Apple maps

[asakiyume]

When I came home from Readercon, there was a tornado watch, and so rather than be on the awful interstate between Quincy, MA, and B'town, likely trapped in a traffic jam (they are pretty much a guarantee for this time of the year, traveling between western and eastern Massachusetts) awaiting a funnel of doom, I decided to go home no-highways (which really just means no interstates), aided by my phone. It took me the route I was expecting it would take me: along state highway rt. 9, which runs east-west through the middle of the state. For much of the journey it's scenic towns, and there are plenty of places to stop if you need to shelter from a tornado. And a constant reassuring progression of Dunkin Donuts (it doesn't go through Stow, MA).

So yesterday, having dropped Wakanomori at the airport, I decided to do similar as soon as I escaped the traffic jam surrounding the airport. But this time, maybe because it was rush hour and so rt 9 was also quite thick with traffic, the app directed me north and further north, always managing to inch west too. Are you sure you know where I want to go? --It claimed it did.

We went through towns I'd never heard of, like Rutland, MA ("the geographic center of Massachusetts!" it boasts), followed by the improbably Oakham, MA. Oakham? Did H.P. Lovecraft win a contest at some point and get the rights to name a Massachusetts town?

And then somewhere around Oakham, Apple Maps decided that when I said "Avoid Highways," what I really meant was "Avoid any evidence of human habitation whatsoever," and I found myself driving though forests, lakes ("turn right onto Fisherman's Lane" ... well okay, it makes sense then that the road should wind through a lake, I suppose--here is someone else's photo), and meadows against backdrops of hills and stormclouds and mist.

I imagined the car breaking down... of course there would be no signal... I am good at foraging but not THAT good... I would slowly waste away, till nothing but my bones remained, somewhere southwest of Oakham.

Every now and then there were signs of life. Someone had written "Wedding this way" in black sharpie on a little scrap of white lawn-sign plastic. You could just about read it from the car--I did read it from the car. But it would be easier to view if you were walking. but if you were walking, wouldn't you know the location? A mystery.

Another time--this was once I had entered civilization again, in the form of the Actually Inhabited town of Hardwick--there was one of those no-words signs that indicate things. This one was meant to indicate, I want to guess, "Children playing"--but the symbols seemed to be children on a see-saw? And then there was no school or daycare or anything! I felt cheated. "You promised me children on a see-saw, and there were NONE!" Plus, I think the signs that represent kids playing by showing kids jumping into the street convey a better sense of why you'd want to be alerted to children playing--namely, that they're unpredictable and that you should drive carefully. It's not meant to be that they're a scenic attraction (except maybe in places with drastically declining birthrates.....)

Anyway, I made it home! And this morning a bobcat walked through my yard, and the two of us exchanged a long and meaningful look.

Also my Tikuna teacher texted me "Guungua choru maune wa cu ñemata," and I understood (almost) the whole thing without her translating,** so life is good. 😁

**siempre estás presente en mi corazón/you're always present in my heart

Comments

[mallorys_camera]

Oh, this is brilliant!!!!! Seriously. You should submit it to a publication that pays money.

And as a sidebar—my hatred of interstates is so intense that I almost always take backroads when I drive somewhere. 😀

[asakiyume]

Oh thank you, I'm so glad you liked it because I was really feeling like I was channelling YOU. "Patricia would notice these things. Patricia would be amused by this circumstance."

[mallorys_camera]

❤️❤️❤️

[kayre]

Wow, bobcat!!

[asakiyume]

Our neighborhood is amazing: we have bears, deer, bobcat (well, one at least), foxes, one time a moose--it's pretty wild!

[sartorias]

I would have been so tempted to invite myself to that wedding. Especially if it was held in a liminal space between the magic of a forest and otherwhere...

[asakiyume]

Right?! I'm kind of kicking myself that I didn't go... but then I might not be writing you now...

[amaebi]

Following the signs and eventually the faint, then emboldening sounds of fiddle music, Francesca reached a wide and flowery meadow, wreathed in fog-- where she saw only seven standing stones, and a doe munching grass.

[asakiyume]

Awww, I love this. Goodbye all; it's been great knowing you.

[puddleshark]

So magical. And some of those places you travelled... Are you sure you didn't accidentally use a magic rather than a map app?

Thank you. This was a wonderful start to my weekend.

[asakiyume]

I did wonder!

Another possibility is that the app itself had a hankering to see all these lesser known spots. In its spare time it's been accessing Google and reading up on lesser-known, possibly haunted Massachusetts locations. "I can take you back home AND see the places I want to see," it thought triumphantly

[heleninwales]

That sounds like an interesting journey home with just the right level of excitement and suspense.

[asakiyume]

Exactly! Not enough excitement and suspense to really cause heart trouble or physical difficulties, LOL.

[shewhomust]

I love this post, and envy you your journey of exploration.

At the same time, it's one of those posts that illustrates how mileage varies for UK / US readers. I don't have any problem with Oakham being the next town after RutlandL Oakham is the county town of Rutland, so why not?

On the other hand, didn't Massachussetts win a contest to be the place where Lovecraft constructed his creepy world? No surprise that there are strange things there...

[asakiyume]

Really! Amazing! So the early settlers of Massachusetts' Rutland and Oakham knew what they were about! ... It seems like just as often they lose the thread: You'll get a town name Dalton--good English name--but then the next town over is Peru. What?!

Did Massachusetts win a contest or did Lovecraft just pick it for his own reasons? Either way, he surely did set a whole lot of stories here! And probably the reason Oakham sounded Lovecraftian to me is because he would take actual town names and skew them just a little for his stories. (But if I had known about Original!Oakham, things would have been different)

[amaebi]

At a crossroads, a sign: Eldritch Horrors, left -- Bonny road that winds about the fernie brae, right -- ?, straight ahead.

[asakiyume]

Hahahaha! Stubborn app was set to mild-adventure mode, and I didn't realize.

[amaebi]

:D

(Really?)

[asakiyume]

--which really? Really the app was set to mild adventure mode, or really I didn't realize?

(For complete, mundane honesty: the app was just the normal old app. But I doubted it enough to pull over and check that it really was taking me home and not to some other place I might have accidentally entered.)

[amaebi]

That silly question to you from someone whose first experience of a navigation was a Tom-Tom that I thought said, in its assigned Australian accent, "After a thousand years, you have reached your destination."

[asakiyume]

That Tom-Tom was a philosopher!

[amaebi]

The hearer had a faulty interpreter: it actually said "after a thousand meters."

[minoanmiss]

Thank you for taking us with you on your adventures :)

[asakiyume]

Thank you for coming along!

[wayfaringwordhack]

Now that is off the beaten track! Nice to read about your adventures that ended well with the crowning glory of bob-cat eye contact!!!!

[asakiyume]

Bobcat reminds me of all that's good about where I live ^_^