Humor by John Christmann
You Have Arrived At Your Destination
We have a Global Positioning System in our car. I punch in an address and a nice woman who is not my wife tells me when to turn. This is one of those really great technological inventions that put humans on par with highly evolved creatures like salmon.
Or, as it turns out, crocodiles.
I learned this last weekend while getting lost less than thirty miles from my home. My son and I were being guided by the nice woman who is not my wife to an athletic field located somewhere in Ridgewood, wherever that is.
I was listening to National Public Radio at the time, and became engrossed in a story about the navigational abilities of crocodiles. Apparently they keep showing up in the backyards of slow moving elderly people in Dade County, Florida. It seems they have a keen sense for finding free food.
But here is the kicker. When the crocodiles are removed and put back in the wild they always find their way back to the free food, much to the consternation of the slow moving food population of Dade County. To mitigate this dangerous problem, officials tried placing magnets on the crocs’ heads in an effort to disorient them from the earth’s magnetic field, essentially disrupting their internal guidance system.
If you dragged me away from a backyard BBQ and placed me in a swamp I am not sure I would want to return with a hunk of iron taped to my head either.
Well, maybe I would, but that is not the point. The point is if animals have such a fine sense of direction, why don’t humans?
According to the experts on NPR, at one time humans did have an innate sense of direction. This was because the world was flat and if we took a wrong turn somewhere we fell off. Through the process of natural selection those who survived never made wrong turns and happily wandered about the earth establishing athletic fields in obscure places confident they would find them later.
Unfortunately, the process of natural selection was not identified until Charles Darwin, sailing on The Beagle, a ship that navigated by sense of smell, accidently found Monarch butterflies and Amelia Earhart in the Galapagos Islands and pondered how they got there. But by that time it was too late because fourteen hundred years earlier in 1492 Christopher Columbus, foolishly believing the world was round, programmed India into his sextant and ended up in the Bahamas, which he christened by the Spanish name, Columbus, Ohio.
He and his misguided crew quickly spread their directionless genes throughout The New World (which they erroneously thought was Dade County) as they established trade routes along athletic fields which they neglected to chart on MapQuest because the Internet hadn’t been invented.
“Dad,” asked my son from the back seat, “do you know where we are?”
“Sure,” I said, “We are in New Jersey. Less than thirty miles from our house.”
“Then why are we passing the Empire State Building?”
It occurred to me that if Columbus actually had discovered Dade County he might well have been eaten by crocodiles and I would be instinctively homing in on a field right about now instead of driving around with a genetic magnet in my head listening to NPR and a nice woman who is not my wife lead me across the Brooklyn Bridge.
These days conventional wisdom has it that women navigate by asking directions from total strangers while men rely on maps. I find this notion very sexist and insulting. I often ask strangers for directions when I am driving. I stop the car, roll down the window, and politely ask, “Excuse me ma’am, do you know where I can buy a map around here?”
This is how I found out I was headed to Ridgewood, New York just 30 miles as the homing pigeon flies from Ridgewood, New Jersey. I had to buy two maps to figure this out. Neither of them showed the field I was looking for.
As I crossed back into New Jersey I called the nice lady who is my wife on my cell phone and asked her for help. “Honey, can you find some directions to the field in Ridgewood?”
“In New York or New Jersey?”
Thirty minutes later my son and I turned into Columbus Park outside Ridgewood, NJ where his team was already on the field. It was easy to find; a crocodile could do it: through two stop lights, left at the bank, right at the cemetery, and a half mile to the end of the road behind the church on the right hand side, just below the North Star which was not yet visible in the sky.
My wife gave me explicit directions after she called the coach who was already at the field.
After the game, confident I knew how to return home, I entered my address in the GPS. The nice woman who is not my wife told me where to turn and I told her where she could go.
“Are you sure you know where you are going?” asked my son as I headed west into the setting sun. He was noticeably nervous.
“Sure.” I said confidently. "We are returning home to Spain.”
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