Down the Road a Piece

In this age of GPS and Yahoo driving directions we are techno-spoiled. We seem incapable of finding our way down the highways that wind their way through this country. We type in a starting address on Yahoo and the address of our destination and hope we get actual directions. Then an arrow appears pointing to a vague location on a map or a pop up box telling us Yahoo has found a similar address, and asking, ‘is this one okay?’ We install a GPS (Global Positioning System) on our dashboards and expect to be dazzled by the omniscient genius in the box.

I had my first experience with a GPS a few years ago. I discovered a less than cordial side of this genius when I rode with my sister in our mom’s car to attack December’s post-holiday sales. The GPS was a gift to Mom from her granddaughter, the lawyer on Wall Street. If I’m giving too many details, I apologize. I’m from the South - our first words aren’t mommy and daddy, but “cousin, you know Uncle Rick’s boy, the one with the strange left eye?”

We heard the GPS directing every turn. The voice seemed to become increasingly annoyed as she repeated directions. My sister proceeded to yell at the audio guide: ”I’m going that way. Please shut up!” My reminder that there wasn’t really a tiny woman squeezed into that dashboard box fell on deaf ears.

A friend of mine, who travels on his job, refers to the synthesized voice as that “lady in the box”; but he uses a much less complimentary word for lady. Of course, this fellow is always happy to argue about directions with any woman - whether she’s in a computerized box or a clerk at a convenience store. At least with a GPS he can turn her off!

Growing up in a small, rural town, I’m familiar with another automobile positioning system: the DTRP, short for down the road a piece. When you stopped in at his country store asking for directions to the Myrtle Beach highway, my granddad didn’t rely on high-tech computer guidance systems.

He simply pointed and instructed, “You go to town, past Old Lady Allen’s place. You know, the house with the red flowers in the front yard" (as if you were familiar with those particular blossoms).

“You look for Stump Johnson’s gas station. There’s an ‘ol faded Coke sign right over the door. The highway you’re lookin’ for is just down the road a piece. You can’t miss it!”

Anyone who’s received equally colorful instructions knows that the DTRP’s reliability is spotty at best; that Coke sign might have blown down in the last thunderstorm and the red flowers might not be blooming. For those passing through, the homespun positioning system works on a very unscientific premise: drive until you get there.

If it’s a lady’s voice on the DTRP audio, it could be a shopkeeper’s wife yelling from the back of the store, “no, he’s telling you all wrong” or a grandma on Main Street who gestures down the road while regaling you with tales of the church bakeoff she just came from and how outstanding her coconut cake was.

In the South where I grew up, destinations are merely places where you aren’t. You’re either here or you’re down the road a piece. There’s no point in worrying how you get somewhere. I’ve encountered some fascinating characters while hopelessly lost on rural back roads. With the guidance of DTRP, you’ll get there eventually.