of shawarma stands right off the Long Island Expressway. Another time I stumbled us into a strawberry patch on the wrong California Highway. We picked them while they were still warm in the magic sunshine. Don’t ask me how to get back there. Maybe it was Oregon?
We all have our talents. Many of which are necessary. While you might tell me which way to turn, I can point to the staticky air of sunrise, or the gaggle of geese crossing overhead, and the fine shape of a city coming up around the bend. Either way, it’s all guideposts. Go ahead. Plot the course. Or follow me. Better, let’s go together. We won’t be late and the journey will be a story worth telling.
