Get Lost! [NOT 12/8/22]

Where Am I? Where Am I Going?

Children Studying Map
Children Studying Map, 1939 (Detail) / Arthur Rothstein / Source: https://www.loc.gov/item/2017777354/

Ever Get Lost? Ever Help Unlose Something?

Let’s talk about getting lost. Or else let’s talk about reversing the process.

When I was in high school a bunch of us went on a week long trip to a winter camp way up North. One of the activities was a “get lost hike” where groups were blindfolded, bundled up in trucks, driven around in circles, and then dropped off in the snow to pull off their blindfolds and find their way back to the camp.

A legal liability bonanza!

My group went up a hill, saw the lake which bordered the camp, and hightailed it for the lake. Except we started going East when we should have gone West, or vice versa. I don’t know. We were lost.

After trudging for a long time, we were finally tracked down by a counsellor who was assigned to make sure nobody wandered off too far in the frozen woods and died. By this time, it was getting so dark and we were so far from camp that he had us trudge over to someone’s house where he sheepishly asked to use the phone and call for a ride. We got back hours after every other group. Oops!

What’s A Time You Were Lost? Or Are You A Finder?

So what about you? Ever missed a wedding because your directions were hosed? Ever get lost backpacking and find yourself in bull pasture? Ever found yourself going back and forth in a city looking for 1234 Oak Street, only to find the city has both an East Oak Street and a West Oak Street and you were on the wrong one? Or maybe every time you go to IKEA you can’t find the Klogstrppp bookshelf or the Nrogglogg futon covers?

If you’re still stuck in IKEA or driving in circles right now, take a break and tell us about it.

Or on the other hand, are you the kind of person who everyone stops on the street and asks for directions? When you’re on a tour of a museum and the guide can’t find the exit, are you the one who steps in to figure out where it is?

If you’ve ever saved the day, deciphered the map, and led everyone to freedom, tell us about that too.

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

29 Comments

  1. When I was a teen driving around looking for a house of someone whose address I lost, I did the unmanly thing and asked for directions.

    Sure I had a busted ego from all the grief I got from my friends, but we got there.

    I took my learning lesson to become a decent navigator/map reader and for a while was called “Sulu” because I rarely got lost when I laid in a course.  It was kinda racist… because Chekhov was the Navigator.

  2. Driving from Lake Tahoe to Bend Oregon we were searching for a hotel we had booked outside the town.  After driving for 7 or 8 hours it was getting dark and I was tired.  We were using a GPS since we had no cell service but it was telling us to get on a USFS road (a forest service road).  I was wanting to listen to the GPS but wife talked me out of it.  We went back out to a place with limited cell service and figured out we were not close to where we should be.  Fucking GPS trying to kill me!  Forest road had been closed for a long time.  Cost us about an extra hour but at least we got there.  If you ever drive from Nevada to eastern Oregon, make sure you have a full tank and directions because you will sometimes not have cell service for hours and sometimes not even see cars for an hour or more.  Fun to drive but can be unnerving.

    • My experience driving out there is it can easily be 50 miles before you know for sure that the next road isn’t there. No signs, no landmarks, no connection.

  3. One painful lesson I learned was don’t trust a fucking map without terrain contours.

    I was driving to Temecula CA from LA (for business, not to beat the shit out of some fan) and decided to be “smart” and take State Route 74 between the Interstates 405 and 15.  I didn’t realize it was a scary ass canyon/mountain road.

    I was scared out of my fucking mind for over an hour doing tight curves and looking DOWN the canyon while driving.

    My clothes was soaked from sweat (and urine?) from the drive.

    • I’ve done that road, definitely could be scary.  We have even scarier ones in WA, especially in winter.  Some have no railing anywhere too!

  4. I got lost once, when I was four or five years old. It was such a singularly horrifying experience that I made a point to never get lost again. I have good geographic memory, I know how to read maps and I’m not afraid of asking questions or directions if I’m the least bit unsure. It saves me time and aggravation.

  5. i could get lost in a fucking bathroom….no sense 0f direction me

    that said….ive never got lost yet

    i just dont know where the fuck i am fairly often

    • If you never know where you are you can never be lost.  Was it Yogi Betta that said “wherever you are, there you are”

    • Just as long as it doesn’t end up like Trainspotting.

  6. I was visiting an aunt and uncle in Ohio as a young child. We were driving somewhere, lost out in the country. It was nothing but cornfields for miles. My aunt kept suggesting that my uncle should ask for directions. “ Ask who”, he said. There weren’t even any houses around. She just kept insisting he ask. Finally he pulled over rolled down his window and started yelling, “ CORN, how to do I get back to RT _____?, CORN!” It was hilarious, and a little scary because he was a pretty reactive person. Anyway, I feel like I’ve been lost most of my life.

  7. A few years ago I had a two-night backpack trip turn into a 4-nighter. We missed our turn in a thickly vegetated drainage and then had to follow that drainage down to a larger watershed that had an actual maintained trail.

    We generally knew where we were, but were lost in the sense that we were not able to find trails that were indicated by our map. Turns out those trails had not been maintained since the mid-’80s.

    • Good thing it didn’t turn out to be the Blair Witch Project.

  8. I was lost the first half of my life.

     

  9. Last summer I got marginally lost on a game trail in a park in Oregon. I had thought I was on a unpaved trail and turned out it was not. Luckily it basically coursed along the river and I knew at some point it would meet up with the real trail at a lookout point or something. It did about an hour later and then I laughed at myself the entire (paved) walk back to the parking lot.

    • I’ve done things like that and it’s fine when it adds only 15 minutes to a hike, but not so much when you go an hour out of the way.

  10. Also I have an uncanny ability to navigate shopping malls. I believe that it’s due to all the time I spent living as a mallrat in my formative junior high and high school years.

  11. Map-wise, I’m lucky, because unless the town is set up cock-eyed like St. Cloud, where *some doofuses* decide to put roads both “on the square and the diagonal” simultaneously, i usually have an almost-magnetic sense of North… so I’m usually solid on remembering things like where we parked, even at malls & huge festivals (triangulation by looking at a few things when I get *out* of the car, standing *next* to it, and then memorizing “that picture” in my head!😉).

    I also am able to memorize maps easily, and since I memorize in 3D, I end up memorizing the inventories of places I work/spend time, too.

    Learned ^that^ was strange, back in my early 20’s, working at the dance wear place, when I was busy with something at my desk that I couldn’t leave, and had a co-worker who needed to recut one piece of a garment…

    She came up to me, asked where to start looking for the roll of fabric, and I said, “It’s on *this* wall, second shelving section, third shelf up, it *should* be right about *here* (holding my hand out in front of me, at the height where I’d left that particular roll), and the roll is about *this* big around.”

    She went to the back room,cut the piece, then stormed back to my desk and demanded to know “HOW DID YOU DO THAT?!?!??????”

    I askedher what she meant, and she said, how did you tell me exactly where that roll of fabric was?!??? It was right where you told me!”

    And I just looked at her, not understanding that this wasn’t a skill that everyone has (since I’d grown up with two parents who can do it, too!😆😂🤣🤣🤣), and said, “Because I was the last person to cut from that roll, and that was where I put it when I was done?”

    We went a few more rounds of, “Because I left it there”/”But how did you KNOW that was where you left it, though?!???” before I realized *most* people apparently don’t remember exactly where they put things, when they set them down🤣

    That was the first sign i had, that made me realize that *maybe* my brain worked a bit differently than other folks’.

    😉😆😂

    • Forgot the St. Cloud link!

      https://www.dot.state.mn.us/maps/gdma/data/mapfinder/ssHTMLs/saint-cloud.html

      It’s that switch between the “main drag”/aka Division Street, and Downtown-which is laid out parallel to the river, which ALWAYS throws me.

       

      Because I-94 runs roughly Northwest-to-Southeast across MN, it took me forever to wrap my brain around the fact that Division Street is largely/squarely “West-to-East” when driving toward Downtown, rather than “North-to-South!”

  12. On the *other* type of Lost, though–that “feeling sorta unmoored, uncertain, and just a bit lost?

     

    I’m there alllllll the way tonight.

    Lily crossed Rainbow Bridge today, at a bit after 5 pm.

    She went downhill slowly over the last couple weeks/week and a half, but then really suddenly from yesterday afternoon on.

    I called our vet office, to see about setting up “that last vet visit” as soon as I could get her in, thinking that if need be, I’d take her in to their Urgent Care clinic in the morning, and they called back a couple hours later. I spoke with the tech who called, and she said they’d put us on the call list, in case they had any openings, and I got a callback just a couple hours later.

    They asked of I could get her there at about 4, and I said YES, so my Boy-roommie and I got her loaded up, and I drove Lil & myself there…

    I parked next to the sidewalk like an asshole, popped on my hazards, and walked in to the desk to let them know we were there. A couple techs met me, and the three of us lifted Lil down onto their stretcher, then they took her to the back room to start the line in her front leg.**

    They put me into “the family room,” then brought my sweet girl in, and said, “Take as much time as you need, while we get things set up.”

    Lil honestly almost drifted out three different times, while they were arranging everything. She was just laying there on the floor, on the stretcher & blankets, and her breathing those 3 times got suuuuper slow & shallow. Buuuut she woke back up each time, as someone would come in/out, helping me get the paperwork done (Lily was laying with her head *off* the stretcher, and had the tube under her neck, so to keep her more comfortable, I laid down on the floor nose-to-nose with her, and put my right hand under her head, so I could give her scritches with my left.

    I remembered to get a couple pictures of her “one goofy, white, chin-hair” and also *just* managed to catch the “video”(camera down, but mic pointed toward my sweet pup!), of her snoring like she used to as a young-pup.

    The vet walked in, juuuust as I realized I’d forgotten to hit the “record” button, so I asked her if it was ok to record the sound with her there, and she was awesome enough to stay quiet with us, so I could get those snores I’ve adored soooooooo much for the last 13 1/3 years💖💫💝

    I’ve said for years, that I hope *someday when Lil goes,* i could send her off with at least half of the peacefulness her kennel-mate had years ago…

    And y’all?

    I don’t know quite how I got so incredibly lucky today, but *somehow* after breathing rapidly all day, my sweet girl managed to fall *completely* asleep, with her head in my hand–just like she used to as a weepup(!!!💖💞💓💗💝), and she was 100% asleep when our lovely & kind vet administered the sedative, never feeling any of it💖

    She literally fellasleep, then just went deeper into her sleep, before she passed shortly after. It was the softest passing I’ve seen–SO much gentler than I’d ever hoped was possible for her to have, and it was 100% a gift to be with her as she went.

    It’s gonna be so quiet and already is a bit strange-feeling, realizing every time I go to put my feet down off the couch, that I don’t need to check & make sure she’s not *right* under my foot.

    And I know that part of my brain’s in shock, and it’ll hit me hard, sometime in the coming days.

    But I’m glad she didn’t hurt long, so relieved that she didn’t suffer, and will forever be grateful that her passage over the bridge was *that* incredibly smooth, soft, and gentle.

    Her last picture, and the goofy-sweet sounds of her snoozles, that I’ve loved for so, SO long;

    https://photos.app.goo.gl/KRKjr1XaKjXbUdS58

    **forgot to say, once they started bringing her in, I DID turn off the hazards & move the van to a proper parking place!

Leave a Reply