This is a short story about getting lost and found again.
A long time ago, I was driving through Omaha, Nebraska (as opposed to Omaha, Colorado, I guess) for the very first time. I was trying to find a particular Japanese restaurant there that I’d been told was very good, but roadwork had made mincemeat out of the directions I’d been given. I was starving and a little cranky from events of the day, a reunion with friends that had not gone according to plan in the least. It was dark and freezing cold, being mid-February, and well before cell phones and GPS gadgets that could have helped me. And I was totally lost.
I was stopped at a light in the middle of all this construction when I noticed a slew of cars with their blinkers on. They were all turning into this one residential district. Without even wondering why I was doing it, on sheer impulse I put my blinker on and followed them down a rabbit hole.
Front cover from the first UK hardcover edition of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I was using the Dirk Gently method of navigation popularized by Douglas Adams: Find someone who looks like s/he knows where s/he’s going, and follow that person. The method might not get you where you wanted to go, but it’d certainly get you somewhere interesting, and maybe even somewhere you needed to be. (Why yes, I’ve been called an “eshu” many times by gaming buddies because of this willingness to be flexible about how I get places, and this incident is what sparked it all.)
Sure enough, way too many long minutes of scary dark residential driving through an unlit rabbit-warren of houses later, I popped out along with all the other cars past the roadwork, and there was the restaurant I’d wanted! And it was good, too.
The boyfriend I’d been traveling with, Lionel, was shocked that we’d actually found our way. He’d never read Dirk Gently.
Later that weekend, we were traveling with one of the friends we’d come to Omaha to see, searching for somewhere to eat on a freezing but bright and crisp Sunday midmorning. The friend was ostensibly giving us directions, but he had no idea how to give directions. There’s a knack to it, you know; you can’t say “turn left here” if the car is in the right lane and you’re 20 feet away from the turn. So we ended up in a tough part of Omaha that this friend had never even seen before then. (Yes, “people who can’t give driving directions to save their goddamned lives” are one of my pet peeves.) We ended up in this really scary neighborhood full of warehouses and factories, with a train track bisecting it all.
Suddenly I noticed a restaurant parking lot that was packed with cars. “Let’s eat there,” I said.
“What is that place?” asked the friend, as he and Lionel strained to see it.
“I don’t know, but it’s 11:00 a.m. on a Sunday so this isn’t a default after-church crush, and they’re all coming to a neighborhood that isn’t residential or commercial so they had to deliberately come out here to get to it. It’s got to be okay.”
The logic made sense to my companions so we ate there, and it was amazing–way better than the chain diner the friend had been trying to direct us to. All-you-can-eat-steak–I mean seriously, and it was delicious too! We ate ourselves into a protein coma and then staggered away. And I’d learned an important lesson or two about flexibility.
Years later, my mother died of cancer after a protracted period of suffering. I hadn’t expected anything by way of inheritance; I had not known until I got the phone call from the insurance company weeks after her death that she’d even had that small life insurance policy. It was one of the biggest shocks I’ve ever gotten; I wonder if she thought about it and if she’d deliberately not told me or my sister that it existed. I’d spent the last year or so all but living with her, helping her and doing for her, and she’d never said a word about it. She liked giving people presents and surprising them, so it really wouldn’t surprise me that she’d have kept quiet about it on purpose.
After a week or two processing what’d happened here, I began making plans for how to best use it. I’d needed a car, and this Miata I’d found was actually way less expensive than a new “normal” car by many thousands of dollars. It was supposed to require less maintenance and upkeep and I needed a car that’d help me get over what’d turned into a paralyzing fear of driving (which by the way is absolutely true; I’ve owned this car now for 12 years and have spent a grand total of $200 or so on non-upkeep repairs–she likes expensive synthetic oil, but other than that piddling detail she’s been a dream car to own). I would need to learn how to drive a stickshift, but I’d wanted to learn to do that anyway. Once I had (mostly) learned how to drive the car I’d just purchased, I immediately began planning a cross-country road trip to figure out where I was going to live next, since I’d decided I was completely over the Deep South and needed a change of scenery.
I ended up in a midwestern state that appealed to me and set about learning my way in the city I ended up adopting, which involved a lot of getting lost. But I stopped being scared of getting lost. I can read maps and I’m determined, so nothing really bad came of getting lost and found again. I explored pocket parks, boutiques, and venues all very much off the beaten trail, all found courtesy of following this method of navigation I’d learned.
One sunny spring afternoon I found myself missing a turn to get to some local twine museum or chili cookoff or whatever the hell I’d been going to do that day. I was in a very unfamiliar part of town in a line of cars, and noticed quite a few of them were turning at a particular light. I decided on impulse to just follow them. I didn’t have anywhere to be and whatever I’d been planning to do could wait.
I ended up down a long country road, where one by one the cars turned off into driveways and I was left driving alone and thinking maybe I should just turn around. I ended up deep in farm and ranch country, very unfamiliar sights to a city gal, but I kept going because it was a lovely day, it wasn’t like I could get more lost than I already was, and the car had a full tank of gas.
Then I saw a sign–not from Heaven, no, but a real sign hand-painted on a ranch’s gate: “Riding lessons here.”
Why the hell not? I thought, and pulled into its dusty dirt driveway. Paddocked horses flicked their ears at me as I looked the place over.
After locking up the car, I wandered the place till I found two men in a stable. One was wearing a leather apron and shoeing horses; the other–shirtless and wearing a straw cowboy hat–was making small talk while he did chores in the stable. They both stopped cold when I walked in with my sunglasses in my hand, both looking at me, the horse-shoer with tools in his hand and an annoyed horse’s hoof in his lap, the other man with a pitchfork in his hands.
“I was wondering about the riding lessons,” I stammered, and they both relaxed immediately and showed me where to talk to the owner of the ranch, an earthy and direct lady who I adored on sight and who liked me too. For the next few months, every Wednesday I’d come over here for riding lessons from a real live cowboy, who was not either of those two men; this one was a rodeo rider with crystal-blue eyes, dark hair, and an absolutely maddening smile; he treated me with the utmost respect and professionalism and half our adventures were done to the tune of him telling me in his country drawl about this or that bar fight he’d gotten into that weekend or rodeo stories like “money the hard way” which apparently involved tying $20 bills to a bull’s horns and making young men go try to get the bills from the angry bull. His world was so unlike the digital one in which I moved and lived that I couldn’t help but be entranced. The horse I had been assigned was a grizzled old veteran who had no patience whatsoever for me, and it wasn’t till the very end that I realized that I needed to learn to speak Horse to get along with him, which we’ll talk about at some point.
Afterward, I’d go wash my car in the car-wash that was right down the road, and then I’d go get barbecue and a Shiner Bock from this little place further on, and I’d sit outside at a patio table in the sunshine and drink beer and eat Texas-style beef ribs and think about what a goddamned amazing fuckin’ life I was living right then. All the griefs and heartbreak of the previous year melted a little; the losses I’d suffered still hurt, yes (and still do sometimes), but I could imagine my mother approving of how I was rebuilding my life and what I was doing with that very last surprise she’d managed to arrange.
You can’t be too scared of getting lost or doing new stuff. And if you’re somewhere unfamiliar and you’re already lost, it doesn’t hurt to at least check out what the locals are doing in that situation. You’ve got t0 be willing to see where the road leads sometimes, and sometimes if you take the road you weren’t expecting to take, you’ll end up having one of the best summers of your life and learning how to ride horses from an honest-to-god cowboy.
I’m telling you all this because next time we’re going to talk about how learning how to ford a river on a right bastard of a horse got me over quite a bit of that old religious programming. See you next time — make sure you wear pants, because shorts can chafe something fierce.
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