The Satellites Are Laughing

Big Dave, Old Dave, and Vivi

I don't even know where you'd get a nice fold-out road map anymore. I've given up. When I needed to steer my rental car from the Pittsburgh airport to Big Dave and Vivi's house, I went ahead and printed out the Mapquest directions, plus the map. I need the map.

I need to get a sense  of what topographical squiggle I'm skirting. I need to get my personal magnets aligned with the poles. I want a decent directional clue so that when I get off-track I have an idea where to veer.

Our pioneer forebears didn't always have a map. They had to make educated guesses and reconcile obstinate hooves and mountain passes. Their sense of topography was more immediate. They could see what needed to be overcome, could suspicion their way to water. Then they passed along the information or left wagon tracks for the next group. Sometimes someone would whomp up a map, but it was likely to be partly fictional. They had skills we have lost; on the other hand, a bunch of them ended up being vulture food, too.

Big Dave told me to forget about the map. He considered it unlikely I would be able to machete my way through Pittsburgh. Couldn't be done. "Get a navigation app," he said. Well. I only have the vaguest notion about getting apps. I have about two on my iPad, which is why, I think, I have been so disappointed in my iPad. Right now, it's not much of an improvement over one of those old-timey magic drawing boards that erased when you peeled up the plastic. But ever since I surrendered to modern technology, forsaking the good old reliable road map, I've been unsure of myself. Maybe he's right. Maybe I would find myself in an eternal gyre of vehicles in the middle of the city and have to be rescued. I looked for an app.

Navigator it is! First one that popped up, with a four an a half star rating, and free, so I bought it. I put in Big Dave's address and fired it up at the airport, and off we went. It went well at first, and got me to the freeway. I was a little perturbed that a British woman was in charge. She seemed to have the potential to be judgmental. I made a note to see if they had a Southern version. "Oh, now, sugar--you done overshot. Okay, hon, sit tight, don't you fret none. We'll see you right. Would you like some pie?"

Once we got on the freeway--I'm including my British friend--she clammed up altogether. Didn't even deign to hum. After a few miles I found myself grabbing the phone and shaking it a little in case she was napping on the job. We entered a tunnel. "GPS signal lost," she barked. Hurray! I thought. You're still here! And, after a moment, shit.

But she piped right back up when we came out of the tunnel and had all sorts of new suggestions for me. I was to take the Slip Road. Soon. Real soon. Now! I lurched onto the exit ramp and looked for a sign for Slip Road. Okay, I realized after a while, this is British jargon for exit ramp. I can adjust.

What I can't adjust to is the raucous accordion bleat that violently erupts out of my phone, like a bugling car horn that precedes an imminent collision--the kind of noise that makes your hair fall out first and think about it later. What the fuck, I inquire politely of my Navigator. I slalom over the lane for the next quarter mile while peering into my phone to find out what I'm being alerted to. There is nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Not the next random time, either. Or the entirely unpredictable time after that. I ignore it and put it down to episodic digital flatulence, but I make a note to have a stern word with the Help button once I'm safely delivered to a sofa.

On the next trip, I load up my Navigator with a destination and take a Mapquest printout with me just for protection, and all is well. I have studied the printed directions. Basically I get on I-79 for eighty miles. The British lady finds me the freeway. I begin to relax. Fifteen miles later she wants me to take the Slip Road again. I'm so startled that I do. If I'd bothered to install the Southern voice, I might have objected. Y'all real sure about that?

Now I'm toodling through some unnamed neighborhood, past strip malls, past lube shops, past a guy on the sidewalk wearing a foam pizza suit and waving a sign, and I begin to become morose. Just as I decide to hit up a gas station for directions, she finds me the freeway and sends me back up. The same damn freeway I was already on, one exit later.

What the fuck, I query.

Ten miles later she's doing it again. Go fuck yourself, I suggest. You're fired.

It does sort of work. But I don't like it. I feel like I've been digitally blindfolded and spun, and I'm wandering around holding a donkey tail in front of me like a moron. I'm a prairie dog rooting around underground with no native prairie-dog sensibilities, popping up in the right place most of the time but with no idea how I got there.

Used to be, I got lost every now and then. Now I never know where I am.

Road Tripping

Back when I was a tadpole, our mothers used to broom us out the back door and tell us to roll around in the dirt, eat grubs and play kickball in traffic. We lived by our wits, such as they were. Ultimately, this led my entire generation to engage in a little thing called a "road trip," wherein groups of large children who had obtained sexual maturity, if nothing else, piled into cars and took off for the hills. Maps were free from the gas station, but the cars were guaranteed to fail, telephones were scarce, there were no machines that spit out money, and, for that matter, there were no credit cards. Survival was all up to you and whatever common sense and resourcefulness you had accumulated through the years of parental benign neglect. Drugs and alcohol upped the ante. Natural selection worked as it was intended to, and those of us who remain topside are more or less able to think for ourselves.

Things are different now. Children are carefully supervised, padded against peril and sent out with wicking underwear and weatherproof outfits and enough electronics to replace every part of their brains. A child plunked down in the wilderness now would spin in place for a few hours, and then make an art project out of acorns and mud and wait for praise from the rescuers. This method of child-rearing produces grownups like the ones here in Oregon who, last month, headed down unmaintained roads in the grip of winter until they got stuck, far from civilization, because that's what the little voice on their GPS system told them to do. The modern version of the old scold is no longer rhetorical. "If Garmin told you to go jump off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff?" Why, yes! Yes we would!

One stranded couple knew exactly how to get over the mountain to their destination, but they faltered when the GPS lady insisted they take a short cut. The GPS lady was so sure of herself

that when they passed by the shortcut because they couldn't see it, since it was all covered in snow, she admonished them to make a U-turn. Which they did, and proceeded to plow their way into a snowy oblivion several miles in. Their cell phones didn't work, either. This poor family was so baffled by the failure of their electronic neuron supply that they did the only thing they could think of. They made a nice video of their surroundings and waited to die.

Technology may be a snap if you're born to it, but it can be very frustrating to those who had been raised to rely on their own brains. We will never forget the scene of Dave's mom crouching in front of the oven one Thanksgiving. That fine woman had, by then, roasted about fifty Thanksgiving turkeys in her life with complete success, but there she was with her new-fangled Butterball, prying at the button with a paring knife and muttering, "Dang it, I know it's done."

So just when I had despaired of children ever being exposed to the consequences of their own actions, bless their hearts--they went and invented tree-surfing. A California teenager recently rode a Christmas tree towed behind an SUV, and the driver took a turn too fast and sent the surfer out on a tangent that culminated in his hitting a parked car and suffering entirely redundant head injuries. The driver fled. The other kids riding in the SUV said they have no idea who she was. Natural selection, if given free rein, will cull every one of these people. This will cause momentary sadness, but then thanks to a variety of indulgent satellites, we'll know just where their bodies are.