The ‘Golden Age’ of getting lost is officially over
You may love your GPS, but getting lost was kind of cool
In the age of GPS, we’re never really lost. With tracking devices, cell phones, and nearly ubiquitous internet access, we pretty much always know where we are — and where we’re going. Uber drivers need no knowledge of a city or an atlas in their glove compartment. Planning a road trip requires no stockpiling of maps, no visit to the AAA office in your area.
The idea of getting lost has always had a certain romance to it. In the Golden Age of the American road trip, it was considered an essential part of the process, integral to the experience. The thing is, getting lost was always a kind of luxury — one only made possible by the development of a large, clean, smooth national road system, populated by roadside amenities like motels and Holiday Inns, gas stations and diners, AAA and Rand McNally.
In the early days of cross-country travel by automobile, getting lost could mean, well, getting in big, big trouble. It was something to be avoided at all costs. Because roads looked like this:
And going off them looked like this:
The early days of the road trip forced drivers to be prepared for these types of events and far worse. At the time of the first road trips, “American roads were extremely primitive — fewer than 150 miles nationwide were even paved. There were no road signs, road numbers or gas stations, and automobiles were extremely prone to breakdowns.”
Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall Crocker were the first to drive across the country in 1903, in a “gleaming cherry red Winton.” In what was typical of road travel at the time, their trip was punctuated by one disaster after another: wrong turns, breakdowns, clogged oil lines, supplies that came to them via stage coach. One such breakdown stranded them in the Oregon desert for eight days; they later got lost in the Wyoming Badlands for 36 hours without any food. These kinds of hazards of getting lost are why those who set off on a large road trip in the early days “…hauled along ropes, blocks and tackle, axes, sleeping bags, water bags, spades, camps stoves, compasses, barometers, thermometers, cyclometers, first aid kits, rubber ponchos, tire chains, pith helmets, assorted spare parts, and sufficient firearms to launch a small insurrection… an array of equipment that added ‘four or five hundred pounds alone to the weight of the fully loaded automobile.’”
Road maps like this one gave detailed instructions about which roads to take, and what their conditions were:
As interstate roads were developed, gasoline rationing ended, the economy soared after World War II, and motels and gas stations began to dot the landscape, Americans took to the road in droves and the idea of the family road trip became commonplace; the Ford Motor Company even promoted its sedans as “America’s schoolhouse on wheels.”
The 1950s and 1960s saw the beginning of the mythology of the road as adventure, romanticizing its unknown nature, exploration, and the idea of the unexpected. Scholars have described this as “the archetypal road myth. Its main motif is the traveler, who after getting in touch with the unknown in his wanderings, experiences a mythological and ontological shift.” Families even started to be able to have air conditioning in cars — in its earliest days in the 1960s, as Susan Session Rugh describes, “there was this cardboard box you put dry ice in and hung in the window.”
As the road trip got more and more comfortable, it was also mythologized further as a kind of wandering journey of exploration. This made its way into the popular imagination through works of art like Kerouac’s On the Road, the cult classic film Easy Rider, or through Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, who were swilling LSD-laced Kool-Aid in their bus.
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
Today, that kind of freewheeling, follow the road exploration once again isn’t possible. If we want to get lost, we have to plan to; articles advise us on “How to Get Lost on Purpose,” and yes, there’s even an app for that.
The “Golden Age” of getting lost is officially over.
