Getting Lost

Peter Kalu

Getting lost is an intrinsic part of becoming an adult. So much so, that the British have something called ‘The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award’ in which they take their older children into the countryside and abandon them without maps or phones confident that, though lost, they will ultimately find their way home. The scheme is highly successful, with no more than three children per thousand not finding their way back unassisted. Trust your instincts, the scheme advises, channel your inner homing pigeon.

So. You are lost. What to do? Advice has been available for millennia, boiled down in Psalm 137, as preached by Mr Bob Marley and his Wailers who faithfully sang: ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song’’ (i.e. be happy) ‘in a strange land’ (i.e. when lost). The advice from 137 is to find a river (Babylon in the advice but any river will do), sit down on the banks there, and weep. There you go. Weep. Accept your situation, deal with your issues about being lost. And only then – once you have confronted your grief and processed it – will you find your song: find happiness in your new circumstances.

This essay has taken a wrong turn

I was wind-surfing a lake in Milwaukee. The sun was blazing, the surfboard responsive, the sail full. I sped across the waters in a supreme demonstration of my new surfing skills. Except I couldn’t figure out how to sail into the wind as opposed to away from it. Soon, my original launch point on the shore was a speck, then nothing. The sun’s rays beat down on me oppressively, my heart sank. My 20-year-old body lay down on the board and wept. I was lost. Through my wailing, I heard a shout. I looked up. A grey-haired couple in a pedalo were approaching. They spoke American but we were able to communicate, and they towed me behind their pedalo all the way back across the lake to my original starting point. There, my blessed friends suppressed their mirth at the ignominy of my arrival; they clasped me to their chests, fed me beers to arrest my dehydration and we sang with joy, toasting the grey couple who joined us in our celebratory jig.

This essay is lost

The maths exam had come at the end of a week of exams, and I was flummoxed. Every route I took failed to solve the problem. My mind became fevered. There had to be a key. Some formula I had forgotten, or a correspondence I was missing. Maybe turning the problem upside down would help. Or look at it as if into a mirror. Yes, the mirror, where everything is still there, but flipped. This was the way through, and out, surely? I wrote my answer down, checked it as best I could. I left my paper on the exam desk and walked out of the hallowed exam hall, silently praying to the Exam Gods.

I’m with E in Manchester and we’re lost. She laughs. ‘I so love getting lost with you,’ she says, ‘it’s divine.’ We fall into a bar, then a cafe, and meet a group of Senegalese students heading to an international swimming gala; we learn from them the Dakar slang for ‘have a great time’, then, as the sun sets, we overhear the Italian cafe owner’s claim that his is the only authentic Genoese cooking in the city.

Now I’m with D in Leeds. He’s thunder-faced as he realises we have driven two miles into a dead end. He blames the information we received, the false position of the sun, the absence of distinctive landmarks and, finally, me, the incompetent driver. We retrace our steps in silence. He vows never again to travel with me.

This essay is spinning its wheels

My brother is a racing pigeon with three compasses in his head, like migrating birds have, each compass finely calibrated by his years as a lorry driver. I, on the other hand, am expert at getting lost.

Getting lost while driving in forested Derbyshire countryside in the pitch dark in Biblical rain in a fifteen-year-old Ford Focus with my fifteen-year-old in the passenger seat is up there at the top end of the list of lost, fun things to do. To screams and laughter, I took a second wrong turn to add to the first. The road tapered into a bramble-hemmed track, broad enough – just – for the car. There are no streetlights on the track, no spill of house lights, no moonlight, only my Ford Focus’s weak headlights picking stuff out myopically: mud, bushes, trees, other green stuff, either side of us. Do we carry on? I ask. Yes! Yes! shouts teen dawta. The engine sputters but sounds game. On we go. The front wheels churn and slide. Branches lash the windscreen. The suspension heaves. We bounce across holes. It’s a horror movie, but we’re laughing. The driver in me knows that if this is a dead end, I’m going to have to reverse though this twisting forest track and the odds will be against me, especially with the reverse light being only intermittently functioning. But I’m infected with dawta’s teen spirit and keep going, thinking, what’s the worst that can happen? – this is the Peak District, not the end of the world, the RAC can tow me. We wail a mix of delight and disappointment when the track widens, and a streetlight veers up: we are back in civilisation.

The West’s plundered wealth rests on the concept of folk being lost. Finders-keepers was the principle on which all colonialism was built. To no avail did local populations remonstrate, ‘we’re not lost, thank you, and have no need for you to find or discover us, we’re fully self-discovered and have no further needs, though thanks for passing by!’ Not that the Colonials had any three-compass brilliance at getting around. Columbus got lost – hence his designation of the Caribbean as the (West) Indies. Dr Livingstone was lost for so long they sent Dr Stanley to find him. Stanley’s famous line ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ had its end redacted, I suspect. The line probably continued, 

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ 

‘You won’t believe what I’ve seen.’  

‘Go ahead, tell me…’

I experience a chain of memory associations. The tombstone in an overgrown Whitehaven cemetery that commemorates a boy ‘lost overboard at the Bight of Benin.’ J.M.W. Turner’s oil painting of The Zong, the slave ship from which enslaved Africans were thrown overboard – ‘lost’ in the language of the owner’s attempted insurance fraud. The thought that even now, unless careful, you can still drown in the seas of whiteness.

A dream. I’m on a bicycle trying to get home, and the bicycle has no chain so I’m not moving. Suddenly, the bicycle is a tandem and Bob Marley is pedalling with me, as well as the three Wailers, and Dr Livingstone, and dawta, and we’re zooming along. There’s a crowd, like during the Tour De France. I wave to them. I think they’re waving back, but realise that they’re jeering at us, shouting, ‘Get lost! Get lost!’ We pedal on, merrily, and keep waving.

This essay has arrived at an unexpected ending