Now, when I say no sense of direction, I mean I once took a wrong turn in a hallway in the middle of the night and walked into a closet instead of the bathroom. (Luckily I realized my mistake in time.) Truly, I think I could buy a GPS for my car and deduct it on our taxes, claiming medical necessity. I get lost constantly.
The first rally I ever did was with my first wife, and I suspect my poor navigational skills were part of the reason why we divorced. God, did we argue that day.
After that, I began rallying with my friend, Elliott, and what a pair we made.
Elliott had an old, bulbous Saab, with manual steering and a steering wheel the size of a pizza pan (for leverage to turn the wheels, I suppose). It was, as I recall, a Saab 96, with a four-speed on the column. It was slow and not very powerful, which proved to be a problem.
If you've never been on a sports car rally, here's how it works: every car has a driver and a navigator, A few minutes before the start (cars generally start one at a time at five-minute intervals, give or take) the navigator gets a set of instructions that involves following difficult directions (sometimes only using clues or riddles) to specific points in specific amounts of time. Teams must make their way to a series of checkpoints, each of which must be reached at a certain time. (And by certain, I mean to the second: teams get a point for every second early or late to a checkpoint, and a winning team might get through 7-10 checkpoints and only have 20 points.)
Sometimes the navigator is given a distance and needs to calculate the speed at which the team should drive, sometimes the opposite. Experienced rally folks have sophisticated computers in their cars. Novices, such as us, have a calculator, a couple of pencils and a pad of paper.
I should have known how the event was going to go for us when I gave Elliott the first direction 20 seconds into our first rally. "Left! Left! Turn left now!" And turn we did, into a parking lot.
"This can't be right!" And we were already a minute behind.
Now, what happens during rallies is that each checkpoint has a couple of folks staffing it, and they pack up and leave after the last car SHOULD have come through. Elliott and I employed the same strategy in every rally: get hopelessly lost, than have to drive like maniacs to get to the next checkpoint before it closed. At awards ceremonies, as winners came forward with their scores of 20 points or 30 points we scanned the leader board for our score, which was always in the thousands.
We got lost every way you can get lost. We'd pass signs that said Now Entering ________ County when the directions had made it clear that the entire rally was going to remain within the county we were leaving. We'd see other cars we were sure were in our rally (and had started long after us) going in the opposite direction. ("Think we should turn around?" "Uh, yeah.")
The Turn Around Strategy — second only to our Drive Like Maniacs Strategy — ultimately proved our downfall.
On a narrow country road in the middle of farm country, we realized we were hopelessly lost. In attempting to make a U-turn, Elliott got stuck in a ditch.
Since he was driving, I was the one who had to get out and push. The tires spun, covering me with dirt and mud, but the car stayed stuck in the ditch. As we pondered what to do, a farmer came along in a truck and, in less than two minutes, pulled us out of the ditch and got us back on the road. We gave him our heartfelt thanks, and as he left the trouble started.
Elliott took one look at my dirt and mud covered clothes, and reached a decision: "You can't get in my car." "What?" "You're covered in mud. You can't get in." "I'm covered in mud because I had to push your car out of the ditch you drove into. Stop wasting time, we gotta get going." "I don't want my car to get all dirty."
Finally, Elliott relented and let me in. We drove until we saw a Burger King, and I tried to clean myself up in their bathroom.
That, I think, was our last rally. We're still very close friends — I've known Elliott for 30 years — and since that rally, which was 20+ years ago, we've never had a disagreement.
Nor, now that I think about it, has Elliott ever asked me for directions.
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