Intuitive Navigation

The bears paced in an enclosure that featured a series of stone cottages. I stood transfixed, watching them in their fairytale until, with a surge of adrenaline, I realized that the rest of the family had moved on without me. I was four years old and knew not to talk to strangers, but when I saw a zookeeper wearing the standard issue khakis, I decided that a stranger in uniform was safe. The zookeeper took my hand and I watched ducks waddle along the path while we looked for my family at the nearby exhibits. When we found them watching the macaws perching toward the front of their lush forest habitat, they mildly chastised me for getting lost. No one was in trouble for forgetting me. This was just the first incident in a childhood of getting lost. As I grew, so did my ability to lose my way; the range of my movements expanded, offering greater opportunity for wandering off, getting left behind, and worrying field-trip chaperones. 

I learned how to drive before anyone carried a smartphone with a GPS. I printed off directions from MapQuest for any excursion that took me beyond school, work, or my best friend’s house. Navigating home from the downtown cinema, stopped at a traffic light, I frantically searched the map for a clue to how I got so off track. My foot lifted off the brake, and my car slowly tapped the bumper ahead. I hoped I imagined it, but I knew I felt contact, however slight. Then, the door of the other car opened. Alone in the dark, I stayed in my seat with the windows up as a man who looked like Danny Trejo examined his bumper, glowering. It seemed there was no damage because he shook his head at me and got back into his car. The hardness of his eyes when he looked at me still turns up in my subconscious at random intervals, along with the fear I felt, wondering what would happen next. I let my held breath out in a long, slow hiss as I remember him getting back into his car.

After another six months of getting lost, I came home and demanded of my parents, “Why didn’t you tell me that you just take Jefferson downtown and Washington back?” 

“How did you not know that?” they asked, frustrated that I had arrived, once again, after curfew.

Seventeen and riding across Indiana in my musician boyfriend’s minivan, I wished I had stayed home. I decided to tag along to a Wynton Marsalis concert with him and his stoner friends and now none of them knew where we were. The friends were always kind to me, but—ambitious and too serious, always toting around a thick book—I did not belong with them, and we all knew it. I did not belong with this boyfriend. We broke up before graduation, but years later, we met for tea in London, England, and he told me about a recent trip, renting a motorcycle and riding across Greece. I understood then why I fell for him when I was seventeen, but in that minivan, driving through cornfields, I started to realize that just because someone was nice to me that did not mean I had to follow them. “Men are better at navigating because there is more iron in our blood,” one of the boys said as he looked at the map. The other girlfriend on the trip caught my eye and mouthed, “What the fuck?” before all the guys said variations of, “Shaun, no, man.” 

～

During a summer class abroad in Rome after our first year of college, my new boyfriend was sure he could navigate through the twisting streets, as though the map was coded in his Italian genes. Our professor warned us that Rome looked like someone had tossed a bowl of spaghetti at a wall and planned the city according to what stuck. I was sure I would get lost immediately, but the chaos spoke to me. I always found the way back to the hotel while my boyfriend fretted over directions. You just took a left at the Trevi fountain, then two right turns, one at the marionette shop and another at the cat sanctuary, and then you crossed the river. Easy. I could manage this kind of intuitive navigation.  

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I spent a semester abroad at Keele University in central England during my junior year and a large group of students from Kyoto University also came to campus for a month. The rest of us international students could buy cheap seats on their tour buses when they took day trips. On one such trip to York, I was hurrying to the bus home when I saw a young Japanese man walking alone in the wrong direction. I recognized him from an earlier trip to Oxford. We had been seatmates, sitting in awkward silence for two and a half hours. I imagined him wandering the old city walls, hoping someone would notice he was missing. No one would. I startled him as I tapped him on the shoulder. “The bus is this way,” I said. We made it just in time. Three hours later, as we got off the bus back at the university, he asked to take a picture with me. “You saved me,” he said. The sentiment was excessive in its expression, but I understood what he meant; I had been there.

～

After Easter break, I took a weeklong trip with my friends Abby and David through Scotland to Iona, a remote island that my high school Shakespeare teacher had often talked about, describing its beauty and peacefulness. When I emailed asking for tips on getting to Iona, he outlined a long journey, culminating in a gusty ferry ride. From Keele, we took five trains, two buses, and two ferries. When I planned the trip, I made most of the bookings online, but the last leg—from the port town of Oban, Scotland, to the Isle of Mull, and across Mull by bus to a tiny ferry that would take us to Iona—had to be booked in person at the dock. I kept it to myself that I was not entirely confident I could get us to Iona and back.

At the ticketing office, the young man helping me looked as panicked as I felt. Between his thick Scottish accent and my fast Midwestern one, neither of us knew what the other was saying. After a few attempts to explain where I was trying to go, I looked at his tense shoulders and furrowed brow and intuited that he was new to the job. He simply had no idea what I was talking about, independent of any language barrier. An older colleague stepped in to help.

My relief when we took our seats on the ferry was interrupted by the realization that I still had to figure out how to book the return trip across the water. We made it though, and once we arrived on Iona, it hit us how small and remote the island really was. There was not enough activity to fill our three-day stay. We explored Iona Abbey and learned how Christianity came to Scotland; we feasted on burgers and pints of Guinness at one of the island’s two restaurants, a small but elegant dining room located inside the hotel that we could not afford to stay in. We took a boat to see Staffa, an uninhabited island where Puffins sometimes roam. We took long walks.

After our second dinner at the hotel and a walk along the beach, we took a wrong turn. Iona is so small that it would take just over an hour to walk the whole island, end to end. There are more sheep than people. Getting lost seemed impossible, but somehow we managed. We watched the sun sink into the endless sea as we wandered off the path into knee-high brush. Under a starry sky clearer than I had ever seen, we wandered more. It was lambing season and over the buffeting wind, we heard the haunting bleats of baby sheep, dogs barked at a distance, and we feared we would accidentally trespass and get attacked. An eerie sound like interference on a radio seemed to follow us. As Abby and David bickered about celestial navigation, I just kept walking, reminding myself that on an island this size, we could never be that far off the main road. Our cheeks and ears burned from the cold, but we trudged along for another hour before a sparse row of street lights led us to the main road. With aching feet relieved to be out of the brush, we silently made our way down the street and up a narrow staircase to our beds, the lambs still audible from under our blankets.

When I returned home from my semester in England, I visited my teacher to chat about the places I had traveled. I explained the winding trajectory we took to get to Iona and confessed that we had gotten lost on the island. “You know there’s quicksand on Iona?” he asked, taking a pointed sip of his tea. 

～

Lying on the loveseat I salvaged from the common area of my grad school apartment building at the end of the previous summer, I was too exhausted to even cry. My apartment was my sanctuary in a rural college town, far enough from campus to be quiet but close enough to walk. I spent my days in that apartment reading, grading freshman essays, and training a puppy but this peaceful life I had started to build for myself felt hollow. My depression during that icy winter seemed like an extreme reaction to a string of changes: a bad breakup, a semester of graduate classes where I felt stupid and disengaged, and my friends from my master’s program moving away to other schools for their next degrees or jobs. We had navigated these transitions together, venting about exams and applications over coffee and stacks of papers but it only took one semester apart for our group to disintegrate. Continuing into my doctoral program at the same school, I was moving on but also felt left behind. I had no map for this emotional state. A counsellor at the campus health center referred me to a support group for graduate students that met once a week, giving us a space to talk about the stress, competition, and loneliness of our programs with people outside our departments. There was this guy there named Julio, the only man in our group. I felt drawn to him, but aware that group therapy is not exactly the dream scenario to meet a partner. Over months, slowly, I felt less lost in my life. After the semester ended, we all found each other on Facebook, and Julio and I kept talking throughout the summer. 

～

On our honeymoon, I could not find the train station in Kortrijk, Belgium. That morning, hungry and jetlagged, Julio and I were uncharacteristically tired of each other. When our train pulled into the station where we would switch lines to our final destination in Bruges, I told Julio I was going for a walk and darted away before he could protest. I thought I had an hour before our next train. I had thirty minutes. Noting each turn I made, I left mental breadcrumbs and explored the town square, taking photos to show Julio when I returned with a cooler head. On the walk back, I realized that I missed one of the turns. I did not recognize anything around me, and I could not find any signs pointing me toward the train station. Routinely checking the time, I wound my way back through the maze of streets until I stumbled upon a familiar white stone church. I took off running, praying that I was headed to the train station. I expected Julio to be angry that I was gone for so long, but when I sprinted through the terminal doors, he scooped me up into a hug, nearly crying from relief. As I took shaky breaths, he explained that when I had not returned, he started to spiral, imagining me getting kidnapped or how he would explain to my parents that he lost me in a foreign country. He did not yet know that they were used to me getting lost. When I missed our train, he tried to ask the man working the ticket counter if he had seen me, but in his guidebook French, the best he could come up with was, “Have you seen a brown-haired woman?” His relief when I returned eclipsed his frustration. Hours later, we walked in exhausted silence, but holding hands, through the cobblestone streets of Bruges, starving and in need of a beer. 

～

In Spain the following year, at a train station at the foot of Montserrat, I sat blinking away tears because I misread the map and schedule. We were stuck, waiting for the funicular, sacrificing valuable time on our day trip from Barcelona, shortening our planned hike. Annoyed, but kind about it, Julio sat a little too far away. Incrementally, I moved closer to him until, when the next train pulled in an hour later, my wet cheek rested on his shoulder. 

～

The academic career I trained for ten years to launch would not happen. Examining the shelves of books I had accumulated, I reflected on all the times I felt insecure in the classroom but pushed down the instinct that I should pursue something else. My search for something I could do led me to a county jail where I worked as civilian staff in the library. Among misfits, criminals, and down-on-their-luck people, I felt—for the first time—that I was doing a type of work I should have been doing all along. I found parts of my heart and mind that a university had never asked for. 

～

Driving home to Colorado after my father’s funeral, I decided to take a detour to see Carhenge, a roadside attraction in Nebraska that, as the name suggests, recreates Stonehenge with old cars. My dog and I spent the previous night outside Omaha in a smelly motel room with mysterious smears on the walls and no knobs on the faucet. I could hardly sleep, so we left at dawn, with Rory snoring on the passenger seat. 

For long stretches of the highway through Nebraska, my phone struggled to find a tower. I made sure that I loaded directions before I left Omaha and reminded myself not to close the map so I wouldn’t lose it when I lost cell reception. Exploring and taking photos of Rory sniffing tires or pigeons roosting in hollowed-out Buicks, I got distracted and—out of habit—started closing all the apps on my phone. Even as my thumb swiped up on Maps, I realized I was lost.  

“We’re okay,” I told Rory, counting on my years of navigating with MapQuest or my gut. “We just have to find the highway, and then it’s four hours home. No problem.” I repeatedly tried to connect to the map, but I was so far in the corn that my phone did not get service again until I reached Colorado. 

After an hour of searching for any sign pointing me to I-76, which would take me to Denver, I got enough reception to call Julio, who had returned to work the previous week. My map, however, would still not load. I could not explain where I was enough for him to help me find my way. We gave up, hoping that I was at least heading in the right direction. I feared I was driving north and hours later would discover that I was in Wyoming. The anxiety and anticipation gnawed at me. I needed to get home. Losing my dad, planning his funeral back in Indiana, and grieving, had exhausted me. I just wanted to lie down. 

I raced down the country road screaming wordless angry sounds. Rory looked at me with wide, scared eyes. Before I fully broke into a Biblical lament, I saw a field of sunflowers and slammed on the brakes. Sunflowers are my favourite, but I had never seen a field so big—or individual flowers so massive. They looked not like plants, but like a mythical race of people, bobbleheads bent toward the horizon. I pulled off onto the side road and parked the car. While Rory circled, searching for the perfect place to pee, I stood near the flowers, looking up at their uncanny faces, and calmed myself. Cuddling Rory, I got back into the car and kept driving. An hour later, I found I-76. The mountains on the horizon guided us home.

～

At four in the morning, my daughter cried, responding to the alarm in her belly. These early wakings had become our routine. I fed her then snuggled her close until Julio brought a hot mug of coffee. On this specific morning, I practiced the conversation I would have in a few hours, over Zoom, quitting a job that I loved. My daughter was seven weeks old and the maternity leave I cobbled together by hoarding sick days was ending soon, but we were six months into a global pandemic and the promised winter surge loomed. We lived in a childcare desert with no family nearby. I simply could not make the costs and risks balance against the paycheck I brought home from the jail library.  

These early morning snuggles, repeated day after day, would start to blur together, a warm respite from the uncertainty of the world into which I welcomed this baby and the anxiety I felt about my future, however grateful I was to have choices. I was a new kind of lost—I knew where I was, but didn’t know where I was going. Months later, with the baby asleep in her own room, I spent early mornings writing, learning how to keep bees, or doing chores around the small alpaca farm Julio and I built. Like the map turned inside out, landmarks shifted but were still recognizable. I wondered how many more unforeseen twists still lay ahead. It has been so easy to see these turns as failures, but when I look away from the billboards of “should have” and “could have” and back at the path that led me here, I no longer feel lost at all.