Wayfinding
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
-Dirk Gently in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve been asked out by three different gas station attendants in the D.C. metro area since I moved here two months ago. I know most of them by name.
I’d like to say it’s because I’m charming and well-heeled, but I’m sure it has more to do with being awkwardly overly-chatty with strangers and… hanging around in lots of gas stations.
People who work at gas stations usually give good directions and I appreciate that because if I’m trying to get somewhere, I’m usually lost.
Here in D.C., if I haven’t passed the right road then the right road suddenly becomes one-way in the wrong direction and I end up wheeling around some crazy underpass cemetery diagonal state street roundabout with traffic lights and speedbumps, searching out the cross of letter and number streets to set me straight.
It’s like all that talk in pirate movies about getting your “sea legs” so you can walk steady on the deck and presumably swash-buckle around on the rigging.
Clearly, I’m still getting my “D.C. legs” and I think it’ll be a while before I try any Errol Flynn aerobatics.
I’ve been paying a lot more attention to what’s guiding me since I read Slate’s enchanting series on signage a few weeks ago. Turns out there’s a whole industry devoted to the study and planning of how people navigate around spaces. The people who get paid to implement this stuff call it “wayfinding.”
Good wayfinding means a constant sense of reassurance that you’re traveling in the right direction and that you’re not traveling alone.
Granted, I haven’t had to scatter any breadcrumbs to get me to the grocery store and the post office and back. But too often, I find myself waiting around at the 7-11 at 8th and E streets in NE while the friend I’m meeting is at its doppelganger in the SE.
Lots of days, I’m productive and punctual and even happy in my work.
Then other days–like last Thursday– I feel like I’m in a dysfunctional polyamourous triad with Mint.com and GoogleTasks. I realize as I’m going for a cup of coffee that I’ve already had five. And that I can’t stop whistling the NewsHour theme music. And that I’ve shown up to work dressed rather like Sam Neil in Jurassic Park. And then it starts to rain…
Luckily, I’ve never been to proud to stop and ask for directions. From a large glass of beer.
My newish roommate, The Tree Surgeon, inadvertently gave me some encouragement the other night at happy hour. He was pontificating about the gnarled Norwegian Oak, glitzed up with Christmas lights, that shades the bar patio at Wonderland Ballroom…
“It should’ve already blossomed,” he said. “But it’s late because the roots are stressed and it’s planted in the middle of all the chaos.”
“The tree and me, both,” I joked.
“Don’t worry. It’ll get there eventually. It’s probably used to this sort of thing by now,” he said.
Hmmm, here’s hoping…
“Doubtless, we’ve been through this
So if you want to follow me you should know
I was lost then and I am lost now
And I doubt I’ll ever know which way to go”-Vaporize by Broken Bells
