The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (25 page)

 

After a half hour or so of wandering and inserting our e-card at the first few checkpoints, my father and I round a corner and find ourselves walking alongside a father-son team in matching red wind-breakers.

"It is your first time?" the father asks in a thick, charming eastern European accent.

"Can you tell?" my dad replies, smiling.

"It is for him as well," the man says, pointing to his little boy, who looks to be about nine.

As they walk ahead, I tell my father to stop watching them. The brochure clearly declares among the Golden Rules of Orienteering: "Do not follow other orienteerers!"

While stalking other orienteerers is considered cheating, it's a strategy I have mastered when it comes to finding my way outside of the woods. In addition to following others, I am big on repetition. The first few months of a new job has me whispering "Left, left, right" every time I exit the elevator and try to find my office. I also count the rows whenever I walk up the ramp of a dark movie theater toward the restroom: "one, two, three, four, and left." I repeat it the whole time I'm gone so that I can find my seat again—this after once accidentally sitting down next to a stranger during a particularly suspenseful scene of the film
Coyote Ugly.

In using these strategies, I'm not trying to increase my actual abilities the way I am by orienteering. Instead, I'm simply trying to get where I need to be in whatever way I can—a common desire for those of us who tend to get lost at every turn. Other coping mechanisms I've heard:
I print directions to and from any new destination and keep them in a binder in my trunk.
Or,
I leave myself voicemail messages with landmarks.
And
I don't drive
or—the worst—
I never go anywhere alone.

In my efforts to improve my directional ability, I came across a book called
Never Get Lost Again.
It's small, and the cover features a drawing of a blonde woman in cargo capri pants standing on a compass and holding a map. A friend saw me reading it and said, "She's not even looking at the map!" This should have been a red flag. The book provides absolutely no useful information. The author's suggestions include such gems as "Get clear, specific directions," "Learn to read a map," and "Ask for directions." Very helpful, indeed.
Oh, if only I'd known to get directions all these years.

What is helpful, then, for improving non-GPS-aided sense of direction? Very, very little, it seems. The sun always seemed like a safe fallback, at least in terms of east and west. However, in fact, the sun doesn't rise and set exactly due east or due west. There's some seasonal variation, I learn, which is really just one more factor working against me.

The orienteering techniques were slightly more useful, though in more of an "I'm-lost-in-the-woods!" kind of way than a "How-do-I-get-to-Chipotle?" kind of way, which is closer to what I really need. One strategy I was particularly impressed with is called the "Shadow-Tip Method." You start by finding a long stick and planting it in a relatively clear spot of level ground where you can see the shadow. With a rock you mark the spot on the ground where the shadow stops. The direction of the shadow is west "everywhere on earth," several sources explain. Then you wait fifteen minutes, mark the shadow's new spot on the ground, and draw a straight line in the dirt from the first to the second. This marks the east-west line. You go from there.

This makes absolutely no sense. How can it always be west?
you ask. It turns out, the shadow will move in the exact opposite direction as the sun, and the sun always moves west. So, the next time I'm lost in the woods with access to a watch and a piece of tree, and a better memory than I currently possess, I'm set.

 

Of eight orienteering courses, which increase in difficulty, we've chosen to do course number 1, which winds only along park trails. It is, I suspect, the course most often utilized by elementary school children. Remarkably, my dad and I get really lost only once, between flags seven and eight, near the end.

As we've hiked I've tried to note about how long it takes us to walk to each flag, as compared to the distance shown on the map. The shorter distances end up being around ten minutes, and the longer ones are fifteen or twenty. The rain has picked up and we've both commented several times how much we're looking forward to lunch when I realize we've been walking for quite a long time on one of the shorter jaunts. As I stop and pull out the map, I ask, "Did you see which way that guy and his son went?"

"Isn't that against the rules?" my dad asks, stomping to get some mud off of his sneaker.

The orienteering map is one of the most intricate, least decipherable pieces of paper I've ever seen. The legend shows thirty-four different symbols and their corresponding objects or terrains, all included in an 8 ½ × 11 sheet. One can find anything from the symbol for "stony ground" or "impassable cliff" to "knoll/small knoll/dot knoll." Black boxes show buildings. A building up on our right seems to correspond with one of the boxes above the wide circle we've been hiking. I point this out and suggest that as we're halfway around the circle already, we should just keep walking and complete it, then go from there. My father thinks it's a different black box. In the end, neither of us is right, and it takes us another half hour to find the next flag.

 

The
Orienteering
brochure wants me to know that "getting lost should not be scary for many reasons" and that "wandering around will only worsen the degree of 'lost' that you are in." This information makes sense in theory, but in practice, who hasn't been
absolutely sure
they'd find their way after just one more turn or another few miles?

People getting lost is big business. In addition to GPSs made specifically for cars, we can now add the technology to our cell phones and even our stopwatches when we run. And outside of this technology, there are companies like Corbin Design, a firm based in Michigan focused on providing buildings and campuses with clear directional signage. Their slogan is "People get lost. We fix that." I don't think they do, though. Good signage is not unlike the GPS—helpful in the moment, but a Band-Aid for a larger problem. Technology and design can help us find our way, but they don't improve our skills at all.

In my grandfather's pool when I was a kid, I'd lie on a squeaky, blue plastic raft and close my eyes. He would grab my hand and swim around the pool, tugging me along on the raft behind him, our wrinkled, chlorine-seeped fingers entwined. He'd tread water while spinning the raft slowly. Eventually, he would stop and ask me to guess where we were in the pool without opening my eyes. By the diving board? In the shaded corner? Dead center? This was not a large pool by any standards, but besides the occasional coming and going of the bright sun, I had no tracking device. Inevitably, I'd guess: "By the back, near the cabana!" or "In the shallow end by the steps!" My guess was invariably wrong. Then we would switch and he'd climb onto the raft. Before he was even settled, splashing cool water onto the almost-burning plastic, I was off, spinning him as fast as I could while pushing the raft to all four corners of the pool. When I was exhausted, I'd say, "Okay, what do you think?" He was right every time.

So why could he do it and I couldn't? Grekin, the author who offered the worst advice ever, uses the term "directionally challenged" when describing the people of the world who, like me, can't find their way back from CVS, or figure out which way is north or in which end of the pool they're floating. She also calls having a poor sense of direction "a real disability," though I suspect the American Disability Association would disagree. Sense of direction is a mystery in the same way as sense of time or sense of balance. You have it or you don't. Research is continually being done, but it's not easily understood.

Some people call sense of direction the "sixth sense." But this isn't quite right either, as not everyone is born with a sense of direction in the same way that most people are born with the other five. Sure, some folks can't hear or see, but both anecdotal and research-based evidence tells us that far, far more people are born each day without a sense of where they are in the world. And it seems to me that, for all of my attempts over the past thirty years, it's almost as impossible to improve one's sense of direction as it would be to regain lost hearing or sight. Loss or lack of such a true "sense" is surely a worse plight, but in some ways we can look at them similarly. There are things we can do to compensate, or work around our deficiencies—Braille or sign language, for instance—but for all of my trying, I'll never be able to
train myself
into having a strong, intuitive sense of direction. And if that's the case, then is there anything wrong with cheating? In this way it seems that the car compass or stacks of secret directions or counting rows in a movie theater is almost
more
impressive than truly recognizing whether I'm going north or south on an unmarked road. In working to understand and improve my sense of direction, I've realized that I'm going to be memorizing, learning by rote, forever—and that using a GPS isn't cheating but instead a work-around that makes life easier, less frustrating. I wish finding my way came naturally, but it never will. And if I'm going to be wandering through life blindfolded with a magnetic bar strapped, figuratively, to my head, I might as well be able to hear that little box bolted to my dashboard as it tells me, "Left turn ahead."

 

Eventually, jeans soaked up to our knees and our stomachs growling, we buzz the final checkpoint, just twenty or a hundred yards away from the registration stand. The event has taught me nothing about finding my way, minus a few tricks with shadows and sticks. I want to view the whole day as useless, a day in which I learned only that those with strong directional skills like tight pants, but it's just as much my fault. When I didn't understand the compass lesson, I didn't ask for clarification. I just found another work-around strategy and used the lake and the paths as landmarks, immediately abandoning the challenge of mental mapping—the reason I'd come in the first place.

When we give back our compass, we're handed a printout of our total time on the course, as well as the time it took us to travel between each station. This allows for "comparing times with your fellow orienteerers." I glance around at a couple of eight-year-olds who beat us, and then at the athletes who found their way through gullies and "impassable cliffs." My dad and I agree, without speaking, to skip this comparison step. We try to remember where we parked the car, and then program the GPS with my address, less sure of how to get home than snails in a cloth bag.

FROM
The Smart Set

T
HREE SUMMERS AGO
, looking for adventure, I left New York City and drove to California for a newspaper job. One evening while jogging, I noticed a glowing rock high on a hill. A few weeks later, I pitched my tent beside it. After work, I'd trudge up my hill in the moonlight and sit for hours under the rock. On some nights, strange howls kept me awake. I wondered if there was a land where people still lived in skins, gathered around fire, and believed in magic and not God. Looking for that land, I quit the paper and traveled to Nunavik, an Inuit territory in Arctic Quebec.

On Canada Day, I landed in Kuujjuaq, a community of two thousand on the tree line. An icy wind spat cold rain. On the shores of the Koksoak River, families picnicked beside their SUVs and Canadian flags flapped in the drizzle. " Things are changing so fast," said Allen Gordon, the head of the Nunavik Tourism Association. I later learned that his wife was the first one in town to ship north a Hummer. We celebrated the holiday at the Ikkariqvik Bar, a cavernous dive without windows. There were darts and a disco ball. "If you're a woman, you'll win a sewing machine. If you're a man, you win nets. If you don't want either, you'll get four beers," shouted a lady selling raffle tickets. A teen dressed in black showed me a tiny silver pistol, and someone collapsed on the edge of the dance floor. "We are drunk because it's Canada Day," said a man at the bar. When the raffle lady stumbled back onstage, she was too drunk to announce who had won what.

 

Kuujjuaq is regarded as a
city
, severed from Inuit traditions. To find magic, I needed to go farther north, so I boarded a propeller plane for Ivujivik, a town of three hundred on the stormy coastline where Hudson Bay meets Hudson Strait. Trees disappeared then reappeared and then disappeared for good. This was tundra—a sopping, pitted landscape that shone brilliantly in the sun. Confused ribbons of water connected an endless splatter of lakes, some green, some yellow, some with red edges and bright blue centers. Ancient channels were etched in the stone. We unloaded and picked up passengers in Inukjuak and Puvirnituq. Over Hudson Bay, a passenger spotted a pair of belugas.

A drunk woman named Saira showed up at the airport in a Bronco packed with relatives and wanted me to live with her. We had met in Kuujjuaq at the home of a woman who peddled black-market booze. Saira was drunk on Smirnoff at the time, but had somehow remembered my travel plans. I ignored her. A construction worker dropped me at a drab house on the edge of town occupied by a security guard named Chico who I had been told would have a free room. A man with a beat-up face came to the door. "Why are you here?" he asked. I explained. "I can't wait to get the hell out," he said. "I hate this place."

I was in e-mail contact with a nurse who supposedly had a room, but that too evaporated—her boss was in town. Reluctantly, I sought out Saira. She opened the door with a grin. "I'm drunk," she said, "but it's okay." I joined her and a niece with whittled teeth at a table covered with empty Budweiser cans. The women looked at me and giggled harshly. They bantered in Inuktitut. Saira explained that she was getting evicted in a few days. "We will live in a tent in the back," she said, "and come in to take showers."