Far from the desert, it all began in the tropical jungle on the crater of an active volcano.
This tale starts, as many such tales do, with a shortcut. It was 2015, four of us were heading back from the crater on a trail when SOMEONE (not looking at anyone in particular SIMEON) saw what looked like a shortcut up to the next switchback. So he left the trail and I joined him. It didn’t seem like a terrible idea, but the way rapidly became nearly vertical, so instead of hiking we were hauling ourselves up using trees and roots.
And we went on… and on… And there was no path switchback in sight. That didn’t actually mean much – the underbrush was dense enough you could only see a few feet in any direction, which was a great way to dangle the carrot and make us want to go just a bit further rather than turn back… Just a bit more… And a bit more…
Going back was actually going to be quite difficult; the banks and mossy walls were slippery, we were both wearing packs making it harder to squeeze through the flora, and we had worked hard and come a long way, gaining a lot of height.
We called out to the others in hopes the switchback was near. No reply. Sims went to call Kora by phone, pulled out his phone, and noticed it was Kora’s phone… And he also had his phone. Oops.
So I tried calling Jaime. Signal reception was nearly nothing, but we barely connected. I found out that they weren’t even on the path any more; they had reached the trailhead. Hmm. Our shortcut had failed spectacularly. I told them that we were either in the process of finding our way out or dying, so wait up for us, but I didn’t know how much she heard because at some point the reception failed and the call dropped.
GPS wouldn’t work down in the undergrowth under the thick canopy, so first I found a small break in the canopy, then consulted the satellites. According to Google maps, I was standing on the path. I was not standing on the path.
We explored a bit more, and I concluded that Google maps was wrong. I grew up with maps and compasses, but this was a new kind of navigational puzzle; the digital map was accurate in shape but wrong in coordinates. (My guess was that Google’s aerial-distortion-correction algorithm had drifted due to having no visible reference points, just endless jungle green.) The GPS was accurate in coordinates while the map wasn’t, thus gave the wrong position on the map by an unknown amount. But this could be correcting using the regular pre-GPS methods.
Simeon wanted to keep looking for the path, but looking at the map I thought we were better off striking off in another direction entirely, towards a road that was further away according to the map. The extra distance was outweighed in my opinion because the road could not be missed or overshot, the terrain was easier in that direction, and my best estimation for the mystery offset of the map, if correct, would mean the path was very difficult to get to from where we were. So I convinced Simeon to abandon the search for the path, and we set off on a new course through the forest using old-school compass bearings.
Along the way, Simeon surprised some turkeys, and the terrain got easier, and no-one died of malaria, and we found the road right where I expected it to be! That put us a fair way from trailhead – much further than if we had not taken our shortcut – but a clear way to get there. So we jogged back to the others (who were still waiting) and they were completely unimpressed with how much time we had saved by taking our magnificent shortcut!
But it was exhilarating in a way; thanks to the advent of GPS it has been a very long time since a map has given me anything to puzzle over. Dusty and unused parts of my brain lit up for the first time in a decade, engaged by the lost challenges of wayfinding. It was… fun.
Re-discovering that maps and compasses and navigation could be fun, and feeling that it was a kind of fun that was dying out in the age of GPS, I thought that perhaps a video game could bring that experience to others, and skill acquired playing the game could be taken out into the real world …and work!
It would be several more years before I returned to the idea.