Terry Marotta: The pathfinder’s burden

Some people love global positioning systems, others avoid them like the plague, and I always wonder: Are the anti- GPS people men mostly? Map fans generally?

Maybe they’re Type A folks of either gender, the kind of people who climb out of their cars at the filling station just to be sure the attendant is pumping the fuel into gas tank instead of the trunk. They love to plot their own course, look down at a map and say things like “We’ll go north for 30 miles and east for 10 and avoid the city altogether.”

It's fun for them I guess, but what I like is to punch my destination into that little GPS screen, watch it choose me a route, then sally forth, no longer weighed down with the pathfinder’s burden.

I find I like the computerized female voice with the American accent to guide me. I tried the “lady” with the British accent but kept imagining a haughty attitude behind her words and who needs that when they’re in need of help?

My American woman, meanwhile, strikes me as a wise, seen-it-all person, an ER nurse maybe or a lady cop.

“Turn around when possible,” she’ll say in a flat and even tone - or else use this strategy to really keep me from feeling judged:

“Go right in 400 feet,” she will say, then, immediately afterward, “In 200 feet turn right,” then, “Right turn ahead” until darned if we haven’t made that crucial U-turn that she was too diplomatic to label as such. 

There is never any mention of error with a GPS, and of course you are never really lost, because the satellite it’s drawing on for advice really does see you.

I feel like Margot Kidder held up by Christopher Reeve in the first “Superman” movie when he’s taking her for a ride across the night sky and she starts to slip from his arms:

“I've got you! I'm holding you!” his face says and isn’t THAT a message we all long to receive:  You don’t need the brake. You don’t need the accelerator. In fact, I’ll even do the steering.

Funny thing is, I thought my car was the only place I could go to receive that message – until a few weeks ago that is, when, on a moonless night, I felt my way onto a small patch of sand and stretched out on a lawn chair to study the skies.

It was one of the nights the Perseid meteor shower was set to put on its show and I was determined to see it, since every year I either forget about it, or else it's cloudy, or else I've fallen asleep too early to catch it.

This year I was on vacation and far from the city lights.

I lay back in that chair and looked up.

There were the stars, all our beloved regulars, spangling the heavens like sequins on a figure skater’s costume.

I noted them, then began scanning the skies fixedly for 60, 90, 120 seconds, my mind filled with the usual monkey-brain thoughts: “I'm-cold-my-neck-hurts- I know-I'll-never-see-them ...” etc.

And then … I saw them, shooting across the sky in quick little arcs and just as quickly disappearing.

I saw one, and another, and another, and the little hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

Because here was proof, right before my eyes that it’s really ISN’T me or any man-made satellite either that makes that old sun come up every morning, but rather some sure-enough capital-S Something whose nature we can only guess at.

Write to Terry at TerryMarotta@verizon.net or care of P.O. Box 270, Winchester, MA 01890. Enter her name and the phrase “Exit Only” in any search engine to see her daily blog.