Plenty of ‘Misdirection Academy’ graduates on Bainbridge Island

Published 1:30 am Friday, February 14, 2025

Does this sound familiar to you? Distant friends call and say they’ll be in your area and want to visit. They ask for directions. Now, if I happen to be the one taking the call, I provide actual directions, including street names, approximate driving distances and helpful landmarks such as “the second off-ramp,” “the third stoplight” or “the fourth driveway on the left,” etc. But, if the woman who is my wife happens to be the one answering the phone, the poor caller gets plenty of information, but little of it will be useful in locating our house.

I certainly don’t mean to single Wendy out for criticism here. Giving unhelpful directions is only one of her many charming qualities. I know people who are graduates of the same school of giving directions, which I like to think of as The Misdirection Academy.

Most academy graduates start off by offering cardinal point-based directions, such as “we’re a mile north of Walt’s” or “two miles west of Eagle Harbor.” That kind of direction may make perfect sense to a friend who is already a resident of BI, but any resident probably already knows where we live and wouldn’t need to ask for directions.

But such directions can be problematic for a nonresident unless that person (a) happens to be in a car with a working compass; (b) happens to be at Walt’s or at Eagle Harbor; and (c) there happens to be a locatable, drivable road leading north from Walt’s or west from Eagle Harbor. Misdirection Academy graduates routinely refuse to use actual street names, preferring to call things “the main drag” or “the two-lane road that goes through the woods off to your left.”

Things really break down when they try to use landmarks. Wendy and her ilk are prone to advising someone to “turn left at the corner with the pretty yellow house with the cute blue awning” or “go past the house with the bed of crocuses in the front yard and the black lab in the back until you come to the brown Colonial where you’ll veer south.” Most of my distant friends wouldn’t know a crocus from a dog’s elbow, and think a “Colonial” is a golf tournament.

Another thing academy graduates are fond of is offering alternative driving directions to the same place, as in: “You can either take 305 to the street where the animal hospital is, turn right and head south until you pass the Thai restaurant, or you can take 305 to that Sports Road and bear west past Lauren’s school and Mary’s church and then turn right at St. Bartholomew’s.”

Speaking as a driver who is occasionally interested in getting from the known point where I am to the unknown place where I need to be, I don’t find alternative route information particularly helpful. I’d rather be given just one way even if it means I may hit traffic, recognizing that, with the exception of the ferry situation, “hitting traffic” means having to wait for three cars.

If time permits, I often draw a sketch map of BI and mail or fax it to potential visitors, with the location of our house and the simplest route for getting there highlighted. Wendy sometimes does the same thing, except that her maps are densely annotated with important information such as her favorite clothing shops, good restaurants, the homes of friends and other points of interest along the way.

All of that is undeniably fascinating, but hardly necessary to someone whose goal is to get to our house. I always write our address and telephone number on my maps. Wendy provides our address and home number, her work number, one or two cell numbers, her work schedule, a couple of e-mail addresses, and the phone numbers of several friends who might know where she is.

Wendy also offers tips on parking in the unlikely event that a poor pilgrim using one of her maps actually arrives at the desired destination. Wendy’s sketches are often more like bizarre social and cultural artifacts than maps, but then, for academy graduates, it is all about the journey rather than the destination. And sometimes, you really just can’t get here from there.

Tom Tyner writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper. This is from his “Classics” file.