Effort Is the Whole Game

A house, by a lake, three hours drive northwest. We went for three years. Ten visits a year, give or take, two directions a visit, comes to sixty crossings total. A man who has crossed the same water sixty times can be reasonably assumed to know something about it.

I did not.

The first time, I put the address into my phone and did as I was told, and the phone was very good to me. The route varied slightly on each passage, the scenery rearranging itself by a few degrees, because somewhere in a server farm an algorithm had determined that two minutes could be shaved by threading a small town, or that a wreck forty miles ahead was best swung wide of.

In sixty crossings, the navigation never once failed me. Neither does a well-made cage.

At the end of these three years, a realization. It stopped me in my flawlessly mapped tracks. I could not produce even the beginnings of a route to this house by a lake. I had at my disposal the sporadic "We're in the outskirts of Santee" or, more commonly, the somewhat useful (but not really) "Oh, look kids, there's that farm with all the horses".

So I promised myself, next time, no phone. The night before, I grabbed a notebook, pulled up the directions on my laptop, and studied the route. I wrote it all down partly as insurance, but mostly, because the hand writing a thing, is the mind holding it.

Then I drove, and talked to myself the entire way.

In seven miles, exit 93 to 15 North. Some quick math, when the odometer reads 48,758, start looking. At every intersection, instead of dropping my eyes to the glowing rectangle and executing its instruction, I looked up, and I looked around, and I confirmed the world against my memory of it. Yes. This is Old River Road. This is the one.

That was the intent. It was not the effect. The effect was that I started seeing things. At Tee Vee and Old River there is a house. Behind it, a trampoline. On the lawn out front, listing slightly, gone a little to seed, an early-2000s Mitsubishi Eclipse. All of it had been there the whole time, every crossing, waiting with the patience of furniture.

Within a few months the whole apparatus went automatic. It stopped being "watch the odometer, then look for the exit". It became: "there's the water tower, take the next right". Landmark, location, and action, all melded. Three passes each way was all it took, more or less, and I never once got lost, though the first attempts did wobble. The effort thinned out and drained away and the route filed itself in the department of the brain that handles stairs, and chewing, and the words to songs I don't like.

In one sense I ended where I began. I remained a poor man to ask for directions, since my knowledge had encoded itself in trampolines and water towers and a listing Mitsubishi rather than in route numbers a stranger could use. The phone would still have done it better. The phone would have done it perfectly.

Was this effort worth anything?

One question, allegedly. Really it's two questions stacked in a trench coat, the top one does all the talking; the bottom one does all the walking.

Top question: what is the output worth? A sequence of turns that gets you from A to B. There's nothing particularly fetching about this sequence of turns. The machine will produce it instantly and without fault, anytime I ask it. Appraised honestly, the value of that knowledge rounds to zero.

Bottom question: what is the process worth? The obvious answer is that I was exercising some muscle, sharpening some faculty, keeping the machinery oiled against the long decline. Maybe. The value of the process is individual, and beyond empiricism. On a macro level I can produce no evidence to its worth.

The evidence I do have, however: I had driven that road sixty times and I did not know it. Two hundred hours of my one life, a passenger in the driver's seat.

"Yeah, yeah we get it, the journey is the destination, this isn't new."

But it's not quite what I mean. What I mean is narrower and stranger and I think more useful: there are destinations whose journeys cannot be delegated. Not will not. Cannot. No service can make the trip on your behalf, because the destination is the change the journey works into you. By some cruel and beautiful arrangement, these turn out the be the destinations worth reaching.

Consider what the delegation would actually mean. If I owned a device that could strum my guitar better than I will ever strum it, that could pull from those six strings a music more beautiful than anything my hands will produce in whatever years remain to them, would I put mine down?

A bullet point on my bucket list reads: Learn to do a kickflip. Thirty-nine years old, zero kickflips, and no guarantee that number ever moves. If somewhere there was a rig, a gyroscope, some magic board that would bolt itself under my feet and rotate the deck and set me down clean on every attempt, I would not want it. I don't want a kickflip. I want to have landed one. The board has to be allowed to win. It usually does. That's the arrangement.

The resulting question is uncomfortable. What happens when we hand a task to a system that produces the necessary output flawlessly, every time, forever?