Noah's Archive: Taking Direction

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here... - David Wagoner, “Lost”

Why does it take so many male sperm cells to fertilize an egg ... ? Because they hate to ask for directions. - An old feminist joke

The myth that “women ask, and men don’t” never did square with experience. As a wayfinding male, I ask for directions as often as I need to, which is seventy percent above the national average. In Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions, a study of gender differences in spatial cognition, biologist Richard Francis calls the issue trivial, dismissing those who refuse to ask for directions as victims of "excessive teleology."

I am married to an excessive teleologist whose affliction is exacerbated by an excessive aversion to getting lost. Obstinately unwilling ever to ask for directions, she relies on maps and never leaves home without one.

The possibility of being lost holds no terror for me, but maps do. They are hard to read, impossible to refold once opened and utterly unrepresentative of the terrain they claim to clarify. We are all impatient with clients who, having been shown plans and models every step of the way, are astonished by what the finished design looks like. But plans and models are at least realistic in intent. Maps are abstractions to begin with. Poring over them in an effort to see where you are going is like looking at a Jackson Pollack to see what it’s like to be an artist in the Hamptons.

Even the best roadmaps are obsolete as soon as they are printed. And online services with names like MapQuest and SiteSpotter offer cutting-edge cartography that may cut every edge in sight but can be disastrously unreliable as guides to a desired destination. In a recent New York Times piece called “Online Maps That Steer You Wrong,” Christopher Elliott advises: “To improve your chances of making your next business meeting, consider buying a navigational computer.”

I will consider no such thing, having just read an advertisement for “Magellan RoadMate 760,” made by the same folks who brought you “Magellan eXplorist.” The RoadMate features “Route Optimization” and a directory of “almost seven million points of interest”—the kind of overabundance that gives optimization a bad name. Seven million points of interest offer far too many choices to contend with, even if RoadMate will make them for me, which apparently it will if I want it to. It is the ultimate automatic pilot.

But if I’ve got to have a copilot, I prefer a flesh and blood model. Eschewing maps, I do what Magellan and Henry Hudson would have done if they could have: I ask natives for directions. So should you, if you can remember not to listen to what they say. That is, do not listen to most of what they say, which is more than the traveling mind can retain. Driving directions are best consumed incrementally. Listen to only the amount required to reach the next native.

“Excuse me. Can you tell me how to get to Vainglorious Parkway?” A moment before, he was only an innocent pedestrian. Now he has been transformed by the query into a figure of authority who does not take his responsibility lightly.

“Vainglorious Parkway. Yes, well, you could get onto the old Bougainville Pike, but they’re doing roadwork there, so you’re better off taking McDougall Street. Except that at this hour you’re going to run into school traffic. Here’s what you do. See that billboard a quarter of a mile ahead? Take a left there, go to the second traffic light and take another left. Then, after you go maybe two and a half miles you’ll come to...”

You begin listening at “Here’s what you do...” You stop listening at the second left turn. That’s enough for now. If you get that far satisfactorily, ask another native for the next installment. It’s a fair exchange: you get the information; they get the self-esteem that comes from feeling needed. If, like Blanche Dubois and me, all your life you have put your faith in the kindness of strangers, all their lives they have waited to be the strangers you were looking for.

You probably won’t get lost, but what if you do? Worry, if you must, about being late, but never about being lost. It is a state of the human condition, balanced in time by your being found. David Wagoner’s “Lost,” one of many poems he based on Northwest Indian lore, is applicable to all our forests, not just the wooded ones. By the time this column is posted, Rebecca Solnit’s new book, Field Guide to Getting Lost, will be in bookstores. I can hardly wait to test-drive it.

Lost does not mean gone from this life. It only means being in an alien environment, which I suppose is why people find it threatening. Frankly, I like it. For as long as I can remember I have taken a quirky satisfaction in being out of my element, in the wrong place, at home where I don’t belong. My son Stephen confesses to sharing this pleasure. A few weeks ago we sat in a large, inexpensive and truly excellent restaurant on Balboa Street in San Francisco. The restaurant was Chinese. So, except for us, was the clientele. Stephen, who plans to move to Beijing this year, could fantasize that he was already there. I could fantasize that he would take me with him.

As we were finishing our meal a young couple came in and broke the spell. They were not Chinese; they were not even Asian. They looked discouragingly like us. “Intruders!” I muttered indignantly.

For a moment Stephen looked as resentful as I felt. Then he turned to me hopefully and said: “Maybe they’re just here for takeout.”