ernst

4:23 a.m. - 2022-06-29
GPS

I love maps. As a child they stoked my imagination about places unknown, both real and fantastic (if you dropped 11 year-old Ernst anywhere in Middle-Earth he would have totally found his way back to Rivendell) and as an adult they organize what I know of a place. They flatten terrain and streamline the will of the navigator: a fork in the road becomes a signpost, not a decision. Route-wise, one's options decrease as the map's scale increases. This is significant. So after a lifetime spent reading maps, I found GPS voice-prompt navigation unsettling. A few lady friends would use it in city traffic and, while effective, it left me disoriented. I needed an overview and a compass for context.

But the previous morning, foggy-headed and disoriented for a completely different reason, I had asked the google GPS-prompt to get me on the highway out of Asheville, NC. And it surely did. But I seem to have left it on and forgotten because a few hours later it piped-up from the passenger seat. I'd hit rush hour in Knoxville at the same time as a torrential thunderstorm and traffic had stalled. Apparently the eye-in-the-sky assigned to be my personal Virgil/Beatrice had received fresh intel about an accident or some such obstacle ahead, and I was advised to exit the freeway. Assuming that this was in order to access a frontage road until the problem was behind us, I complied...but my inflectionless-yet-confident co-pilot directed me instead across a series of city surface streets, steering ever southward and away from the interstate. Concerned that this was in error I pulled over to check my cellular.

When I'd left Asheville my recommended route was delineated by a single red line between destinations. Now three options were illustrated, each with a different estimated travel time. The one that I was following purported to shave 45 minutes off my original 7-hour trip time but, given that this involved a detour through city traffic, it struck me as counter-intuitive. As I studied the route though, things started to make sense. I had been westbound on I-40 towards its intersection with I-75, which I would then take south. The GPS navigator took these two “legs” of the journey and, starting from where I'd exited the freeway, charted the hypotenuse of a triangle....across streets I couldn't name and through neighborhoods I'll never see again.

What I held in my hand wasn't a map, I realized...it was every map.

I merged onto 1-75 southbound at the end of my detour, and into predictable highway traffic. But my curiosity had been piqued about GPS' potential re: interstate travel.

~ ~ ~

Accursed Indianola is miles behind me, and beyond the reach of my headlights the world is black on black. The dirt fields that stretch to either horizon are thin strips of pitch delineated by the infinite-but-illuminated blackness of a clear night sky. Maybe it's the time of the year (April) or the time of day (4:15 AM), but there's no chalkboard smudge of the milky way visible across the jet-black dome above...and if our celebrated satellite is up, she has her back turned and I don't see her. Every star is just a brilliant individual pinpoint frozen above me as the asphalt spools below my high-beams. Then, with startling fanfare: the Mississippi River.

I knew I'd cross it of course, I just hadn't expected this. The pier-towers of the bridge ahead are white and imposing and its support cables cradle four lanes of highway with elegant assurance. The whole of its hundred-yard span is illuminated by lampposts. This sudden brightness, this juxtaposition of modern design and depressed-rural context, and the fact that I'm the only person on the road at this hour...the whole crossing feels unreal.

Well maybe not completely--the storied body of water moving below me is undeniably real. Running ink-black and massive, glinting like obsidian in the light of the bridge: the nighttime Mississippi affirms silently (but with authority) its “mighty” sobriquet. Then I'm across and barreling down a dark strip of state highway identical to its east-bank counterpart. My cellular rests face-down on the passenger seat, quiet now in the dim green light of the console.

A literal crow flying from Indianola-to-Shreveport (the first leg of today's journey) would look down upon a sparsely populated region of Northern Louisiana; at tiny towns connected by ad-hoc stretches of single-lane highways and parish roads. The closest “straight shot” west would be further south on I-20 and, from what I'd gathered glancing at my cell earlier, the GPS had triangulated a route that would eventually put us on that interstate. But we had ground to cover first...

20 miles past the river my robot-guide awakens to relay instructions. I turn south accordingly, onto a humbler stretch of dark highway flanked by black-water ditches. The lights of a small town eventually appear on the horizon... Once in town my navigator kicks into high gear and I'm told to bear right at the courthouse and then, at a stop sign by the Super-Saver, take a hard right. I proceed to drive slowly through a quaint residential neighborhood on a road that ends with a small white church square in my headlights. From there I'm instructed to turn left onto a weedy street that I swear goes through a trailer park before becoming the parish road that will take me to the next small town...one of several where, over the course of the hours that follow, I'll experience some variation of what I'd just encountered. Making a hard turn at a blinking light by a one-engine firehouse, or bearing left by the doughnut shop to access a road that I'm not entirely convinced is paved... With each of these unexpected directions I find myself more elated. The “every map” aspect of my satellite library is on full display and I feel like I'm tapping into some sort of high-tech transportation “matrix”, while simultaneously experiencing the genuine character of the country I'm traversing. The kind of character inevitably erased by the generic expediency of the interstate.

There was also an element of surprise to this. As if I was a child on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride or some such. Setting out, I'd paid little attention to today's route and left every decision in the hands of my GPS-guide. So I was, in a sense, both driver and passenger. (How little attention had I paid to the route, you ask? Well remember when I was referring to “parish roads” instead of “county roads” earlier? That's because I thought I'd crossed the river at the Mississippi-Louisiana border but yeah...no. Weeks later, trying to retrace my drive, I would realize that I'd been in Arkansas for close to an hour. This never would have happened to Ernst w/an atlas but hey, I was rolling with it.)

Oh and the moon did make an appearance. Whether she was rising or headed to bed I cannot say--I can only attest that she did it in dramatic fashion. Her crescent tease was the brightest thing in a paling sky and she hung low and large: not a cold and distant circle but an intimate and proximate sphere. Venus and Jupiter were both in brilliant attendance, and the soon-to-be sunrise was showing its hand as a burnt-orange ribbon branded tight against the still-black horizon. And, as if the original edition of this celestial tableau wasn't enough to take in, it was staged again...obliquely, simultaneously, and betwixt cypress silhouettes on the mirrored surface of a vast bayou. “Never forget this” I told myself with a pang of longing for everything I'd already forgotten, “Never forget this”.

Thank you Beatrice.

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