The meaning of lost

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Dec. 14, 2008 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. This is based on another piece I recorded for KAXE this year.

The meaning of lost
By Aaron J. Brown

We modern folks tend to look at getting lost the way ancient folks looked at the universe. While we are lost, we are the center; everything else revolves around us. I think about times I was lost. There was the time my friend and I got lost in the woods behind my house and had to hike out to the highway following the power lines. There was the time I was on a long distance bike ride and what I thought was a short cut turned into a 40-mile, leg-straining trail of tears back to the house. But these examples involve knowing where you want to be, just not how to get there.

There exists, however, a much more difficult way to get lost: knowing where you are, but not knowing what you’re looking for. The year before we got married, my wife Christina and I drove to Illinois to visit her family. We were only a half hour away from a train terminal that was just one hour’s ride from Chicago, so on a slow day we decided to spend a day in Carl Sandburg’s city of broad shoulders.

When the day began, we knew where we were going (Chicago) and what we would do when we got there (Chicago things). Riding the train into the city, we passed a labyrinth of suburbs with vague names and cookie cutter architecture. A vacationing family with multiple small children melted down into a screaming, pulsing ball of anger and disappointment, which, at the time, seemed funny to us. Now, with three kids of our own, I can say it’s much better to be on the outside looking in. The entertainment gave us little time to consider what we might do when we stepped onto the platform in Chicago. When that moment arrived, we northern rustics stepped into a buzzing hub of human activity, gawked upward at the tall buildings, signaling the panhandlers that fresh meat had arrived downtown.

That moment was as good as it would get for us that day. See, I had been to Chicago a couple times. Once I went with my high school band to play at a festival, but that time we were escorted around by a sprightly older tour guide named Birdie. She taught us how to gouge out the eyes of an attacker using your keys on the first day and after that we just did what we were told. The other time I went with my college friends who were Chicago suburbanites familiar with the city. We had browsed downtown and the Navy Pier, went up the Hancock building and later found a cool two-story bookstore. In retrospect, that was the experience I had hoped to recreate with Christina.

This time, however, I was supposed to be the expert. I was not only supposed to know where things were, which I vaguely did, but what we should be doing. What do you do in Chicago? It was too cloudy and time consuming to go up the tall buildings. So I fixated on that book store, the book store I had seen with my friends. I had a distinct image of it and assumed that, when we found it, we’d be happy … the way I was happy to find it before. What followed was three miles of walking past countless things we couldn’t afford or lacked time to see. Christina wanted a quintessential Chicago experience. I was quitting smoking at the time and wanted a cigarette. Meantime, I didn’t really know anything about Chicago. As our time before our train home waned, words were exchanged. It wasn’t our first fight, or our worst, but it’s on the album. To this day our family photo collection shows two panoramic shots taken that day. Both are strikingly framed by the iconic Chicago Sun-Times building along the river. In one you see Christina scowling through an attempted smile and in the other you see me grimacing.

These pictures remind us that knowing what you want is more important than knowing how to get there.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Read more or contact him at his blog, MinnesotaBrown.com. His new book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” is out now.