GRAFTON — Sunday morning I'm driving home from an early milk run to the dairy. A shiny black Honda with Jersey plates is parked at the bottom of my lane, tucked neatly out of the way of traffic. The car is unoccupied.
Uh-oh. More lost souls from away. Or their car died. It's likely the former.
It isn't unusual to find befuddled flatlanders on my doorstep or wandering around my barn, directed here by a GPS. They have ignored the small green-and-white sign at the lane's end that proclaims Private Road and its companion sign that invites walkers and horses but “please no motorized vehicles.”
More than a century ago the lane was a town road but it was “thrown up” to this land long before I was born. Technology hasn't caught up with the times.
I turn up the steep hill and see a young man and woman walking down. They appear to be more amused than befuddled.
I stop the car and ask, “Are ya lost?”
They laugh.
“We think our GPS steered us wrong,” the man says. “We're looking for a white house with red shutters that's for sale.”
“It's a 10-minute walk through the woods,” I reply, nodding toward the dark hemlocks and pines to the east, about a quarter mile down the lane. “You're welcome to walk through, but the deer flies are virulent. Or you can drive around. That'll take you 15 minutes.”
They elect to drive. I give them the somewhat-elaborate directions. They listen intently.
“Do you want me to write that down?” I ask.
“No thanks,” the woman says. “We'll make it. Are those your horses in the field?”
“Yes.”
“They're beautiful,” she says.
“Thanks. And good luck.”
They mosey on down the hill. I hope they love the house and buy it. I think they'd make good neighbors - attentive listeners, aware of their earthly surroundings, able to laugh at themselves and appreciate the beauty of two well-made Thoroughbred horses.
* * *
A couple of times a week, I ride the four-mile loop through the woods and onto the Class 3 dirt road that's owned and maintained by the town.
We pass the house with the red shutters, walk down the hill past the wetlands, and trot smartly uphill to Anderson Road; we make a right by my friend Wilder's house and keep on trotting.
It's a mile to the spot where the town road ends and the ghost of the old road narrows and roughens. This part of our trip is accessible only to ATVs - two-legged and four.
We pull up to a walk and pick our way around the ubiquitous rocks to the top of the hill where the road T-stops at the old Bell Road; there Kevin, the landowner, has posted a vintage road sign: Pay Phone Ahead.
I pass this sign often, but it always elicits a giggle. Once or twice a year I meet people here, stopped in cars with out-of-state tags. They look flummoxed. And scared. The driver rolls down a window.
“The GPS says we're on the right road, but....”
A good GPS should be equipped with a warning: Stop! Turn around! You can't get there from here.
* * *
The hippocampus is the part of our brain that governs spatial mapping and navigation. Some neurological studies indicate that our hippocampuses may be shrinking.
The result? Someday we might not know where we are or where we're going.
Atrophy of the hippocampus may also increase our risk of dementia. A New York Times blog “The Idea of the Day” headline poses the question, “Can GPS Help your Brain get Lost?”
“Increasing reliance on global positioning systems could damage our own internal sense of direction and have other unforeseen effects on the brain, neurological studies suggest,” the Times blogger writes. Here in the woods you don't need to read a MRI as evidence.
Surely the young man who drove his DirecTV truck onto a Class 4 road and into a ditch last summer was already demented. Or blind.
Wilder spent two hours on his tractor rescuing the truck and its unhinged driver. When Wilder told me this story I asked, “why does anyone out here need TV? There's more available comedy and drama right outside our doors.”
I do have sympathy for lost souls in the woods. I've gotten lost without the “help”of a GPS on more than one occasion. One cloudy winter afternoon I put on my snowshoes and set out for Wilder's open fields. I was going overland, a trip I'd made several times, but not in the snow.
It was taking a long time to get where I thought I was going. Dusk was closing in. Common sense should have dictated that I turn around and follow my tracks home, but I have a stubborn aversion to backtracking.
It wasn't until I heard my dead father - woodsman and naturalist - speak from the other side (“Turn around now!”) that I reversed direction. It was almost dark when I spotted the comforting peak of the barn roof at the western fringe of the woods.
* * *
Apparently, stubbornness causes atrophy of the hippocampus, too.
Global Positioning Systems. Televisions. Computers and keyboards. iPods and other listening devices. All technologies touted as signs of progress, providing us with wider connections to the world. And they do.
But unless we learn to use them judiciously, we will continue to disconnect from the real world - the ground we stand on and the earth that sustains us. We will be out of our minds and bodies. That's another wrong direction a GPS can't detect.
We know how to navigate the Internet but we don't know where the sun rises and sets. Schools are cutting recess time. “Physical education” is an anachronism.
We're animals, made to move, just as surely as horses are bred to move. Too many Americans are moving only from their houses to their schools and workplaces, living climate-controlled lives. We're overweight yet underfed, physically and spiritually, suffering from what author Richard Louv dubbed “Nature-Deficit Disorder” in his book Last Child in the Woods.
Only when hands-on environmental studies become part of the core curriculum - in school and at home - will no child be left behind. Or be stuck in a ditch. Or go belly up in a snowdrift because she refused to backtrack.