You can’t fake a sense of direction – beware of this lost newspaper editor

It’s my personal conviction that some people are born with an unfailing sense of direction.

Put them anywhere – a forest or some baffling street corner – and these people manage to find their way home. They’ll even remember where they were, so they can come back for a visit some time.

I am not cut of that cloth.

For years, I’ve been faking having a sense of direction, and it’s gotten me nowhere. Or if it did get me anywhere, I have absolutely no idea how I got there, or how I’ll get back.

It’s gotten to the point where I’ll just do the opposite of what my inner compass tells me. This often works, much to the amusement of my teenage daughter.

Of course, she’s one of those people with an internal GPS system, so she’ll usually just stand there, arms folded, watching me spinning in circles, trying to calibrate my faulty inner gyroscope.

Eventually, I’ll stop spinning and ask her where I’m supposed to be going. This results in much eye-rolling, but eventually we find our way home.

I realized just how bad matters were this week, when I fielded a call from a reader. We were exchanging some pleasantries, and he happened to mention he lived over at The Lakes.

I’ve never actually been to The Lakes. When I lived in New York, The Lakes was a term we occcasionally used to refer to the Great Lakes. Nobody liked the Great Lakes, as they created all kinds of bad weather systems. Kind of the same way people feel about Canada, every time there’s an arctic cold front here.

So, I’m already a bit sketchy about the terrain he’s discussing. Not a good thing.

I happened to mention I lived near the Green River (I know! I’ll be the first with a story if anything happens!) at an apartment complex that he’d heard the name of.

“So are you north or south of me?” he quipped.

“Ummmm. I think I’m upstream from you,” I said, vaguely recalling which direction some ducks on the river happened to be floating, when I went by one time.

“Yes, but are you north or south of me?” he pressed.

After a lot of stammering and trying to figure out where Interstate 5 was in relation to all of this (it’s my one toehold on the North and South thing) I finally gave up. I was either going to have to sit down with a map, or just make something up, otherwise.

Which, of course, my reader friend found very amusing. I explained that if I’d been Sacajawea, Lewis and Clark would never have made it out of Missouri, let alone found their way to the West Coast.

In the grand scheme of things, I suppose I am in trouble. In the event of an emergency, I’ll be rattling out landmarks, rather than any cogent directions, to a hard-pressed dispatcher.

But on the other hand, a person like me will be forever keeping the GPS companies happy, not to mention stroking the egos of people with perfect compass systems.

And since I’m not keeping track of things anyway – I shouldn’t even bother to try, given my handicap – I’ll enjoy the trip more, too.