The GPS Blues

June 14, 2004

By Lyin' Judy Bridger

    I come up on this wingnut from up and around a bend while walking cross country up along the plateau close to the Mono Pass trail in Yosemite. He had something in his one hand that he was reading and he was walking in tight circles, circumference maybe a hundred feet or so.
    “Hold on!” says I. “What the  you-know-what?”
He didn’t stop circling, but he tipped the bill of his very nice-looking cap that maybe he’d picked up at Patagonia.
    “Keep on walking and reading, reading and walking,” advised me to him, “and you’ll cut a hole in the slope so deep that we’ll all fall in and the next thing you know we’ll be all the way down in Mammoth, and who can afford that?”
    He stopped.
     “Madam,” says he, “just where the freaking freak am I?”
    “Why, sir, you are in Yosemite National Park,” says I. “This is a beautiful place and  a magnet that draws all sorts of strange types to its granite tops, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
    “I am hopelessly lost,” he said, and with that, planted his heinieiney on the dust. He looked at the device he had in his hand, and then chucked it right over to me. 
    It was one of those Global Positioning System (GPS) devices of some kind or another.   
    “Nice rig,” says I, lying.
    “YES!” replies The Circler. “Cost me $482.”
    From his back pocket—and I could see that his trousers were top-of-the-line Prana—he pulled out a page from the Outside magazine gear guide, then read it to me.
    “‘Unlike many of its juice-sucking peers,’” he says, “‘this one keeps its brilliant, 256-color screen powered for an impressive 30 hours. With its fast processor, flipping through the brilliant, high-resolution screens is as easy as cruising around your Mac, and the USB simplifies connections.’”
    “So what?”
    “So they said it was easy,” says the yokel,  “so I didn’t read the directions and therefore didn’t know you had to move to make it work. For two days, when I wanted to figure out where I was, I’d stop and look and it’d say north was that way.” He pointed south.
    “So I’d start out and head that way,  and it’d say, no, north’s the other way! And then, I must say it let me down a little in the woods. It cost me 16 dDouble-A batteries to figure out that it works best in the open, which is why I’m here.”
    I looked at the screen.
    ““Backpacker ” magazine says it renders maps with ‘stunning sharpness,’” he said.
    “Stunning is what’s important,” I lied. “And west is thataway, which you can tell by the sun, which makes that way south, and if you kneow the peaks up here and hadve a tTopo map, you’d be back in your Hummer in a coupla hours instead of out here making a pathetic mess out of yourself.”
    “I didn’t bring a map,” he said.
    “Ah,” says I.
    “I didn’t bring a compass.”
    “Ah,” said I.
    Suddenly, all 256 colors on the screen disappeared.
    “What the freakin’ freak?” I says.
    “Batteries,’” he replied. “Got any dDouble-A’s?”
    I pulled my pack on and set out to leave. From my hip pocket I withdrew a tTopo map and casually looked at my compass, which I keep around my neck on a string. I looked at the skyline and found Mt. Dana and was on my way.
    “See ya, Bub,” says I, shaking my head.
    “How much did that compass cost you, anyway?” he said.