As I have now mentioned on several occasions, I just moved to a new town. The most direct and obvious way to get to my new house is and has been obstructed by a detour since my first viewing, through the exquisite torture of securing a mortgage during the AIRE (Astronomical Interest Rate Epoch), through inspection, closing, and moving. And now during actual living.
Town and trails are just over there, down Poncha, bang a right. But noooo. Go straight on Thing Road, left on J, left on Q, right on Wye, quick left on B, then C, then a frisky little U-turn and you’re almost there. Argh!
But this convoluted, labyrinthine route to the market, trails, hardware store is subtly building my mental map, layer upon dead-end layer. And according to the internets and the strange-talking, uber-verbose Wikipedia:
“By traveling between landmarks, route knowledge evolves, which can be seen as sequential information about the space which connects landmarks. Finally, increased familiarity with an environment allows the development of so-called survey knowledge, which integrates both landmarks and routes and relates it to a fixed coordinate system, i.e. in terms of metric relations and alignment to absolute categories like compass bearings etc. This results in abilities like taking shortcuts never taken before, for example.”
And if the above were said by someone interested in brevity and clarity vs intellectual one-upmanship, it would say:
“People smart. Learn good.”
I am relieved to find that for reasons that are unclear, I am far more naturally oriented here than in my last new town where I spent three years and could not discern north from south. That’s not true. I could discern it, I was just dead wrong—convinced that there was some grand conspiracy set up to thwart only me, one that involved the Colorado Department of Transportation and an elaborate road sign switch-a-roo.
To aide in my learning, at the end of every bike ride I deliberately attempt to make my Strava map look like it was tracking a crazed gerbil. The things one finds in this way are most often a delight. A pocket park. Random public art. The library. Sometimes they are things to be located, noted, and thereafter avoided.
Riding down a trail on the east side of town, I thought to myself “now where did those guys say the meth encampment was? I thought it was….Oh, right here. It is here. Head down, pedal faster.” Sometimes the mental map-making serves a more fundamental personal safety purpose.
Wikipedia goes on to say:
“When navigating a space, an observer can take on either a route perspective or a survey perspective. A route perspective is when the observer navigates in relation to their own body and location, whereas a survey perspective is a birds-eye view of the environment, in order to navigate a space…People can switch between the two seamlessly, and often without noticing.”
Mind blown. Some of you people can call up a birds-eye view of your environment? Really?!? Astounding. The previous example of north/south incompetence notwithstanding, I am pretty good at navigating by the seat of my pants, but this is always based on the building of a landmark library—a route perspective. To think that other brains levitate and behold the landscape from above is a jaw-dropping fascination to me, and one I did not know existed a mere two paragraphs ago.
But while I am a newbie in a new town trying to absorb my surroundings, I heartily recommend this approach in your town too, whether you’ve been there one month or 22 years. The bicycle was born to wander, and so were you. Team up, take a right, take a left, stay straight where you never have. Enrichment awaits. Or maybe a meth camp, but at least now you’ll know.
