Location Taken: Baltimore, Maryland
Time Taken: May 2012
I take very odd photos of cities. Street corners, stoplights, highways, stuff like that.
Maybe it’d be easier if I actually stopped in the cities rather than just drive through them…
Nah, couldn’t be.
This particular photo was somewhere in Baltimore, as my family worked our way from the south side of the city to the north via small city streets. It was Memorial Day weekend, and the highways were packed.
You see, my Mom has a thing about traffic jams. She hates them. With a passion. Enough that she’d rather get off at the first opportunity and jump onto the small roads that aren’t packed full. Even if we’ve never been on them before, even if they end up taking twice as long as just sitting through the jam would have.
It can be a real adventure in navigation.
We don’t have a GPS, you see.
We don’t need one, really. We have a stack of maps instead. And my Mom, my Dad, and I are really good at not getting lost. We can learn a route just by traveling it once, and can memorize a route on a map within seconds. I’m the best of the three, since both my art skills and my training in geography and geology apply just fine to the art of not getting lost. I have quite literally been called a “Living GPS” before, with the added benefit of being smart enough to say “this way isn’t right, let’s not drive into that swamp”.
A lot of my ability comes from spot memorization. I’m constantly paying attention to the world around me, and I can memorize an area and store it in long term memory very easily. Some of that comes from my art training, some of it from natural talents I built my art skills off of. I’ve gotten to the point where I can recognize a building I’ve passed by maybe three times before – from a completely different angle than I’ve ever seen it before. And it sticks, too. I could, at this very moment, hop in a car and go visit my sister without ever having to look at a map – and she lives in Seattle, some two thousand miles plus from where I am. And she’s moved since the last time I visited, too. But I looked up where she lives now, so I’m good.
I keep forgetting that people can get lost. It’s just one of those things very alien to my nature. To me, knowing where you are at all times is natural, like knowing that that person with those physical characteristics and that personality is your mother. It just boggles my mind that people pay so very little attention to their surroundings that they can’t even back-trace where they’ve been.
Admittedly, I am used to other people getting lost. You may notice my sister didn’t make the list of people who share my ability to not get lost. She doesn’t pay as much attention, and while she is good at navigation and is better at not getting lost than the average person, she still does get lost on occasion. Usually that’s when she pulls out her phone and calls home, asking me to help her get un-lost. And I do, quicker and easier than any of her local friends could. Despite living thousands of miles away and having only spent about two weeks at most in the state she lives in.
It’s one of my strongest natural abilities. Now if only it was one I could make a living on. But GPS has made it less important, so well, I can’t. Ah well.
