Did you know we live in a directionless vacuum? When I was new to Orlando, a friend tried to draw out how the highways and streets worked. Oh, the futility. How can highways labeled north and south go east and west as well?

But it’s not just the highways that make no sense around here. I was down in St. Cloud recently, and the streets are named after states. I was like, I know this game! The states will be organized alphabetically. Now, I know that maybe they were organized in order of when they joined the union or when Lewis and Clark found them, or something fancy like that. So only history majors (I was a history major) who paid attention in class will know where they are in St. Cloud. 

I’ve run into directional madness in other places as well. Living in St. Louis in my teens, I found out the hard way that Highway 270 doesn’t just run north and south but runs a full circle around the city. When you’re seeing the St. Louis Arch, the great gateway to the west, again, you realize you might have missed your exit.

Speaking of my teens, here’s a perfect anecdote that shows how I navigate. It was the middle of the night, and I was bobbing naked in a public pool with a couple of friends. It was legal to break small laws in those days. 

Well, while we floated in our birthday suits, suddenly, we heard sirens in the distance. My two friends both bolted into action, frantically struggling to get their wiggly bodies back into their shorts to sprint for home. I, who must not have been as hopped up on hormones at the time, realized that the chances the police were coming for us was 100-to-one. But then, it hit me, if I don’t follow my friends, I won’t be able to find my way back to their house. Thus, I have a ’90s scene reminiscent of Stranger Things: me running naked through the suburbs trying to yell-whisper at my friends to wait. 

Given that story, when I’m lost, I’m the type of person who follows the vehicle in front of me hoping that they’re heading toward the same location. This type is also likely to either have forgotten their cell phone, not charged it, or chucked it into a retention pond proudly, proclaiming their freedom from screens.

Another type of person is the one with an internal compass. I don’t loath this type. This type could be spun around deep in the grasses of the Everglades, and they’d find their way home. At least they would have if they hadn’t drowned, been eaten by gators, and finally picked apart by buzzards. Perhaps a piece of them would make it home. See, buzzards aren’t all bad. I go too far. 

Then, there are the landmarks people. They’d be lost in the Everglades for sure – turn left at that bent piece of grass. When asked how to get somewhere, they’ll begin talking about big barns, rusted-out trucks, fences, gabled homes, crooked telephone poles and old men in rocking chairs. Their directions are only discernible by Sherlock Holmes.

Then, there are the maps folks. They spend most nights and weekends carefully tracing maps so they can fill in all the cool tiny street names themselves. Show them Google Earth and you can watch as tears of joy course down their cheeks. They also collect coupons and make fun of adult coloring books, preferring crossword puzzles and more edifying activities, like pouring a new concrete pool in their model train village with ensuing activity involving tiny shovels, wheelbarrows, and a one-inch high mixer. 

This type of person wishes they had a shrink ray gun so the world would be a bigger place, requiring more complex infrastructures and streets. When I’m driving with one of these people in the backseat, I, too, wish I had a shrink-ray gun. 

Of course, all of these directional types’ characteristics were more apparent before cell phones. Before cell phones, folks like me were in danger of starving to death in some remote corner of the world every time they ventured out of their house and, on bad days, their rooms.    

People like me are comforted by the saying that all roads lead to Rome, or at least the roads did before Rome grew lazy and corrupt, was attacked by barbarians, and fell apart due to poor corporate practices, like stabbing their bosses a million times. “Et tu, Brute?”

But here in Florida, we know that all roads lead to Disney, unless you’re me and, for some reason, all roads lead to Gatorland, what with its gators and their knowing smiles that seem to say, “If only we were in the Everglades together, now that would be our idea of an amusement park.”