Without extreme vigilance we are in danger of allowing the tentacles of technology to snake their way over our bulwarks, capsize our tranquil schooner, and drag us down into the awful dark depths of infallibility.  As Conrad’s Kurtz mumbled, “The horror, the horror.”

    Fallibility is the hallmark of exploration, but ever since the discovery that a needle rubbed on silk, plunged through a straw, and floated in a puddle of water always points north, we have faced the threat of becoming infallible in our travels from one place to another.  When, by the beginning of the 14th century, technocrats had figured out ways to make a transportable box compass that needed neither silk nor puddle, it looked like the great joy of becoming lost would itself become lost in the inky black cloud spit by the octopus we call technological advance.   The tentacles were coming over the rail.  Quick!  Grab an axe and hack them off before it is too late.

    Unfortunately, the threat went unnoticed for a long time because so much exploration involved going places we didn’t even know existed.  As a wise friend of mine once exclaimed at a doubting fellow traveler while we weighed the advantage of taking one road instead of another, “Lost!  How can we be lost when we don’t even know where we’re going.”

    When collectively we figured out where most of the places we imagined could exist were, exploration became a more personal adventure that was relatively free from insidious technology.  People began to simply bumble through the countryside.  In fact, to go on a bumble meant, for a while in England, that one was going to ride a bicycle through one region and into another.  

    Bumble, I like that term.  It describes perfectly to me the joy of going out on a bicycle and riding down roads I’ve not ridden down before.  “What did you do today?”  “Oh, I bumbled around the southwest part of the county and found some good hills.”  “That sounds nice.”  

    It is nice, but it is a niceness that the brain trust is trying to wrest from us.  They would have us always know just exactly where we are and just where to turn to get where we think we ought to be.  

    At the beginning of every day in the Tour de France, each rider is given a little chart that graphically shows the climbs and at what point in the day’s ride they begin and end.  It isn’t a map, but just a little strip of a jagged graph that locates the mountain peaks on a line marked in kilometers.  When Greg Lemond was racing, he realized that with that chart and a cycle computer he could more strategically plan his attacks and better determine when not to chase down someone else’s.  Many of the riders he beat, disdained that cycle computer as thoroughly as they disdained clip in pedals and aero bars; and as thoroughly as they would soon disdain click shifting.

    In my opinion, the scoffers were wiser than the more technologically advanced riders even though they lost the races, but, as is often the case, wisdom herself often loses to advances in technology.  Soon, cycle computers became commonplace and the nut cases that went off the front of the peloton after 50 kilometers became more pathetic than heroic.

    Click shift to the 2008 randonneuring season that is almost upon some of us.  Most randonneurs will ride with cycle computers clipped to their handlebars.  They will know when to expect each turn indicated on their cue sheets and they will ride with the expectation that they will not become lost.  They will also know just how far they’ve come and how much further they have to go.  That can be demoralizing if the ride becomes harder than expected, or the weather hotter, wetter, darker, or colder than planed for.

    Something even more insidious is on the horizon.  The global positioning system is poised to become truly bicycle friendly -- well, maybe unfriendly depending on how you think about those things.  From what I am reading, a lack of battery power will keep the little handlebar mounted GPS receivers from most brevets over 200 kilometers long this year, but the day is coming when even a bad cue on the cue sheet won’t allow us to become blissfully lost again.

    There is hope, though.  I rode all of last season’s brevets without a cycle computer and more than half of the season before and I get lost almost every time I go out for a serious ride.  When you realize that you’ve gone down the wrong road and that you will have to backtrack to get back on course, it isn’t always immediately apparent that you’ve added something special to the ride, but later, the wrong turns are often the part of the brevet that remains most clearly in your memory.  In fact, all randonneurs understand at some deeply internal level that getting lost is something special.  We reveal that deep understanding by calling those extra miles ridden in wayward directions, bonus miles.  

    Besides all that, if you have a particularly bad day, and finish well behind the time you expected to finish, it is nice to think that if you hadn’t missed that turn, or gone left when you should have gone right, you might have finished sooner.

    On my more informal rides, I like to take a map with me so that I can plan where I should ride and so that I can find an alternate route when I realize I’m not at all where I expected to be.

    Remember the fellow who said, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by.”

    He didn’t know where he would end up and as it turned out, “that has made all the difference.”

    Next time Nina tells me to get lost, I think I’ll go out on my bicycle and do that very thing.  Again.