Around and About with Richard McCarthy: No direction known: Remembering the days of giving and receiving directions
It’s interesting how certain actions are made rarer, even extinct, by advancing technology, one-by-one, in an ever-longer line.
Getting directions from strangers is one such action, having been largely replaced by navigation technology. When I think back on it, I actually enjoyed being directed by and giving directions to strangers. I say this as someone who drove out west several times on secondary highways, “blue highways” as they were called because of their color on road maps. In the course of these journeys, I found myself in a goodly number of locales, seeking to find a place to eat, a motel or campground to spend the night, or just to get unlost. In addition, there were plenty of instances closer to home when I needed help finding my way.
Whatever the locale, the drill was the same. You pulled over and popped the question: “Can you tell me how to get to – ?” Sometimes you got, “I’m not from around here,” or “Never heard of it.” More often, though, you got something like, “You stay on this street for, let’s see, maybe about three-quarters of a mile, and you’ll come to a fork in the road. Bear right at the fork and you’ll see the sign for Route 119 about a mile up.”
Every time I write about a fork in the road, I think about this Yogi Berra-ism: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
One variation of asking directions in a strange town was seeking a recommendation for a place to eat. Without any preliminaries, I’d buttonhole someone and ask, “Where’s the restaurant in town where everybody eats at?” Someone who was with me when I did this got a kick out of it and described it as “accosting a stranger.” I now think of it as a flesh-and-blood precursor of Yelp and Trip Advisor. More often than not, the local knew just what I was looking for, and answered something like, “‘Willa’s Rainbow Cafe’. Drive up this street maybe two miles, and you’ll come to the intersection with Route 83. Take a right to go north on 83, and it’s about half a mile up on the left. You can’t miss it.”
Truer words than “you can’t miss it” were never spoken. You’d follow the directions and come to a parking lot overflowing with cars, and there’d be a sign outside saying something like “Tuesday Night Special, Prime Rib Dinner $8.99, Children under 12 half price.”
I can’t write about children being half price without quoting a sign I saw inside one restaurant: “Unattended children will be given a double espresso and a free kitten.”
The answers to asking directions weren’t always foolproof. Sometimes they were just flat wrong, and then you had to regroup and ask someone else. When the directions were wrong, I just figured the person wanted to be knowledgeable and helpful, and got ahead of themselves. Perhaps in only one or two instances did I ever feel that wrong directions were purposeful, a malicious misdirection. Given that I asked hundreds of people for directions along the way, this one or two miscreants represents a small fraction of those asked. Would that humankind’s ratio of unkind acts could be so low.
Very rarely, you came across someone who was overtly unwilling to be helpful. That happened to me once in downtown Boston (go figure!), when I was lost in a maze of streets, looking for the venue of my niece’s wedding. I pulled over and asked a guy the directions question, adding the information that I was running late for the wedding. He said, “Whatt’a I care. I wasn’t invited,” followed by no friendly chuckle and no attempt to give me directions. I had no choice but to go on my way, or rather, my attempt to find my way.
The first time I realized my way of utilizing paper maps, road atlases, and humans for directions was on its way to being archaic was when I’d just eaten at a restaurant in Florida and was in my car in the parking lot, studying the city map I’d gotten at AAA. A guy who’d sat near me in the restaurant was walking to his car, and in what I judged to be a sincere, non-facetious attempt to be helpful, walked up to my window and said, “You know, there’s an app for directions on your phone.” There are some key phrases that tell me my way of doing things is on the way out, if not actually already out, and “there’s an app” is one of them.
In retrospect, what I liked and miss most about the days before widespread digital navigation was something that lay at the heart of giving and receiving directions: the opportunity to be a Good Samaritan, teed up to hit a country mile. It was quite possible, especially the farther you were from home, that the asker and the askee of directions had never even seen each other before and would never see each other again, but the two of you met the moment together. The lost found their way, the hungry filled themselves, and the tired found a place to sleep.
Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.
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