DON’T TURN EAST,
TAKE A LEFT
After a reasonable hunting time with no results I decided to
return to the fire. I walked a long time and nothing looked familiar. I
knew I was going in the right direction, so I kept walking. Eventually I
came to a little road that wandered through the brush. I was not
familiar with it but decided to follow it since it was going in the
right direction. After a long walk I arrived at an unfamiliar house. I
realized that I was helplessly lost and reluctantly knocked on the front
door. A man opened the door and invited me in. I told him that I was
apparently lost and asked him if he knew where my family lived.
“You are lost!” He told me. “The Chambers place is at least
five miles north of here. If you go back down the road you came in on
and turn left on the road you come to you will be almost home.”
He was right. After I got to the other road I knew where I was
and the directions flipped around. It was a peculiar feeling. Our
hunting party had returned and they were concerned about my absence.
My mother sympathized with me and told how she had a similar
experience a few years before. For years they had been going to a little
town about fifteen miles away. The road leading to the town had many
turns in it since the old roads were built around farms instead of
through them. When progressive officials built better roads they built
them straighter. The first time they went to town using the new road she
came in from the wrong direction. The whole town seemed backwards. She
said she had finally got accustomed to the new directions and everything
was O.K.
A few times I had experiences like that when hunting on a dark
night. I wouldn’t realize that I had lost my sense of direction until
we arrived at a fence or a familiar hill or tree, then things would spin
around and I would be back to normal. When I was much older I walked
about three miles to get on a school bus. I had to leave in the dark and
pass though about a quarter mile of thick brush. Sometimes I would lose
my sense of direction and emerge from the brush on the wrong side. I
solved this problem by carrying a small compass and a pocket full of
matches for a reading light.
When I first came to the
I finally managed to accept the new north and be comfortable with
it. Actually, it never bothered me much. I knew where I wanted to go and
I went. I often wonder how many people think of a direction as being
north when actually it isn’t. If you never moved from the area where
you grew up you would have no way of knowing. Of course the compass
could tell you that you were mistaken.
Some scientists believe that the earth’s magnetic field enables
people to know the directions and that some have stronger or weaker
brain receptors for reading the field. There are migrating birds that
always know where they are going hundreds of miles away and of fish that
return to the same streams where they were born to spawn after thousands
of miles journeying through the ocean. Some people occasionally have
directional problems and some do not.
I never have let the name of the directions bother me in my
search for finding fun. Whether you look north or south be sure you
don’t pass up any fun along the way.
Really, the name doesn’t mean that much – a rose by any other
name would smell the same! Some pessimist might add, “So would a
skunk”!
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