Being Lost Is Sublime

The following is the text of a speech I gave for the 2018 Opening Convocation at Alderson Broaddus.

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I was assured, several times, that I could make this speech about anything I wanted. A couple colleagues encouraged me to speak from the heart, and that advice felt right. My heart and my recent experiences bear out the following thesis: “Being lost” and its opposite, “being oriented,” are largely constructs we can choose to accept or ignore. Through the course of my fourth decade, I have come to embrace the latter, no matter the cost. Indeed, I have reaped real benefits from having done so, and I want to share what I’ve learned.

My main point is not a metaphor for finding one’s self or some other nonsense like that. I have in mind something more concrete. I’ll start with a mostly true story.

Have you found yourself at a place and couldn’t form a cogent response or a mental map to answer the fundamental questions, “Where am I exactly?” and “How did I come to be at this particular place?” I have, most recently a couple weeks ago somewhere between Lake Michigan and Union Station in Chicago. My precocious and wickedly smart son, just 14, and I had taken a train and had set out to walk across the city to the popular destinations of Millenium Park and, past that, Navy Pier. I stood just outside the train station, consulted my compass, studied the maps stored on my phone, and compared my choices: left, right, or straight, or get on a bus. “Just take Uber Dad.” No, that’s for the weak.

You need to know that all these apps, maps, and a compass are my crutch or, even worse, the props for my eccentricities. I’ve been known to wander off course even with them. A dear friend once angrily scrawled in her journal, “Bill and his fucking compass,” showed me the page and, right there on a sidewalk somewhere between the train station and the Colosseum in Rome, snapped the journal shut in my face, turned, and left me behind.

I won’t say that I’m bad with directions. I think I’m pretty good. Rather, I tend to overthink things and come up with odd, complicated theories on how best to navigate a particular landscape. I’ll navigate by sound, smells, distant memories, and observations of social behaviors. Sometimes it works, often it does not.

There at Union Station, I decided to ignore the maps and follow smells carried by the wind. “It makes perfect sense. Wind comes off the lake. Heading upwind will steer me to the east and to Navy Pier.” I’m telling the truth here. One hour later, after crossing the Chicago River and wondering, “hey, what’s this river?” and then crossing it again, we ended up back at Union Station, evidently having chased the wind around several blocks. “Uber, Dad.”

Another thing you need to know: I will latch onto a bad decision and squeeze it until I get something good. “NO,” I said, “we’re walking.” Some of my best times have started with “aw hell, let’s just walk it.” In Chicago, timely directions from a panhandler, a gutter punk kid, and a homeless guy, along with $15 spread between them, steered us to the right place.

Next, I’ll include a history lesson to show my thesis has academic and intellectual veritability. Is it possible for me to gloss over some 1,000 years of western history here in a minute or two? Let’s do it. Why not.

By “cultural construct,” I mean that being lost or oriented are experiences we filter through our particular cultural heritage and its understanding of landscape. The idea that we can and really should know our precise location has deep historical roots. Historian Lynn White, in a seminal piece that’s as old as I am, made a case that Europeans’ insistence that humans dominate the land and should impose grids across it started in the Middle Ages. French and German peasants, for example, started to use heavy plows that dug deep furrows, and because the teams of up to eight oxen were so difficult to turn around, the fields were narrow and long, which, in part, gave Europeans the sense that the land can and should be defined by their work and that distant points align in a straight line. Race forward in time, glossing over the bit about Columbus using an ancient Chinese invention that was still relatively new to Europeans, the compass, to steer west, not south. Speed past the North American transcontinental railroad of 1869 and the forced adoption of uniform time zones across North America, and arrive in the year 1996, when Senator Al Gore sponsored legislation that gave civilian access to the Department of Defense system of 27 satellites that make gps possible. Now, we can do things like ask Siri for our exact coordinates.

Lynn White goes on to underscore an alternative western mindset of people who I would label as “the habitually lost.” He cites St. Francis of Assisi wandering about and calling out to the birds. I’d add several more to his list: the three spaniards who walked all the way from Florida to Mexico city, starting in 1528 and arriving in 1536. I’d add Sacagawea, the only person who had enough knowledge to know that Lewis and Clark were helpless in 1804. Later, the lesser known traveler Jedediah Smith had wandered back and forth across the Rockies so much that his mental map of the west was, and still is, legendary.

More and more, most of you smartphone users are obsessively oriented. True wanderers are getting more and more rare.

I’d like to think that I am aligned with this latter group. Now I ask that you indulge me while I cite my top two ignoble credentials as a middle aged solo hiker. It was painful to choose just two, and I’ll sneak in a third into the conclusion.

I have been lost–lost in a tangle of goat paths and scrub bushes 500 meters above a famous footpath named “Path of the Gods” because it’s the mythical landscape that inspired Ulysses to listen for the Sirens along the Amalfi Coast in Italy. Walking out on the path, with the Mediterranean Sea to my left, I saw a ridge high up to my right and thought, “there must be a path above the “Path of the Gods.” There wasn’t. It’s just goats, goat paths, and an unmarked dirt road. I’ll let Dr. Franke sort out the theological issue there.

In 2014, I got lost walking the impassable 10-mile road to El Cedro, Nicaragua, a village that doesn’t appear on a map. The people of the village had arranged horses for our mission delegation of AB students, me and infinitely wise Dr. Jim Stinespring. The hesitant look they gave me, back when I was carrying about 50 pounds more than I do now, suggested that I should walk it–good news for me and the pony. I got separated from the group and the road for some time but headed, more or less, in the right direction. When it came time for the return trip, the kind people of El Cedro brought out a huge mule named pantera, “panther,” and put me on him. I’ll never forget that brave mule.

I wish I could tell you all my stories in all their glorious details. Please understand that the memory of each of instance in which I have not fully known my whereabouts, in which I have been lost, has become more and more precious.

Through all those glorious moments, here is what I’ve learned and would like to pass along today.

1. People are generally kind to strangers and will help, even when they don’t share a language with you. Just say the name of where you want to go, shrug your shoulders, and look around in a confused manner. They’ll point you in the right direction. Often, they will lead you by the hand. Trust me–it works. Panhandlers are a great resource for getting around.

2. Some of you have already figured out that I really haven’t been lost. I’m here now, right? Still, the risks I’ve taken as a traveler and solo hiker have taught me how to be present and appreciate the place where I’m at, even if it’s not necessarily an attractive or otherwise pleasant place, and even if I don’t know its exact whereabouts. There is no such thing as a shithole country, yes? Being both present and lost (or not) requires you to banish the thought that there’s some better place where you’d rather be. Seek the beauty and joy in the places where you are. That’s a good lesson for the students, right?

3. Experience and good friends top fear every time. You know this to be true. Experience and friends beat fear. What’s the worst that has happened to me? I have been lost and afraid. On the first day of October 2010, I set out to hike a well marked path up to a high massif in Austria, the Dachstein.* Mistakes were made. I had gotten a slow start, had set out alone, and had ignored the weather forecast. A snow storm settled in, bringing a mix of freezing rain, snow, and a cloud so thick that I couldn’t see the trail blazes painted on the boulders just feet away. The memory of the muffled quiet set against the torrent of snow, rain and ice falling from the sky scares me still, even years later. My boots scraping the gravel made a massive crashing sound and I could hear and feel the panic and blood surging through my body. As the day’s light faded, I held the compass close to my face for one last reading and took a lucky guess about the whereabouts of the nearby hiker’s hut, which, as it turned out, was just yards away and already closed for the season due to the forecasted bad weather. I got lucky. Looking back, I should have sheltered in place, using my mylar emergency blanket, but fear and panic made me stumble ahead across the rocky path. Six years to the day after that, I would return to hike the same exact trail, this time with a friend, two AB students, and a clear sky. Early into the hike, the students spotted the mountain hut in the high distance and made short work of climbing the remaining 1000 meters in elevation. At 2,100 meters, I wandered off the trail to gaze north across Austria and into Germany. At that altitude, away from all man-made noise, the flapping wings of a raven sounded like breaking waves. Everything was clearly and crisply defined around me. I wondered out loud, “How the hell is it even possible that I ever got lost here?” Then I rejoined the trail up to the Simony Hutte, near the Halstatter Glacier, knowing that my friend would be keeping watch over me, waiting 50 meters or so up the trail and around a bend. It took six years for me to know this in my soul: Friends and experience top fear. I’ll never fear being lost again.

In conclusion, my call to action today is this: take time this year to explore the amazing location of our community and get a little lost. YOU STUDENTS GET LOST! Go explore our region beyond party rock in Arden and this hill. If those are the only places you come to know in the short time you’re in our region, then you’ll miss the rugged trails of the Otter Creek wilderness, the majesty of Seneca Rocks, the quaintness of Helvetia, and more. Even tiny Moatsville is as quaint and lovely as any place I’ve seen. Wander, let yourself get lost.

If you do feel yourself getting lost, don’t worry about it. It’ll all work out. Give me a call, and I’ll help. My testimony here today is that I know it will work out. No matter what turns you take, you will always find the place where you belong and, with any practice, you will see that every misdirected path will lead you back to this exact spot.