SAL

After a few weeks in Knoxville, we are feeling a bit more settled (didn't quite make it to the Smoky Mountains yet, so no post for that). It has been quite an adjustment finding our way around here, though. Particularly for someone as directionally and geographically challenged as myself. We had been quite complacent back in Utah, what with its nice grid system. Everything was so tidy; it was comforting to know that (as a general rule) 100 South would be three blocks away from 400 South, and if you ever got really disoriented, the giant Rocky Mountains  were always to the east. For the most part streets run in straight lines, intersecting at neat perpendicular intersections. Generally, there is only one freeway to contend with--good old I-15 running north to south connecting the dots of towns lining the Wasatch Front. If you wanted to get fancy, you could mess around with 1-80 or the 215 up around Salt Lake, with chances to go east or west on the "belt route." but for the most part we are pretty simple in our needs and I-15 suited us fine.

Perhaps I am being overly nostalgic for my former home in the Rockies and the confidence I had finding my way around. Knoxville is a whole other story. Streets seem to have a different temperament here. The roads are quite narrow (I'm still not excited about Brady's idea for riding his bike to work) with no shoulder to speak of for the most part. There's so much foliage you can't see the next intersection sometimes. The streets curve dramatically in places and change names with a fickleness I find highly unnecessary. The mile or so we take one road to the freeway changes names three times within that mile. There are more freeways than I am probably even aware of yet, and it seems that once we enter one we have to merge to another going a different direction and then immediately exit. Now, there are some upsides to this, lest anyone in Knoxville feel the need to defend this great city's transit plans. Traffic does seem to flow rather smoothly on all these freeways; I have yet to be stuck in a crawl of traffic that sometimes plagues the solitary I-15. So I think it's a system that works, just not one I have figured out yet.

That's where SAL comes in. She is the GPS generously donated to our Knoxville adventure by our good friend Daniel (who, it should also be noted, has impeccable taste in ginger-flavored soda). We (or at least I) would be completely lost without this wonderful device. Even when we get completely turned around, somehow SAL pulls us through. She was the only way I would have gone anywhere the week Brady was in Toronto for the APA conference (considering that first "A" stands for "American," I think I'm not the only one facing geographical challenges).

But there can be downsides to using SAL. We gave her that name because of her "voice." She sounds like the female counterpart to HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Oddyssey. She has that computery, sometimes-sounds-like-she's-playing-a-bad-game-of-"MadGab"-in-her-pronunciations voice, but it always sounds a little condescending. It's quite similar to the voice of the self-check registers at grocery stores, but somehow that voice always sounds a little happier about our transactions, almost congratulatory of my self-sufficiency in checking and bagging my own groceries.

With SAL, though, sometimes I can almost hear a weary sigh when I opt to vary from her route (though to my credit, she does get a little confused about freeway ramps). And when I do get somewhere, she tells me several times--"You are approaching your destination . . . your destination is on the right"--over and over, as if to say, "Are you getting this? You've gone this route before, you know. You really should know how to do this by now . . ."

I am torn about my reliance on this technology. I need SAL, and sometimes I think she knows it. One time after dropping Brady off at work, she led me astray. I punched the "Take Me Home" button, and she decided to go a different route than we came. But I trusted her. Then, she told me to "keep to the right" when the freeway was about to split and merge onto one of the other freeways. She even had little orange arrows pointing me there. I did exactly as she said. Exactly. Then she told me to exit at number 386. There was no 386. There was on the freeway I had just departed from, the one the little orange arrows pointed me away from. But not where I was then. I felt betrayed. I wanted to yell at SAL for somehow putting me en route to North Carolina instead of my apartment. She calmly (though I think a little grudgingly) recalculated the route and I eventually found familiar territory and got home.

But I wouldn't have been surprised if she had somehow overtaken the powersteering, locked all the doors and windows and softly scolded, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave," and drove on.