Land of the Lost

George Herriman

Life before GPS: Some of my most vivid memories from earliest youth are of me sitting crammed into the back seat of the Pontiac station wagon with my siblings (before seatbelts and comfort), my mother on the passenger side of the front seat seething, mumbling curses to herself, all of us freezing or sweltering depending on the season in the makeshift parking lot of some liquor store or other late night establishment in the midst of an unfamiliar urban landscape in any Z-list city of the American Northeast waiting for my father to return from an expedition for directions out of this decrepit hellscape back to whatever route we had wandered from.  The engine was off because we were  probably in desperate pursuit of gas thanks to my dad's odd flirtation with an empty tank particularly on long journeys.  I probably accompanied him on one of these excursions for directions because I can vividly see the interiors of the stores he'd park us outside of and the denizens within-- like their surroundings, relics of an even earlier time.  It's black inside -- the darkness seems to absorb the overhead lighting before it can reach any of us down below, and the shelves are sparsely arrayed with ancient dusty bottles, boxes and cans that are presumably sitting there waiting for the proprietor to break even on them.  The old guy behind the counter is annoyed at the disturbance of my father even though he's bought the late edition of the city paper and a family size bag of chips in return for the information.  My cuteness has no effect on him.

I'm afraid for my life and thrilled at the same time.

Odds are pretty good the directions are flawed or poorly absorbed by my father as he only learns trying to reproduce them on the streets, and a second opinion has to be mined from another storefront proprietor before we are tanked up and back on our way on the great American highway.  Hence the abundance of those memories; the weighted importance they have in the formation of my mind. 

 As a child, I was no help in these situations. I was permanently lost, the embodiment of the phrase "Wherever you are, there you are."  But throughout my life I have somehow gained an affinity for dislocation. I've become a craver of the journey over and above the destination. 

There's nothing quite like careening at high speeds through unfamiliar landscapes with the comfort of your usual surroundings or the certainty of your ultimate destination hours or days away from you.  On either side of you, proliferating blurred experience of cars, houses, businesses, people.  All of them strange but familiar, all of them fleeting but eternal.  Remarkable semblances of your usual existence in novel packaging.  You're passing life by for a change and the change is exhilarating.  You could plot out every meal, every bathroom break, every pause for rest on a journey, but I prefer to wing it, relying on fortune alone for the satisfactions of needs and desires as they arise.  Sitting in the window off the main street of some byway, eating what the locals consider food you sometimes can't help but wonder about the parallel universes that fill up the map wherever you go-- the lives that the locals lead; the things they hold dear, their rituals and institutions.  It's all become the same in corporate 21st century America, sure.  An Applebee's in Elyria is going to be just as bad as the one a mile from my home, but the one in Elyria that I'll never see again with the mustachioed chef flirting with the waitress while her boyfriend is sitting idling in his GTO in the parking lot waiting for her shift to end is still going to be exotic. 

When you are between places, you are elusive.  Before cell phones you could not be reached.  Before mobile SMTP apps, mail did not come to you.  But even in this hyperconnected age, the act of traveling especially by car, and especially under your own steam, inhibits connectedness as usual.  In transit, you are to others a vague notion, at best a 2-D image, your other dimensions a mystery to all but you and your traveling companions.  

With GPS, you don't have to wonder where you are anymore or to engage with the citizens of the environment you find yourself in to find a way out.  That's all well and good but I know what I'm missing.  It never quite escapes my attention that if GPS knows where I am, I'm not really lost.

Nevertheless give me an expanse of time where I'm between places, unmoored.  I'm truly happiest when I may know where I'm going but I don't know where I am.  

George Herriman