Growing up in a small town is very different than growing up in a city. For one thing, cattle drives would occasionally go through the middle of town, making several students late for school. But few things between country and city life are as different as how the residents give directions.
In the city, people use street names, measurable distances (like a block), and actual compass directions to get a person from Point A to Point B: “Go north on Broadway a few blocks until you come to Seventh Street. Then take a right.” And so on.
In the country, where a lot of streets don’t have names (and the residents ignore the ones that do), everyone uses landmarks and vague distances. “Go down dis here road a ways ’til you come to da place where ol’ Heap’s barn used to be. Den you take a right onto a little two-tracker and go until you come to da old oak tree. If you come to da rock dat looks like a chipmunk, you gone too far.”
I didn’t fully appreciate this difference until the summer before my senior year when a new family moved to town. One night, some friends and I were trying direct one of the girls to a house where we were going to have a party. We started out by saying: “Okay, you know where main street is?” Her response startled us.
“You mean, Cleveland?”
“Cleveland?”
“Isn’t the street that goes through the middle of town named Cleveland?”
My friends and I stared at each other blankly. Was it really called Cleveland? We had no idea.
It turns out that the main street in St. Johns, the street we’d always referred to as just plain “Main Street,” is, indeed, actually named “Cleveland” after President Grover Cleveland. But until that moment I had never noticed.
My wife quickly discovered this difference during our courtship and has made it her life’s goal to make fun of how us country bumpkins give directions. Her goal especially applies to my dad who is notorious for using obscure landmarks to get us where we need to go.
Her teasing skills were put to use last weekend when we went to visit my parents in St. Johns. While we were there, we went up to the mountains to cut some wood. My dad, who left before of us, drew a nice map that included such landmarks as: “Big Gravel Pit” and “Potato Patch” (it turns out that Potato Patch is actually a big meadow. I don’t know if they ever grew potatoes there). As if those weren’t bad enough, just before we left the house, my dad called and told us that he was off the road a little ways and that we’d know where he was by finding the rock with a stick on it.
That last one had my wife laughing hysterically all the way to the mountains. She kept asking: “What kind of rock? A big rock? A red rock? A small rock? What kind of stick? Will it be pointing up? To the left? Diagonally?” And then Miranda, our preteen, jumped in and started pointing out every rock and stick we passed.
After a long drive of being heckled by my wife and daughter, we finally got to the rock with a stick on it. This, unfortunately, did not help (see the picture below). Jenna and Miranda found this to be the funniest thing they had ever seen and the heckling increased.
But we got where we were going, so even though city dwellers and country bumpkins use different methods to give direction, they both work. And that’s really the point, right?
Now if only I can convince my wife of that.
