Lost and Found

One Monday morning twenty-something years ago my wife and I were on the road from Dallas to St. Francisville, driving home after a weekend visiting friends. At least, home is where we thought we were going. We left downtown Dallas at dawn and drove into the sunrise congratulating ourselves on having beaten the morning traffic as the exurbs of Mesquite and Rose Hill gave way to the scrubby oaks and nondescript pastureland of East Texas. Anyone familiar with that road trip knows that the landscape doesn’t deliver many landmarks to relieve the monotony until the highway reaches Louisiana, so as we passed a huge reservoir, then turnoffs for towns with names like Fate and Hendrix, my wife admitted surprise at not having noticed them during the drive over just a couple days before. She was not surprised enough, however, to reach for the Rand McNally Road Atlas which, in those pre-GPS days, was in the seatback pocket of every car—which might have saved us a considerable teeth-gnashing when, three hours later, a huge sign reading “Welcome to Arkansas” confirmed that my sense of direction had failed us again. 

Since my gut instinct usually compels me to set off 180 degrees in the wrong direction, she should have been relieved not to find herself in Carlsbad or Oklahoma City for lunch that day instead of Texarkana, which turned out to have pretty good barbecue. And while the arrival of the smartphone has reduced the amount of time I spend driving around searching for familiar landmarks, it is still not rare for me to turn confidently onto a highway, only to discover that my faulty sense of direction has betrayed me again. 

"In these days of smartphones, in which we never permit ourselves to be lost, I sometimes wonder what else we fail to find."

Over the course of our marriage, I have gotten us lost scores, possibly hundreds, of times. I have led her the wrong way into cul-de-sacs, rough neighborhoods, and strangers’ backyards. We have been lost in cities, woods, and on lakes. I have sailed downwind instead of up, cycled uphill instead of down; and once, when she was learning to ski and as night fell over an unfamiliar resort, I led her down a “short cut” that steepened inexorably into a black-diamond, ice-encrusted chute that plunged thousands of feet to the valley floor miles from the ski village. The descent took hours because my wife—who fears heights—did most of it on hands and knees, crawling backwards and swearing at me all the way. It’s astonishing we’re still married. 

Having now spent much of my adult life getting lost in North America—the result of taking a wrong turn in Ireland and ending up in Louisiana—I’ve developed a theory. The direction my instinct tells me to go is usually the opposite of the correct one. So, perhaps my chronic misplacement results from being raised in the southern hemisphere, in a place where the moon looks upside-down, the toilet water goes around the opposite way, and Vegemite is considered a reasonable breakfast food. What disorienting effects might coming of age in such a place—where the normal laws of physics clearly don’t apply—have on one’s internal compass? Discussion with other southern hemisphere expats supports this theory. Country Roads’ newest team member, Camila, came to Louisiana from Ecuador, and cheerfully admits to being notorious for getting lost at the slightest provocation. Despite having lived in Baton Rouge for years, Camila continues to rely on her phone to find her way between even the most familiar destinations. 

In these days of smartphones, in which we never permit ourselves to be lost, I sometimes wonder what else we fail to find. When my wife and I first knew one another, we spent two years working our way around Europe and Australia. This being the pre-smartphone early nineties, we mostly traveled with an out-of-date copy of Let’s Go—Europe as our only guide, and consequently spent a lot of time hopelessly lost in unfamiliar foreign capitals. Some of the most memorable experiences from those years—in a basement tavern in a Czech side street where leather-aproned barmen carved slabs of beef from a spit turning over a fire, a religious festival in a Greek village on the wrong side of the island, a tiny museum of medieval torture devices halfway up a Tirolean mountain—happened precisely because we were lost, wandering aimlessly, with some entirely different destination in mind. Now that our own kids are setting out into the world, I hope that once in awhile they might leave their phones in their pockets, allow themselves to take a wrong turn in an unfamiliar city and just see where the road leads. When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote “Not all who wander are lost,” I think that is what he had in mind.

—James Fox-Smith, publisher

james@countryroadsmag.com