Orientation

I don't really quite believe in such things but it remains a fact (is it a fact if it's unprovable, or is it mere opinion? it's a fact that it's my opinion) that in Midland I had an innate sense of true, or maybe it was magnetic, north. Whatever it was, maybe even an unconscious detection of which side of trees the moss grew --and believe me, that Does Not Work here in the Pacific Northwet where moss will grow on everything that doesn't move and even on things that don't move enough, such as my old pickup during my cycle-commuting years.

That it might have been magnetic north was somewhat confirmed when we moved to California and I still had the sense but it was off by something like 15 degrees.

In Seattle, though, it's gone. Totally. As I learned one day in 1983 when I wound up lost in a semi-rural area north of here, under one of Seattle's horrid blank and blinding white skies, following a loop around several times. That is not supposed to be possible here, where the streets are numbered in a grid. For example, given the address 110xx NE 50th St, it's a brief exercise to parse it: NE of central Seattle, 110 streets to the East, 50 streets to the North, street runs east&west -- ah, probably in Kirkland's Houghton district. Not as colorful as Midland's system of street names (Ashman, Rodd, Main, Sturgeon Creek Parkway) but colorful just doesn't work well in major metropolitan areas. But I had to face the facts: the grid-numbering system broke down here, and I had NO internal sense of direction. (I broke out of the loop by taking some turns that seemed wrong until I reached an area where I was back on the grid.)

I don't expect to try my sense back in Midland. After all, I have Google Maps and VirtualGPS to aid me (despite my supervisors, I've resisted getting a corporate Crackberry with its in-built GPS -- and disabled cameras and memory-card slots and leashed to corporate e-mail). But I wonder: where can I buy a map of Midland today? I don't think my map printed in 1967, with elements that say it's much older than that, will be a good help. I know it won't show me where the Tridge is!

Update: It figures. Kathy's on it. If not a map store in downtown Seattle, then AAA on Colorado St. I don't even remember Colorado St.!