When I complain about my issues with orientation, I am usually talking about one of two things.  The first, which I have already used this blog to discuss at length, I only partially attribute to my mother, who adorned me in liberal amounts of plaid as a child.  The second is one hundred percent her fault, as my complete lack of directional aptitude is a genetic gift that like my prematurely graying hair, clearly came from her.   

My mother, bless her heart, still gets confused picking me up from the airport located twenty minutes from my childhood home.  She used to create mnemonic devices to remember how to get from downtown Hayward to places our family drove several times a year:          

“We turn on B street, Marea, because we want to BE at the cabin!  C street because we’re going to the Little Theater to SEE a play!”          

My mom once flew into Arizona and rented a car to watch me play rugby, and finding her hotel and the pitch without incident remains one of her proudest life accomplishments.  She still talks nostalgically about Phoenix’s large, well-lit signage.       

     

I put on a good show, but truthfully, I’m not much better.  I’m the friend who asks you for directions to your house every time I come over.  If I have to guess which way to turn on the way to my destination, as opposed to making an informed decision after thoroughly consulting a map, I will choose the wrong direction 9 out of 10 times, the same way I always get in the slowest grocery store line.          

What’s funny is that I have this irrational, crotchety hatred of helpful navigation devices like GPSs or iPhones.  Perhaps as a result of my genetic shortcomings, I enjoy the satisfaction of actually figuring out where a location is in relation to my home, and then successfully driving there.  I always bristle a little when someone says, “Oh I’ll just plug the address into Dorothy” (or whatever name they use to give their little gadget humanity), when I’m about to draw them an elaborate diagram.           

“Don’t you actually want to know WHERE you’re going?” I shout, waving my cane at them.  “When the robot takeover happens, those serene, British voices will just tell all of you to drive off cliffs, and you won’t even question it!”            

When I moved to San Diego, my new surroundings gave me a perceived sense of road savvy that I used to justify my rejection of modern technology.  It’s easier to orient yourself when you have an entire ocean to one side of you (West), an increasingly hot, white trash abyss to the other side (East), a completely different country below (South), an inexplicable all-hours traffic jam above (North), and several freeways that run directly between them.              

I also worked for two summers as a courier, and despite my early trials with the Thomas Guide, (it turns out that several streets in San Diego, though sometimes more than an hour apart, have the exact same name), my time delivering subpoenas and fruit baskets really familiarized me with my city.  I began to believe I had escaped the Blue family inaptitude for spatial reasoning; I fancied myself quite the directional expert.           

When I moved to Iowa to work for AmeriCorps after living in San Diego, I realized I had just been excelling in the slow class.  If my genetics predispose me to a Columbus-finding-India understanding of the world, Iowans are descendants of Galileo.            

Since Iowa is one of those squarish states in the middle that most Americans can’t identify on a map, I’ll state the obvious: there are no oceans bordering Iowa.  There are also very few altitude changes, skyscrapers, impressive bodies of water or otherwise large, piercing objects on the horizon that a directionally challenged individual such as myself can point at and say, “There, that’s West.”            

There are freeways that run east and west, but they also often simultaneously run north and south.  It is not uncommon to pass a signpost suggesting that you are on several highways at once and traveling in more than one direction, an abundance of possibilities that contrasts greatly with the flat sameness of the actual landscape and the two-lane road running through it.            

What’s amazing is that Iowans, probably by some miracle of evolution, have an exceptional sense of direction.  They also like to orient themselves using the cardinal points, despite a lack of landmarks that would give these navigational tools any meaning.  For example, an Iowan wouldn’t say, “I put the remote on the table by the television”; an Iowan would say something absurd like, “I put the remote just west of the television,” as if there is a compass drawn on their living room carpet.  Or, a more likely statement: “I set up my deer stand just north of that dyke.” (In Iowa, dyke means a ditch with water in it, not me.  As you can imagine, this just added an extra layer of confusion).            

One of our AmeriCorps jobs on the prairie was building a bison fence by sinking large, wooden posts into the ground.           

“Tip the top of that one a bit to the North”, our Iowan manager would say, then give us an incredulous look when we’d take a 50-50 shot and move it in the opposite direction.  He really had trouble understanding why at high noon in a sea of grass we were somewhat sketchy about the whereabouts of Santa’s workshop.           

I managed to find my way back from Iowa to my safe haven of San Diego, but I have never fully escaped my shortcomings.  I recently took a trip to Ireland where my disorientation reached new heights.  The Irish take complicated Iowan roadway concepts such as multi-labeled highways a step further, often refusing to label streets altogether.  This is getting lengthy, so I have summarized my Irish navigational frustration with a drawing of a common street scene on my trip (click to enlarge):         

 

Since this blog is a lot like me trying to “wing it” on my way to a location that “I sorta know how to get to” – it goes all over the place without actually arriving anywhere (burn!) – I’m going to attempt to tie this all together with a bad joke:         

Marea, a native Iowan, a native San Diegan, and a native Irishman are about to embark on a road trip, and they are arguing over who gets to ride shotgun.  They decide the tannest person should choose who will sit in the coveted navigator seat, and since it’s midsummer, Marea edges out the native San Diegan by a hair. (The Iowan and Irishman were barely in contention, obviously).          

“Well,” says Marea, “I shouldn’t ride shotgun because I’d get us lost before we found the highway, and then I’d refuse to consult an electrically powered device to help us find our way.          

“Our Iowan friend can’t ride shotty because he’d only give directions using cardinal points and hunting references.  He’d also want to stop and have long chats with everyone in a neighborly, midwestern fashion.  We’d never get anywhere!          

“The San Diegan is a poor choice because he only knows how to drive to or from the beach, and there may not be a body of water nearby.  But if water falls from the sky, he’ll force the driver to go under 20 miles per hour in a fit of terror, as all San Diegans do when it rains.          

“Yes,” Marea says, nodding thoughtfully, “The clear choice for shotgun is the Irishman.”  The Irishman whoops loudly and jigs his way to the passenger side door.  Marea looks at her other two companions and shrugs:         

“Anything to keep his drunk ass out of the driver’s seat.”  

…Because poking fun at the alcoholism of the Irish makes you feel better about the emasculation you experienced having to ask for directions so many times in their stupid country.  

Did I lose you?