Fear And Loathing On The Way To Beaverton

My relationship with my Dad's Subaru will never be like David Hasselhoff's relationship with KITT.

I’ve never really understood the concept of motivational speaking. I sort of bristle when somebody who isn’t paying me tells me what to do, and as I understand it, motivational speakers tell you what to do and you pay them. I might just be skeptical of anybody who tries to charge me for advice when I can find the same advice with a little less credibility on the Internet for free, but I feel like my wariness toward motivational speakers is well founded.

Motivational speakers always set me on edge when they say “Nothing is impossible.” See, I don’t know what kind of person you are, but I’m an asshole, so whenever someone makes such a blatantly declarative statement I start trying to find loopholes that will completely and utterly prove that person wrong. The reason the term “Nothing is impossible” gets bandied about so much in schools and the motivational speaking circuit is because they want you to understand that if you try really, really hard, you’ll be able to achieve your dreams. This, of course, always makes me wonder what you do if your dream is to walk in space while completely naked. I’m no expert on space, but I’m pretty sure that no matter how hard you try, jumping out of the International Space Station without a spacesuit on will most definitely result in you freezing to death and explosively decompressing, and maybe not in that order. Space is a fickle mistress; it never takes a day off. It won’t see you blasting out of the airlock in the buff and say, “Oh, hey, look at that! He’s trying really hard to walk naked in me! Just for that, I’m not going to make him freeze to death and explode. Let’s see if I’ve got any candy…”

No matter how hard you try, there are some things in life that simply can’t be done. Jumping off of a skyscraper and flying, for instance, or teleporting from one end of the country to the other, or driving to Beaverton.

Beaverton is the Oakland to Portland’s San Francisco, the Hoboken to our New York, the Parma to our Cleveland. It’s a poorly laid out, heavily populated suburb just outside of Portland, and judging by how many people from there work downtown you might get the idea that the city of Portland is, in fact, just a clever façade, and that after 5:00 they close the park gates and everyone goes home to Beaverton, where people actually live. Of course, this is not actually the case, for I am one of the elite few (hundred thousand) who can call Portland their home. The problem is that most of my friends from school live in Beaverton, and while Beaverton is only ten or so miles away from my house, the roads between here and there are a warped and twisted labyrinth doubtless designed by some black-hearted evil mastermind with an unfathomable loathing for all that is good. I can see him now, good ‘ol Adolf Cthulu (Karl Rove to his buddies), standing up on the hillside and cackling as thousands of weary travelers are ensnared and crushed in the asphalt buttfuck that lies between Portland and Beaverton.

According to Google Maps, Beaverton is exactly 11 miles away from me, yet it routinely takes me in the neighborhood of 45 minutes to get there. This is either because the space between Beaverton and Portland is the Oregon branch of The Bermuda Triangle or because there is no one surface street that will take you straight there. To drive to Beaverton is to cruise down residential streets and past cul-de-sacs, through roundabouts, and across gravel parking lots; it is to chop down the forest in front of you and order a battalion of hobos to build a road, it is to stuff wax in your ears to ignore the siren songs of Quiznos and Burgerville restaurants along the way, it is to caulk the tires of your car with mud and float it down the river like a Subaru raft. This journey has driven men insane; it has driven insane men sane, and then driven them insane all over again just for the hell of it. It were as though God himself did not want human beings to travel between Portland and Beaverton.

Common logic would suggest that if at all possible you should avoid going to Beaverton, and perhaps attempt to eradicate all knowledge of Beaverton so that nobody else ever makes the same mistake. However, it so happens that one of my friends who lives in Beaverton turned 20 yesterday, and when I realized that free cake was on the line, I felt that I had little choice but to pack a week’s provisions and try to ford the pavement between here and Beaverton.

In the past I’ve printed off directions from Google Maps in my attempts to reach Beaverton safely, but even with the help of extensive diagrams and simple directions I got lost several times, so I opted to instead use my family’s GPS unit. By imputing the desired destination and pressing “GO!”, the GPS unit will ideally guide you to where you want to be as quickly as possible. The system is more or less idiot proof – the unit will actually speak the directions to you in a halting robotic fashion as you come up to each waypoint, which makes it a lot easier to play Knight Rider while you’re driving. The experience was particularly vexing for me because our GPS unit inexplicably speaks with an Australian woman’s accent. Sometime between ordering me to “Bear. Right. On. Sunset Highway.” and “Turn. Left. On. Wilson. Street.”, I’m pretty sure she suggested that I “Throw. A. Shrimp. On. The. Barbie.”

However, not even the down under streetwise know-how of a sassy GPS satellite could guide me through the hell between Portland and Beaverton completely without incident. I spent the entire drive sweltering inside a 5000 degree car, scared to roll down the windows or turn up the AC lest the noise block out one of the lilting, effeminate directions I so required. Also, the GPS unit routinely gave me instructions like, “Turn. Left. In. .01. Miles.” Sadly, I am not Lewis and/or Clark, and I can’t just spitball a tenth of a mile out the windshield. The result was a few wrong turns. At one point, I missed a crucial turn and wound up heading into downtown.

“Recalculating.” The GPS unit said. ‘Recalculating’ is the GPS unit’s way of saying, “You moron, I gave you simple goddamned instructions! What part of ‘Turn left’ don’t you get?” Shortly after saying this, the unit will calibrate a new route that will put you back on track. However, it will take its sweet time doing so.

As I cruised past Franklin Boulevard, the GPS unit ordered me to turn left on Franklin. “Recalculating.” It snapped, incensed that I’d screw up twice. “Turn. Right. On. College.” It commanded when I had already passed College Street. “Recalculating.” It said again, gritting digital teeth at my foolish human inability to manipulate time and space so that I could turn only when it told me to.

After a lot of mental anguish and a scathing, profanity ridden indictment of technology in general, my GPS unit and I were able to find our way back to the route to Beaverton and get going again. From there, it was a relatively smooth trip, up until the point where I drove into Beaverton and found myself confronted, Legends of the Hidden Temple style, with four options: Canyon Court, Canyon Road, Canyon Street, and Canyon Lane – the choice is yours!

As much as I hate to lend credence to motivational speakers, I most certainly did do the impossible by arriving at my friend’s birthday party without falling into a black hole. However, I didn’t try really hard to achieve this goal – I didn’t sit down and study maps of the area, or save up the money for a jetpack so that I could fly over the entire mess – I simply used a piece of technology that reduces driving to the simple following of directions, which, even then, was sort of a hassle. I suppose that, given the right circumstances, maybe even the impossible is possible – it’s easy to drive to Beaverton when you relinquish all control to the orders of an uncaring Australian fembot, just as it’s easy to jump into space in the nude so long as you don’t care about freezing to death and then exploding.

Truman Capps motivates himself when he speaks, if that counts.