The neighborhood is Buckhead and there don’t seem to be many right angles here. It takes me a good week to understand that the roads surrounding the hotel and the Tower Plaza form a great curvy triangle and not a square. I have no car and no maps and no real understanding where Buckhead is in relation to Atlanta. I have driven to LAX and gone inside of an airplane, then popped out at Atlanta International, got in a cab, and popped out again at the Doubletree in Buckhead. I have no real responsibilities but to get up in the morning and make the pass van to set. There are no bills, there are no phone calls, my meals are provided for, I am driven around, maids clean my room every day. I am a labor drone with no good reason to understand and/or interact with the world around me.
And so when I walk the neighborhood I do purposely without a map and try to carve out some sort of geographical understanding based only on empirical evidence. And consistently I am shocked at how things fit together in reality from day to day. That mall that I thought was a half mile behind the hotel is actually a hundred yards off to the right side. That restaurant, that building with the vertical neon striping, that sushi restaurant--nothing is where I thought it was. Are these structures secretly moving themselves around at night, a la “Howl’s Moving Castle”—or am I just getting old? Sleepy E of the Good Sense of Direction is no more. He has been reduced to Sleepy E, The Perpetually Lost.
In my mind the map of Buckhead is filled with errors and conjecture, like old sailors maps that possess fictional islands of the coast of Iceland and expansive inland lakes with magical properties, where Africa is a little nub to the south of Europe and the boot of Italy resembles more of a club foot. There are large expanses of uncharted territories with drawings of pirates and sharks and sea monsters filling in the blank space.
One day we borrow a car and drive about twenty miles to a Brazilian steakhouse. We decide on an alternative return route which runs parallel to the freeway, but when I get back to Buckhead it’s as though all bets are off and all spatial relationships have shifted. I pass the street I need to turn on, but when I turn around and head back the way I came I realize that I am now heading in the direction I thought I was going originally. North is south, east is west, up is down, and I have no idea what is going on. I am completely turned around and completely flummoxed. And the sun moves across the sky to accommodate this deception. Right angles are not right angles. If you can’t count on right angles in the world--if you can’t count on geometry--then what can you count on? What can you count on when that straight road you think you can rely on is actually an insidious curve sending you somewhere you don’t want to go?
There is the Date Gone Wrong when I got lost in the woods. There was the time I climbed Mount Si w/ N and went off trail and ended up about a mile off from the trailhead. There were two incidents in Shanghai when I was lost for over an hour. There is the portal into which all my valuable possessions seem to be disappearing these days.
I am the Loser. The Loser of Things, Loser of Ways, Loser of Big Games, Loser of Pounds.
5 comments:
I remember one time when my best friend and I, seniors in high school, drove from the LA area to the SF area so that she could register for school at SF state. My dad flew reconnaissance missions in Vietnam, by the way, so I figured I'd be a good wing man (girl?). On the way there, not too bad. Out of the fog and gloom, the sun broke through when we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, and "Killer Queen" came on the radio. On the way home, however, I think we were halfway to Fresno before I realized that we weren't--how to say in English?--on the right road.
It can be a useful experience. One more lost experience, this from Georgia. My two youngest kids spent some time living with their dad, who was doing doctoral work at UGa in Athens. Athens is surrounded by a Perimeter Road--it's like a ring. But you have to figure out how to get off the ring and into Athens at the right point, or you're in redneck country, which really isn't a joke once you're out of Atlanta, baby. I went there four times to visit them for long weekends. I'll give you five guesses whether I ever was able to get off the Perimeter and into Athens with any reliability (see answer below).
*answer: No.
Ever notice how you can tell that a dog is lost? It looks around nervously while trotting in a specific direction as if the very act of movement will somehow help it find its way. Do humans do it any differently?
I don't think I've ever been lost in my adult life. Why? I have no idea. Maybe it was being orienteering leader at Boy Scout camp?
Dr. Write has the directional sense in our family. I am always lost. I failed as a YMCA Indian Guide and as a Cub Scout.
But I will ask for directions. I am shameless. I tell people. My wife has the sense of direction in our family!
I think I failed Orienteering at UO. Perhaps because it tried to reduce to numbers and angles what I had done all my life by intuition. How not to get lost? Remember landmarks along the way: that tree, the hill to the left, etc. I navigate by imagery: remember how you got there, then reverse it. I got lost in Sweden, and in NYC. Not lost, but turned around. But, on the plus side, though I do not speak French, I was the only one who could figure out how to use the ticket machine in the Paris train station. So I got that going for me.
For pure meat intake, the Brazilian Steakhouse is almost as good as going for BBQ when falling off of the vegetarian wagon.
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