Those of us old enough to straddle the digital watershed are probably more sensitive to the downside of killer apps than millennials.
In July, an old friend visiting the Cape from out of town was staying in a B&B in Eastham. He had ridden his bike up to Wellfleet for a visit, but when we lingered over dinner and it got dark, I needed to drive him back to Eastham.
The B&B was down near the rotary, he said. But as we approach the rotary in two lanes of heavy Saturday evening traffic, he seems a little unclear as to where, exactly. An exit off the rotary, he suggests. But we try exit after exit, nothing looking right to him.
“I think maybe it was in that last stretch of Route 6 before getting to the rotary,” he says. We start back up toward Wellfleet.
For quite a while we wandered, making lefthand turns against heavy traffic, having to use the emergency blinkers to creep past possibilities. “Brent, this is very embarrassing,” my friend said. He said it several times. This is a man who, perhaps more than most, prides himself on his competence, including that important competence for a man of any age, a strong sense of direction. (Another of those old-fashioned concepts that may have to be explained to future generations.) He likes to know where he is on the face of the earth. As we tried one false lead after another, I began to think to myself, “He really doesn’t know where it is. What if we just can’t find it?”
We eventually found the B&B, well back from an unlit stretch of Route 6. It was a considerable relief. The maybe 45 minutes of being lost in heavy traffic felt like the most dangerous thing I had done for some time. It seemed a distinct possibility that we could have been the cause of a serious accident. That we could have gotten ourselves killed.
Afterwards, as I drove home, I reflected on the meaning of this story. In part it was an Airbnb story; a regular hotel or motel would have had a bright sign which would have made finding it easier. In part it was a story of summer traffic in this tourist destination. But mostly, I began to see, it was a story of the Age of GPS.
I assume most younger readers these days would have early in the story objected: Wait, hold on, why didn’t you just use your GPS to find the place? The GPS angle is of course a key element missing from my telling; we were attempting to find a destination without benefit of GPS, which my 2003 Forester lacks. But just as important as our not having GPS that night was that my friend had used GPS on his more up-to-date car to find the B&B originally the day before. Deferring to the knowledgeable GPS lady, so well-informed about every detail of his trip, he had never really learned how to get to the B&B or where, really, it was. (Biking to Wellfleet all he had to do was get on the nearby bike trail.) Had he not relied on GPS he would have known how to find it on his own and we would probably have avoided all the dangerous complication. Looked at that way, Arnold’s GPS almost got us killed. In other words, it’s a story of the ongoing delegation of human powers (that sense of direction) with, in this case, near-disastrous consequences.
But I’m guessing most people these days would see it differently: Had my car been competently outfitted with GPS we would, presumably, have had no trouble finding the B&B. It was my lack of GPS that almost got us killed.
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