| Only those closest to me know my secret. I believe the politically correct term is directionally challenged, but the commoner usually refers to it as just plain getting lost. Some may say I take unconventional paths, and by unconventional, they mean wrong. I mostly take the road not traveled – ever – by anyone. And not deliberately.Yes, I’ve been getting lost around the world for decades, living in a cosmos of missed turns, “scenic tours”, and wrong destinations. Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason. – Jerry Seinfeld I am the person who stops to look at the giant location mall map, spend two minutes locating the “YOU ARE HERE” guiding star, another five minutes trying to understand exactly which way I need to go to buy a burrito in the Food Court – and then go the opposite direction. It is not unusual for me to go for a short walk taking just one different street and end up walking an extra hour and a half just to get home. And I can’t find my seat in church if I go forward for communion. And if I had a big house, I’d never find the bathroom.Not only do I have trouble exiting my doctor’s office, I even can get lost INSIDEhis office. I will leave the examining room and invariably turn down the wrong hall, maybe into a closet, or into the doctor’s private office, looking like a lobotomized gibbon. Coming out of the closet has an entirely different meaning for people like me. The most confident I ever feel in terms of getting straight to my destination is in an airport going from one gate to another. But this is only because there are signs literally every five feet basically saying, “Good job! You are nailing this! Just make it another five feet and we’ll give you another arrow telling you that you’re going the right way.” But I panic whenever I have to go to an airport bathroom because 11 out of 10 times my travel mate is flipping out as the plane is boarding and I am inevitably 14 gates away, striding off confidently in the wrong direction. It’s as if I exist in a different world. Any family member knows better than to ask me which way to turn if they aren’t sure. They say “Tell me which way you THINK we should turn, and then I’ll go the opposite way.” I would like to report that I use this method myself on me, but whenever I try it, I second guess myself and end up, yup, going the wrong way. When I think about the fact that people used to be able to figure their way around simply by looking at the sun, I’m like… Lewis and Clark, David Thompson, Marco Polo – semi-gods to me. I figure the only way I can alleviate this affliction is to either marry a homing pigeon or take along a competent family member at all times. My daughter can take 350 turns, walk 5 kilometres in a new city, and find a Starbucks that we passed three hours ago. It has always been humiliating having my seven-year-old tell me I’m going the wrong way. Like all the time. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made”… the reason I got lost – again. If I ever have to participate in a caravan of cars, my people will do anything to make sure I’m somewhere in the middle. If I’m the lead car, everybody’s screwed. If I’m the last car, they know they’ll lose me within fifteen seconds. They have found that it’s best to keep me somewhere in the middle, as the chances of me getting lost go down from 100%, to like 76%.The only time someone’s directions help me, are when they are literally sitting in the passenger seat telling me to “turn right here”. Then, “wait until you get up to this light. Yes, this one. Coming up. Alllllmost there. And turn left here. NOW!” My nightmare job would be a taxi driver. It would honestly be better if they just told me to drive for three Rihanna songs and then turn right at the stop sign. Or leave breadcrumbs. I sometimes wonder where the people are now who have asked me for directions.  I can usually find someone to blame for all this. Google Maps is good. It could be my GPS, or the lady three kilometres ago who leaned out her window and told me to turn left at the big spruce. Heck, it could even be my ex-best friend in Grade Four who dropped my book in a puddle and set off an entire chain of events that finished with me, lost, alone, and in the middle of nowhere, next to a gravel pile with two stale granola bars for company. If I ever ask you for directions, please do not use words like “east” and “north”. Directional instructions are especially traumatic when I am in Oahu, because they use words like “mauna” (mountainside), “makai” (oceanside), “ewa” (to the west), and “Diamond Head” for east. Who can bloody see mountains on the second floor of Saks in Waikiki, I ask? Nevertheless, not withstanding my inordinate ability to get lost inside an elevator, this has never stopped me from going on the road. More specifically, back roads. Because this is where I discover, uncover, and recover…who am I, what do I want, and where the heck am I? Our freedom of travel has been restricted in a way we have never ever experienced. Now into another year of enforced non-travel, it is almost as if we are all collectively directionally challenged, finding that our map, our very being is forced to change, adapt, commit – moment by moment. It’s like we were supposed to take a right turn down that road 6 kilometres back on a major highway barreling toward our destination, and suddenly we are on a narrow, gravel road. There’s no town, gas station, grain elevator, or house in sight, our cell coverage dropping faster than the TSX in 2008. We are now feeling lost, misaligned, at odds with our constrained reduced world, heightened all the more by a host of anxieties – an inability to live our “normal” life in almost every context. It feels like being a first grader again, searching and searching for your mom amongst the hordes of children and parents in the school yard. This isn’t what Jack Kerouac, that self-styled crazy hobo, promised—a hazy, no holds barred, carefree jaunt. No, this is a road trip disaster. But he also said, “…the road is life”. And this is ours now. Although I wouldn’t be so chesty as to think that I am channelling Jack Kerouac, I have now risen to an almost panicked, dissatisfied restlessness. And so I aim to do the best I can – drive to all the villages, hamlets, and towns on the Alberta map as I can this year. After all, getting lost and the unexpected create the best stories. |
 By the way, which way is the Finnegan ferry? I’m lost. |
Getting Lost
March 15, 2021 by
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