Lost in New Jersey

Drive Me Crazy

I have to admit -- I don't like driving. And that's a painful admission in an auto-obsessed culture like ours.

It might be different if I was cruising through the countryside under cerulean skies with the top down. Instead, I'm usually lost in Weird New Jersey on some four-lane turnpike -- dodging pot holes and trucks coming at me at 70 mph.

Today I had to drive my son to his friend's house, a friend that recently moved to a town I've never visited. The route looked relatively simple on MapQuest. I just had to get onto Route 1-9 and then exit onto Route 280 West. But the place where these thoroughfares come together turned out to be a tangled web of highways, city streets, bridges and overpasses. And cars, cars, more cars, and trucks -- all filled with impatient people who seemed to know exactly where they were going.

To make a protracted story breviloquent, I got on the wrong route and eventually had to get off to ask directions. I found myself in what seemed to be an entirely African-American town that I still don't know the name of. I stopped in at a gas station/food store and asked the man behind the bullet-proof glass at the counter how to get back to the right route. He looked at me blankly, as if I'd asked how to get to Utopia Planitia. Then a winsome woman customer offered to help. Her directions were complicated, but she wrote them down for me on the back of some expired lottery tickets. I thanked her profusely and returned to the car, where my son was waiting patiently. About 30 minutes later, we arrived at his friend's house--mission accomplished. Driving back home turned out to be a lot easier; the route was more straightforward, somehow.

My vision of Hell--or one of them, anyway--is traveling down a six-lane superhighway at 70 mph, surrounded by tractor-trailers and SUVs, and suddenly realizing I'm on the wrong road and I'll never get off.