remembering wayfinding

my mom recently told me the story of getting a ride home from a doctor’s appointment with my nephew Brian. when she asked her grandson if he knew the way, he said no, but he could use google maps on his phone. my mom told him to set his phone aside and not to worry, and proceeded to give him turn-by-turn instructions all the way home.

impressed by her encyclopedia-like knowledge, Brian asked my mom how she managed to memorize all of the local roads. my mom explained that she doesn’t know how to use google maps or a GPS system, so for her there was no choice but to memorize how to get where she needed to go.

at 26, brian is just 10 years younger than me (his mother and i are 18 years apart), but i learned to drive just before portable sat nav devices like tomtom and garmin became widely available, and he learned to drive shortly after iPhones and Androids had become their handheld alternatives. in junior and senior year of high school i had to navigate home from friends’ houses and hangout spots from memory, and the capital beltway confused me with its signage which required you to always know where you were on the circle relative to baltimore or bethesda. so i relied on the positions of buildings and trees as cues for when to turn off or onto a highway. once i had memorized those landmarks and the exact route to my closest friend’s houses, it was like part of the territory had been etched into my brain. all the other places around the main arteries which i travelled - route 29N to 32E to get to patty’s place, for example, or 495W to 355N to get to jane’s - were sloshy gray terrain; but on the routes i drove, i knew every nook and cranny of the buildings, lawns and trees which lined the way.

today Ulrich and i test drove a new car, and the first thing i did after buckling my seatbelt and adjusting the seat and mirrors was look for the navigation button on the center console. without the navigation, i didn’t have any idea which way to go - not even an inkling of where i wanted to go. and then it dawned on me that there are no more maps in my mind after i left maryland at 18; few etched-in-my-brain landmarks, no muscle memory of when to exit, just my eyes searching for a digital map and my ears waiting for the monotonous voice to tell me how many meters before the next turn. as the world becomes increasingly obsessed with predicting the long term effects of living with AI, it feels strange to realize that the only place in the world which i know like the back of my hand is a handful of roads in a town which is half a lifetime away.

Photo by Tamas Tuzes-Katai on Unsplash