I am a driver who is perpetually lost. I get lost going places I've been to dozens of times; to wit: last month I got lost en route to my university, from which I drove home on the weekends for four years.
People say, "You know how to get here, right?"
Sheepish silence.
"Well, you've been here, right?"
More sheepish silence.
"Shoedame, you were just here last weekend!" And they throw up their hands and start talking about landmarks. Well, do you know where the 50-foot grain silo is? With the robin's-egg-blue top? Teenagers spray-painted profane graffiti on it in bright red paint."
No response.
In my defense, if their vehicles were full of my children they wouldn't notice landmarks either. The Statue of Liberty could be relocated to their neighborhood and they would drive right by without noticing it. The atmosphere in my minivan is. . .is. . .well, it's like this. Interruptions are bracketed:
"MOM! She has my hairbrush in her "[bag MOM!]" will you make them shut "[up I]" don't want to go to the pool, it's "[boring SHE]" still has my hairbrush, make her give it to "[me GET]" your thumb out of your mouth you stupid "[baby YELLOW]" punch buggy no punch "[back! OW!]" MOM! he hit "[me YOU]" said my boyfriend could come over can he come over "[tonight, SHE]" always has people over and I never have anybody over, I've been asking to have Kaitlyn over for a "[month WHY]" do we have to have all these dumb girls over, I want to have boys "[over I'M]" starving can we stop for soda? Ice cream? "[Chips? I]" wanna make love in this club, in this club, in this clu. . .<click> MOM! why did you turn off the radio?"
Combine this level of distraction with my natural (nonexistent) sense of direction, and you have a family that is rarely where, or when, we are supposed to be. We've gotten lost in every city, town, and outpost within 200 miles. For years, I have been allowing an extra 45 minutes to get pretty much anywhere. I consider this the minimum "getting lost time". If Columbus had sailed the ocean blue with these five kids he'd have ended up in the Arctic circle. We'd all be eating whale blubber right now.
So naturally, I've envied people with a GPS device to help them drive where they're supposed to be going.
That is, I envied them until I borrowed these devices and tried to use them. You might think that with the noise level in my minivan, I wouldn't even be able to hear a GPS, but I actually can. I can hold a GPS in my lap and turn it up to so many decibels that the polite, firm, schoolteacherish voice is louder than five kids and the radio. So that's not a difficulty. However, any GPS is a) hell bent on killing us all or b) gets us even more lost, if possible, than my sorry sense of direction.
I've concluded that the difference between having a GPS and not having one is that you get lost strangling a computer, or get lost not strangling a computer.
My mother's GPS directs me to turn into brick walls, cow pastures, and creeks with amazing accuracy. It also proclaims that "you are now arriving at your destination" when nowhere within ten miles of the place. "Turn left," it says. "You are now arriving at your destination." You look to the left at a ten-foot pile of mulch and ungraciously lose your temper. Her GPS takes you to the correct street in a city and then demurs at directing you to the actual street number, which might be 25 blocks away. Maybe Mom's GPS thinks that would be cheating; making it a little too easy for me. Famously, Mom's GPS once announced that I had arrived to pick my son up from a college class at the Zippy Clean Car Wash.
My boyfriend's GPS sounds like Mary Tyler Moore on crystal meth and is also possessed by the devil, or at least one of hell's lower-ranking imps. It exclaims, in the middle of four-lane highways without so much as a shoulder, "turn right, then turn left. Recalculating." He calls his GPS by a name I can't repeat and says, "You'd better recalculate, because I can't turn right or left." His GPS is also confounded by exit and entrance ramps. Get on a ramp and it freaks completely and the whole system resets. These are ramps that the GPS actually picks out and directs him onto, and then thinks better of it.
My uncle Bob tells a story of being sent up a mountain road by his homicidal GPS which, due to a rock slide, had only one lane. He was nearly run off the mountainside by a school bus and sought refuge in a ditch. When he arrived, traumatized, at his destination, the townspeople asked, "you took the mountain road, didn't you?" They could tell by looking at him. "Don't ever," the locals intoned, with wagging heads, "take that road."
Computers, even satellite-directed ones, think drivers should take horrible, even potentially deadly, routes. We poor human suckers are so used to believing whatever computers say that we might abandon paved roads for dirt roads, or cow paths through the woods, if computerized voices told us to. Uncle Bob's harrowing journey reminds me of people who show up here on the front porch of the Shoe all sweaty and bedraggled and a lovely shade of "MapQuest Green"—their computers directed them to get here from the south by going over Mount Rogers—Virginia's highest elevation, 5,729 feet. This route shaves 20 miles off their journey and adds an hour and a half, the poor things. In addition to the folly of Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps, our visitors' brand new, very expensive GPS systems often have no sense of road quality versus mileage, and bring them crawling at 20 mph over fifteen miles of unrelenting hairpin curves. Some turkey hunters arrived here by this method and were too exhausted to aim at turkey one; they pleaded to be directed to the nearest hotel and looked relieved when I pointed in the opposite direction of Mt. Rogers.
I'm not saying I've never gotten anywhere using a GPS. Once, Mom's GPS directed me without a single mishap to the nearest Golden Corral—where I could have an excellent salad and a sliver of steak and admire the 400-lb diners for a mere $15, counting tax and tip, and do the cha-cha in the double-wide bathroom stall. However, my bad experiences driving with a GPS far outnumber the good. I have elected not to ask for a GPS for Christmas. By gum, á la Frank Sinatra, I'll be lost, but much more than this, I'll be lost my way.
