The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (23 page)

Pastor Mike thinks the problems persist because of "an attitude that because this is a reservation we're untouchable, so we can do whatever we damn well please and there are going to be no consequences." He tells his congregation, "Our problem isn't employment; it's employability." I asked him if he thought the Shinnecocks should have their own tribal police force once they've gained federal recognition, and he laughed. "Some folks would say fine, but, see, I know us," he said. "I know us. And I wouldn't trust nobody with a gun."

 

One day this fall, Lynn Malerba, the first female chief of the Mohegans, spent the morning meeting with Connecticut's gubernatorial candidates, and then visited her parents for coffee at the retirement home that her tribe built with casino profits. "There's a gym downstairs, and a Wii," Malerba said, walking through the bright entry hall. Malerba's mother showed me her apartment: the laundry room, the two bathrooms and bedrooms, and the view of a courtyard of well-tended rhododendrons and hostas. In the eighties, she was among a group of Mohegans who pooled their money to pay for the tribe's only telephone: "We hooked it up in the church closet!"

Malerba drove to the Mohegans' burial grounds, past dozens of kids holding tennis racquets and baseball bats, on their way to camp—which the tribe pays for, along with day care for the children of its members and employees. Nearby is a huge glass building, overlooking miles of countryside, that the Mohegans are erecting to house their government and cultural offices. At the tribal museum, a team is working on reconstructing the Mohegan language. The wealth generated by Mohegan Sun pays for the tribe's health care and college scholarships, too, and for assistance to first-time homeowners. Each tribe member also gets a cash payment; Malerba told me that the amount was "a private family matter."

Malerba said that she hoped the Shinnecocks succeeded in opening a casino, even if it hurt her business. "We're ten miles away from the Pequots, and we've been able to coexist," she said. "I could never take that philosophical stance, to fight another tribe. Wouldn't that be disingenuous to say that we as tribal nations are all one, and to then work aggressively against a tribe achieving economic independence as we have been able to do?"

The Mohegan nation is like a tiny Scandinavian country—a peaceable kingdom where the young are educated, the old are cared for, and everyone has help with medical care and housing. "Casinos are great in terms of an economic engine and if the revenues are provided for good purposes," Malerba said. She sounded just one cautionary note. "Whether tribes have a business or not, you always have to be really careful about how you choose your leaders," she said.

 

This fall, a judge dismissed the Connecticut Coalition's petition, and the Shinnecocks became the five-hundred-and-sixty-fifth federally recognized tribe. Gumbs e-mailed me, "This Nation of people will always remember October 1st, 2010, as our independence day," and signed off with a celebratory "Ah! Ho!" The tribe can begin construction on a casino as soon as it negotiates a compact with the state. Until then, the annual powwow remains the Shinnecocks' only source of tribal income.

At one difficult point in the nineties, the powwow was rained out two years in a row, and all services had to be suspended owing to lack of funds. But this year the weather was crisp and bright, and there was a line of cars along Montauk Highway waiting to turn onto the reservation. On the powwow grounds, a cleared field behind the Community Center, thousands of people shopped for wampum jewelry and stood in line for succotash and fry bread while they waited to watch the traditional dancers and drummers. Pastor Mike sold soda with the medicine man, a friend of his.

Pastor Mike introduced me to his aunt, who wore a deer-hide dress and a necklace of shells. She told me that in the early fifties the Great Cove Realty Company tried to build a subdivision on a strip of the reservation. Great Cove got as far as pouring foundations before the trustees, including her husband, persuaded the district attorney to intercede, and the developers were forced to abandon the project. The memory of it pleased her. "My husband worked in a restaurant kitchen, and one night the Great Cove guy came in drunk and said, 'I'm going to kill that savage!'" she recalled. " Those were the kinds of things that happened. It sounds strange, but we were poor but happy—all one big family, maybe four hundred of us." She wrinkled her nose. "Now they're out for money. Money is the root of all evil."

Lance Gumbs, Gordell Wright, and the third trustee, Randy King, wore eagle-feather headdresses, pelts, and beaded, purple-fringed tunics, as they led a procession of Indians from across the Northeast. A representative from the Mashantucket Pequots stood just behind Gumbs; war had apparently been averted. As people chanted and danced for hours, Harriett Crippen Gumbs, Lance's mother, sat selling silver jewelry and children's tomahawks, next to the snow cone stand. Despite the economic transformation that a casino would likely bring, she did not think federal recognition was going to change anything. "You've got to know the white man wants this reservation," Crippen Gumbs said, her white hair shooting out from under a baseball cap. "You know what their excuse would be now?" she asked, and leaned in close over her jewelry counter. "'You've intermarried too much. You're no longer Indian.' Well, who the hell are we?"

FROM
Colorado Review

T
HE FIRST PAGE
of the
Orienteering: Sport of a Lifetime
brochure reads: "With a map and compass in hand, you head into the woods. It is a beautiful day and you are about to start off on an adventure: Orienteering." At least I think that's what it says. I can hardly read the text, soggy from rain dripping from the looming trees surrounding us.

My father and I stand at the edge of the woods in a Maryland state park at noon on a Sunday, waiting to begin our day of orienteering in an effort to improve, or at least test, our sense of direction. We look awkwardly at the other people waiting, a couple dozen of them chatting as though they already know one another and wearing very serious athletic gear. Our own jeans will be wet and mud covered by the end of the day.

 

Perhaps irrationally, I sometimes become terrified by the idea that when the world ends and I have to flee my city, my GPS may not be charged. When my father bought it for me as a gift a few years back, I quickly became dependent on it in the same way I rely upon my eyeglasses or electricity. That little screen probably saves me about forty cumulative hours a year that would otherwise be spent driving around, lost.

My whole life, I've been going in circles. While the GPS seems like it's solving this problem, I'm pretty sure it's setting me up for a fall. I've heard several friends with an impeccable sense of direction say they can no longer tell north from south because they've become too dependent on the TomTom or the Garmin stuck to their dashboard. If these people, previously capable of taking on the role of navigator on road trips, can't figure out which direction to flee from the burning city when the time comes, I have to wonder what will become of me.

For years I have been under the impression that I was a lost cause, spatially. I can't read maps. I don't know which direction is which (although in the past couple of years I've started, in a sad, proud way, noting east or west when the sun is low, clearly on its way up or down). I can drive the same route a dozen times before I know which turn is mine. This makes me feel pathetic and, again, a little bit scared about how incapable I am.

As any self-help book will tell you, the first step is to understand your handicaps. I've found that this is true whether I'm reading to improve my relationship, reduce my carbohydrate intake, or assert myself in the workplace. I worry that sense of direction is different, though—maybe because there's less out there to understand. It's an elusive skill. Scientists all over the world are interested in it, but very few have come up with anything definitive to explain it, much less to help us learn our way out.
It's about gravitational pull
, some say. Or,
It's all about cell orientation in the brain.
These statements mean nothing to me, which is all right, because they're still up for debate in the scientific community. For all of the research that's been done, sense of direction is still a pretty abstract concept. What most scientists do agree on is this: on a super-simplified level, the brain needs three types of information to help us find our way. First, it needs to know where we are currently. Second, it needs to know the direction we're heading. And third, the brain needs to calibrate our "current movement state" in relation to our goal destination. (This is the exact same process that a GPS follows, incidentally, if we're breaking things down to a fifth-grade level.) Essentially, the process continually asks, "Are we going the right way?" A brain (or an impressive, expensive piece of electronic equipment) with all of these bits of information can provide an answer.

Terminology is important when discussing anything complicated, but when it comes to sense of direction, we tend to use terms interchangeably, but incorrectly. Often sense of direction gets mixed up with
wayfinding
, which actually refers to finding one's way on the open ocean, using a combination of the sun, stars, and ocean swells.
Navigation
is another term that does not, it turns out, mean the same thing as sense of direction. Although it's closer than wayfinding, navigation technically refers to finding one's way using electronic aids—like a GPS.
Pilotage
is used less often, but still seeps into articles and conversations. This term, which originated in the 1570s, actually means finding one's way with the use of recognizable landmarks—such as recalling a turn by the familiar coffee shop on the corner.

The terminology is disorienting, but the words matter less than the goal. I don't need to run my vessel back to shore. I'd just like to be able to get to my brother's condo without the directions I printed a year ago, secretly stored in the glove box and referenced every trip.

With this simple goal in mind, I began taking steps to improve my non-GPS-aided sense of direction. As I researched ways to improve, I came across several websites on orienteering, a "sport" in which participants race around in the wilderness with maps and compasses, trying to be the first to find a series of flag markers. This seemed less like a sport and more like hell, but it had the potential to be helpful.

Because my dad seems to know everything I don't, I called him to talk about it.

"Orienteering? Never heard of it," he told me.

I told him what I could from my cobbled reading and about my improvement goals. My dad is quick to tease me about my worthless sense of direction, although I've always suspected that his own is not too much better, that he is simply quieter about it.

"So, that's about it," I said. "All these nonprofit orienteering clubs host events in parks scattered all over the world. They're just open—anyone can come, and you pay something small, like ten or twelve dollars, to join for the day."

"Huh," he said. "I'm in. When are we going?"

I envisioned my father and myself, covered in dirt and bits of bark, lost in the woods with flags tucked into our belts. The image was only slightly less terrifying than imagining myself alone in the same situation.

A few weeks later, armed with a map of the park, directions from the Quantico Orienteering Club's website,
and
a GPS, we set off.

 

Here's the truth: on the way to the park, we got lost. We each tried to blow it off, claiming poor mapmaking and a lack of updates for the GPS software, but we knew it said something more about us.

As my father drove in circles, I read out loud from the "Beginner's Instruction" I'd printed from the website.

"
The goal is to find numbered 'controls,' in numerical order, in the fastest time possible ... go over your clue sheet for a description of features, list of control codes ... a triangle is the start (and usually the finish too) and circles highlight features.
Are you getting any of this?" I asked.

"No," he answered, his eyes on the wet road.

I continued: "
White equals normal forest, which is different from USGS maps...
What are they even talking about?"

"I have no idea," he said.

 

Although research doesn't point to sense of direction as a hereditary skill, anecdotal evidence seems to. Little definitive work (the word
definitive
being key here) has been done on the "born with" versus "acquired" nature of directional sense. What has been determined is that how a person
perceives
his or her directional capabilities is usually pretty accurate. Those who think they have a good sense of direction are usually right, and those who know they can't find their way back from the bathroom without a scale map know their limits as well. When people are asked to rate their directional sense and then find their way, the correlation is more or less dead-on in terms of who gets lost.

What this means practically is this: You've gone astray on a road trip with two people. One claims to have a good sense of direction and one claims to lack it. However, they both think they know the way. One says left and one says right. Open the car door and push the one with no sense of direction out onto the road.

Most people admit to realizing their poor sense of direction when they began driving. For years I tried to convince myself that my constant confusion was chance, but eventually, I had to give up the lie. Just after graduating from college, one Sunday afternoon I found myself performing a "practice" drive on Interstate 95 in northern Virginia the day before a job interview. I lived an hour and a half from the location (I planned to move if offered the job). I-95 is known to be one of those highways that are somehow packed at all hours, every day, and I didn't trust myself to find the office under pressure, despite the fact that it was just off the highway. So, instead, I spent Sunday plotting out my course, sitting in traffic, and searching the empty building for the entrance. The day was exhausting, but worth it as I pictured myself lost without the dry run, calling my interviewers, and sobbing on the side of the road, which I suspected was less acceptable than the similar calls I often make to my father. I got the job and consulted my written directions every day for months as I commuted.