I do a lot of fairly stupid things. Generally, I’m well-intentioned, so it’s not like I’m trying to be stupid…but intention isn’t worth shit when the outcome of what I’ve done is completely ridiculous. I swear, if ever I write a memoir, all it’s going to be is a compilation of all of the weird-ass situations that I’ve gotten myself into. Like the time I walked into my friend's house-- a house I'd been to many times--without knocking, set my purse down by the door, and then slowly realized I'd walked into the wrong house. (There were strangers sitting in the front room, staring at me…so I said “just kidding,” grabbed my purse and just walked back out the door without further ado. That’s how I handle shit.) Or the time I sucked laundry detergent out of my washing machine with a straw (read about that here). Or the (two) times that I got lost walking around my neighborhood.
Yeah, that’s right. I got lost in my neighborhood. Twice.
To be fair, we live in a strange little place. It’s a tiny housing development that currently has one large block with a circumference of .5 miles. This neighborhood has been carved out of the middle of the Nebraska countryside, bounded on three sides by farmland and pastures.
So we live in this weird (yet awesome. Don’t underestimate the awesome factor; I really love it out here) little enclave, and I like to go on walks. Especially in the Fall, when the combination of crisp air and golden sun is so incredibly alluring—so much so that I’d go as far as calling it delicious. If Fall could be bottled, I would drink it every day. I imagine it’d be tasty. (And no, Fall DOES NOT taste like a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. You are unoriginal.)
Anyway, where I was going with this was: walking the same half-mile block over and over can get boring, and also, people get tired of looking at you. So every now and again I get a little wanderlust and strive off of the pavement and into new territory.
There are paths where new houses are going up, and some of these paths connect us to another nearby housing development—so we often use this method to get from our development to the other. It involves walking through some brush and over some pounded dirt paths, and in some places, hopping a short barbed-wire fence. It’s really not bad. (Yeah, if you’re reading this and thinking that I’m trespassing at some point on these journeys, you’re probably right. Shame on me for trying to be fit and adventurous.) Those who are less directionally-challenged than me have no problems on these off-the-beat walks. I’ve been on walks with my neighbors, so I know it is possible to stray off of our block, see some things, and get back to our block, no problemo. One of my neighbor’s dogs is even able to accomplish this.
The problem (for me, anyway) is that one of the roads back from the nearby development ends abruptly, cut off by barricades and, if that wasn't enough of a deterrent, a soybean field. Yup, the road literally ends in a beanfield. Welcome to Nebraska, y’all.
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| Small roadblock between me and home. |
The first time I encountered this field, I was pretty sure that the route home was through it. So I navigated through the beanfield, and when I came out the other side of it, there were two roads—one going left, and one going right. I chose to go right. Long story short, by the time I consulted my phone to figure out where the hell I was, I was several miles away from home. I had to call my (non-impressed, directional superstar, born with an effing compass in his brain) husband to come pick me up. “Why didn’t you look at the sun?” he said. As if that works.
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| The road I ended up on. It's pretty, right? I mean, at least there was good scenery. And mile markers. |
My neighbors really do pity me, and so after I told them about how I got lost, they took me out to try to help me find the error of my ways. Under their tutelage I realized that my beanfield jaunt had been the CORRECT directional choice, but I should have turned left after I got through the field.
So you can imagine my excitement yesterday when I encountered the same beanfield.
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| This one! I know this place! |
(For the remainder of those post, I’m going to give you the insides of my head in boldface blue italics, like this, because it is through seeing what happens up in there that you can start to appreciate how truly frightening my decision-making can be. [Side note: Is anyone else stoked that I have a super-serious big girl job in which other people PAY ME to help them figure things out, including decision-making? If you’re not jazzed about this, you should be.])
Oh yes, this field! I know what to do here. Walk through the field, turn LEFT, and I’m home free.
But then I noticed that the field, while dry, was still unharvested. This means that there were grasshoppers everywhere, and I hate grasshoppers. I wasn’t in the mood for dealing with their crunchy, sassy little asses. As I surveyed the field, I noticed that there was a large swath around its perimeter that had been cut down.
Oh, someone has cleared a path for the construction guys, so they can drive their equipment through this field. If I walk on it in this direction, I will hit a road that I know, and I know this because I see a big cement silo that I’ve walked by before. Yup, that’s the ticket!
So I started down the cut-down path. I had some indie station playing in my earbuds and was walking in time to a song. I turned a bend and this allowed me to see further up the path—and what I saw was movement. One…no, two…figures.
Must be someone from the neighborhood walking their dog. Which means I’m on the right track.
More walking. More fiddling with my phone, in an attempt to find a non-sucky song. I was getting closer to the person and his/her dog on the trail.
Wait, that dog is really huge. Like, really, really huge. Is that a mastiff? No one in the neighborhood has a mastiff. Or a great dane. Hmm, this doesn’t make sense, this is weird, maybe if I just squint hard enough I’ll be able to see…Oh Good Lord, that’s a DEER. And that person walking the dog is ANOTHER DEER.
You don't realize how big deer are until you're really close to them.
Do male deer ever charge at people? Who’s more scared, me or them? Do they feel safety in numbers?
I’ve had staredowns with animals before, but none who were bigger than a breadbasket (if you really insist on knowing, previous staredowns have mostly with cats and dogs and once with a mouse while I was pregnant, and coincidentally, naked. Which is another GREAT story). Thus, I found this intense eye contact to be mildly unsettling. The deer stopped moving and went still, probably having a similarly shocking experience to what I was having (“Oh, there’s something big coming, probably another deer like us, maybe we can hang out, eat some soybeans and stuff…oh wait, no, it’s making way too much noise and the hair is all wrong, that’s an EFFING HUMAN and THEY KILLED BAMBI’S MOM so RUN.”)
They ran. I didn’t get my camera out in time to document this, but man do I wish I would have. They were probably 100 meters away from me when they bolted. And the reason I know this distance is because I remember running 100 meter dashes in junior high track. Which when I ran it looked less like a dash and more like a medium-paced trudge, because I’m slow and because starting blocks confuse the shit out of me. But, it was the shortest distance race that we ran so it was my favorite. Because less is better when it comes to running.
Which is, weirdly, a great segue into what happened next.
The deer-staredown incident behind me, I continued down the path. The indie song playing involved a woman singing a plea for someone not to leave her, and I was thinking about how this is yet another pathetic cog in the anti-feminist wheel of destruction that is our modern music industry. If I hadn’t been listening to music and thinking so hard, I might have seen (or heard) the next thing coming.
Which was a combine.
For you city folk reading this, a combine is a very large piece of farm machinery, used to harvest both corn, and in this case, soybeans. It’s like a ginormous tractor with a rotating head (when it’s cutting beans at least. The corn head is spiky and doesn’t rotate at all. But I digress). Here’s what they look like:
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| With a beanhead, doin' work. |
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| Would you want to see this coming at you? I don't think so. |
I’m a pseudo-farm kid. Meaning that my dad was a farmer but we lived “In town,” and by “in town” I mean in a village of 700 people and in a house that was two blocks away from a cornfield on three sides. In any case, I’m farm kid enough to be appropriately scared of being on foot in the same field as a combine. I’ve seen what a bean head can do to a deer, and it ain’t pretty. (Note: The staredown deer from this story did not, to my knowledge, die by beanhead. The poor mangled deer I’m referencing was something I saw another time, because remember, my dad is a farmer and encounters all kinds of gruesome shit. Which you might not expect, depending on how much you know about farming, but which is absolutely true.)
Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit. Is this seriously the last song I’m going to hear before I die? THIS?
And at this point I was running. I mean, as soon as I saw the combine, it was off to the races. (Which you know from above treatises could not possibly have been THAT fast, but rather, as fast as a slow girl can go.) Now, granted, the above set of thoughts about my impending death was admittedly a bit histrionic, as the combine was pretty far in the distance and I wasn’t even sure it was coming towards me at that moment. Didn’t matter, though—I’m pretty sure that a moving combine moves faster than me, and so if there was ANY chance it was headed my way, I wanted out.
Ooohh…so that “path that was cleared for construction” was a swath of harvested field IN A FIELD BEING CURRENTLY HARVESTED, you dumbass.
My feet found pavement relatively quickly. I was safe. The only thing left at stake was my pride, which I could have totally preserved if I wouldn’t have decided to go ahead and post this whole debacle on the interwebs. Who needs dignity when you can completely (and intentionally) embarrass yourself in front of all of your friends, and probably even some people you don’t know? Pride is totally overrated.
You might be pleased to know that once I doubled back the way that I came, I easily found my way home—which is a step up from the first time I got lost. Also, I wasn't even gone that long: the whole 3.75 mile round-trip ordeal only took about an hour. SO THERE.
And that, my friends, is the story of the second time I got lost in my neighborhood. Look for it in my upcoming debut memoir, Good at school, bad at life: How having a PhD did not save me from myself.
