Children of the Automotive Magenta Line

Okay....I'll make sure to study the overview before relying on the turn-by-turn directions.
 
I can relate. In a new area in a car get me there by GPS and I can barely get back there on my own. Give me a map and it is stuck in my brain.

The best for memory retention was Mapqest when you would PRINT out turn by turn directions then find your way.
 
I was raised in the pre-GPS era and have no trouble finding my way using them. I have, however, conceded to technology purely because the moving map is more convenient than paper.

That said, I will no program a route and blindly follow it. Too many end up turning onto railroad tracks or wind up in a river. Garmin's aviation products are good but their ground level cartography sometime sucks. "What you mean this is a through road? The damned bridge was removed forty years ago."

Something a lot of drivers forget is that cars are strictly VFR machines. If you ain't lookin' out the windshield you're gonna get in trouble.
 
I'm sure there's much truth in the article. I'm sure the visual aspects of map reading and the cues you pick up when you actually have to look for landmarks strengthen the overall spatial mechanism of navigation. But I think that's only a small piece of the puzzle. I think it starts much sooner. I think we have a "navigation sense" that has to be exercised beginning in early childhood to reach its potential.

I'm one of those people who has an excellent "sense of direction," whether on foot, driving, sailing at sea, or flying. I use the GPS mainly for "last mile" navigation to unfamiliar destinations. On the open road, I just sort of know where I am if I looked at a map to plan the trip.

As for flying, my CFI always yelled at me for not paying much attention to the GPS, and I've never even turned one on in an ultralight. There's just no need for it around here. There's not enough fuel in an ultralight for me to get lost around here. (Besides, I spend enough time looking at screens.)

I honestly don't remember the last time I was lost no matter what mode of travel I was using. I just have a good sense of where I am and in which direction I'm pointed. But it's also true that I started navigating my way through life at a very young age. My mother took me to kindergarten on my first day, and from that point on, I was pretty much on my own. It was only a few blocks away, but I still had to navigate it: And navigation is navigation.

By the time I was 9 I was taking my 5-year-old brother to baseball games at Shea Stadium. We lived in Brooklyn. Shea Stadium was in Queens. Getting there required that we take three trains. Which three trains we took depended on a lot of factors, including whether the 7 train was running local or express.

On weekends, the city ran Express No. 7 trains from Times Square to Shea Stadium on game days. They only made a few stops, so it was a quick trip. But the weekday day games were much less popular, so the 7 would run local -- and taking the 7 Local from Times Square (the western terminus) to Shea Stadium (the next-to-last station on the eastern end) took forever. It just made too many stops.

If the 7 was running express, we'd take the RR Local from home, then pick up the N Express at DeKalb Avenue and take it to Times Square. Then we'd take the long and winding underground walk to the No. 7 platform and take the 7 Express to Shea. The whole trip would take a little over an hour.

When the 7 was running local, however, we'd take the RR train one stop to Fourth Avenue, then climb up the stairs and catch the F. We'd take the F all the way to Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, and then catch the 7 from there. Even though the F was also a Local for most of its line, it was still a lot faster (and a lot less boring) than taking the 7 Local for nearly its entire length.

Sometimes, of course, the TA would throw a monkey wrench in our plans. Trains would get delayed or re-routed, and we'd have to recalculate our route. No worries. Every subway station and every subway car had maps of the whole system posted in them. We'd just read the map and figure things out.

You have to remember that this was long before cell phones were invented, so we really were on our own. Of course, there were plenty of people around who would have helped us if we'd asked, but the assumption and expectation was that we would find our own way to Shea Stadium and back. Again, this was when I was 9 years old, with my 5-year-old brother in tow.

We also used to go to Coney Island and Riis Park by ourselves, although my mother never knew about those trips. She was always a little scared of water because she could barely swim, so we decided that it would be a very kind and considerate thing to spare her the stress of knowing that we were diving into the waves when we were supposed to be someplace else. :rolleyes:

I was also in the Cub Scouts (and later the Boy Scouts). Back then, small groups of Cubs Scouts and Boy Scouts were encouraged to take unescorted "Day Hikes" at the Boy Scout Camps. These trips were actually required for certain awards.

The only Boy Scout camp that was realistically accessible from Brooklyn without a car was Camp Pouch in Staten Island. To get there we'd have to take the RR train to Whitehall Street, take the ferry to Staten Island, and then take two buses to Camp Pouch. Then we'd have to make the actual hike, following the map and the written directions, and getting signatures from whatever scout leaders happened to be available at various points along the way. And then we'd make the trip back to Brooklyn.

That's the way things were back then. Nowadays it seems shocking, but back then it didn't elicit so much as a shrug. Kids traveled alone all the time. But that traveling involved navigation, and navigation is navigation. It's a skill whose fundamentals are the same whether you're walking, riding a bike, traveling on a train, sailing a ship, or flying an airplane. The earlier you start and the more you practice, the more it becomes second nature.

Rich
 
Last edited:
I wonder if Garmin buying Delorme will kill the awesome "red book" of topo maps for a state? I have multiples of that book for Colorado.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top