“Never to get lost is not to live.”
- Rebecca Solnit."
I've been thinking about getting lost lately, or rather, the inability to do so nowadays. If you're of a certain age, you remember well what it was like to get physically lost, to have no idea where you were.
It might have been at night in an unfamiliar city, St. Louis, say, in heavy traffic on the ribbons of interstate, trying to locate the exit to Chicago, which you miss and then take a wrong exit that leads you into some sketchy area, and you roll into the parking lot of a suspect Gas & Go and pull out your glove box road map that you try to read by the dim, overhead light, but you can't make heads or tails of anything because you don't know where you are, so you get out and walk across the glass-strewn parking lot, past the shabby guy smoking a cigarette and drinking from a paper sack by the door and you step into said quick mart with the bars on all its windows a, seedy blockhouse with a bleak florescent glow and ask the semi-hostile clerk how to get back on 1-55. In a irked tone that says Do you know how stupid you are to be where you are right now? he gives you vague directions that you attempt to hold in your mind, but when you get back to your car they're already muddled in your head. But, somehow, through a combination of reason, grace and dumb luck, by a series of right and left-hand turns, you find yourself accelerating up the 1-55 on-ramp and into the northbound traffic and suddenly you are FOUND! The adrenaline rush of being lost and then found is like no other. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, there's nothing as exhilarating as being shot at and missed.
It seems to me there were character-bulding attributes in having to find a way out of your “lostness. You had to be savvy to negotiate the world. And, sometimes getting lost meant stumbling into an adventure you'd have never had otherwise.
It strikes me that there is a current generation of folks who has never known, for the most part, the experience of being physically lost. With the advent and ubiquity of smart phones and GPS around 2008, it's become nearly impossible to get misplaced. And yet, according to statistics, the generation since has the highest rates of anxiety and depression (and worse) that has ever existed. Correlation? I don't know. I was just thinking.
Big day in birthdays: Steve Earle (1955) - Susannah Hoffs/Bangles (1959) - Kid Rock (1971)
Waiting
Raymond Carver
Left off the highway and
down the hill. At the
bottom, hang another left.
Keep bearing left. The road
will make a Y. Left again.
There's a creek on the left.
Keep going. Just before
the road ends, there'll be
another road. Take it
and no other. Otherwise,
your life will be ruined
forever. There's a log house
with a shake roof, on the left.
It's not that house. It's
the next house, just over
a rise. The house
where trees are laden with
fruit. Where phlox, forsythia,
and marigold grow. It's
the house where the woman
stands in the doorway
wearing sun in her hair. The one
who's been waiting
all this time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,
“What's kept you?”