In 1970, in the desert north of Riyadh, William Polk and William Mares, two Americans who insisted on traveling via camel and relying on artisan wells for water, get lost. Their Saudi guides, already skeptical of this adventurous undertaking at a time when travelers can take jeeps and carry bottled water, organize a search for a well marked on a map but which none of the party has actually seen. After several hours of exploring, thirsty and worried, the travelers locate the water, 140 feet away, straight down. And the Saudi leader has forgotten to pack a long rope or bucket. Hundreds of miles from any kind of assistance and faced with death because of the guides' lack of forethought, the authors of Passing Brave (1971) throw a fit. A major, screaming, arms-flailing, abuse-laden hissy fit. After throughly insulting and enraging the guides, Polk walks to his camel and unpacks 150 feet of rope attached to a collapsible canvas bucket.
The travelers drink and the reader pauses in shock. The Americans had a basket and rope all along? The passage is re-read with care. It stands as before. The group cannot find the well; they are lost, dehydrated, in danger; the well appears; a yell-fest ensues; and the canvas bucket is produced.
This incident has held my imagination since I've read it several years ago and I will use it as entry into a discussion of travelers' reactions to accidentally becoming "lost." I use "lost" in terms of not knowing one's location on a geographical or psychological map. Writers from Lawrence Durrell to Paul Fussell claim that encountering adventure is what travelers desire. Mark Cocker in Loneliness and Time: The Story of British Travel Writing (1992) states that "travelers thrive on the alien, the unexpected, even the uncomfortable and challenging." But if travelers desire the "unexpected" or "uncomfortable," why do they sometimes meet them with such ill-grace? John Kirch notes in Music in Every Room: Around the World in a Bad Mood (1984) that when he and his traveling companion, Iris, get to Asia, they "had sworn never to be caught in the various American libraries run as showplaces by the Embassies and the U.S.I.S., a/k/a the Department of Disinformation." But the need to mentally escape India, to "get lost" for a while, induces them to change their minds. He writes, "While Sikhs in New Delhi waited obediently for immigration information, stunned to be turned into butcher store numbers to be paged, a high-caste librarian took his time exhuming, at my command, a decade's worth of Sports Illustrated."
Beginning with several post World War II authors (including Dervla Murphy, Debra Denker, Eric Hansen, James Fenton, Christopher Hunt, Eddy Harris and Martha Gellhorn) I will discuss reasons for and responses to accidentally becoming lost. From Polk's anger to Kirch's simple-minded revenge to Murphy's delight, I want to search for generalizations and trends within the rubric of accidentally misplacing maps.
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