Wrong-Way Angleton

Recently, the hubs and I returned, via the back roads, from a quick getaway to commemorate our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. It was a lovely, relaxing couple of days. We hiked and swam and ate well and just generally enjoyed the kind of meandering schedule that’s hard to follow when you’re toting around bored teenagers.

And so it felt right when the hubs asked me if on the way home I’d like to explore the back roads where not so much as a single bar of GPS-supporting data signal can be found. It was a suggestion he made almost apologetically because he assumed I’d be more comfortable sticking to roads I know better.

That was a considerate thought, because I have been known to lose my way from time to time and it has occasionally been a traumatic experience. The truth is, though, I have pretty much accepted that this disadvantage is just part of who I am, and if I have the time, I’ve even enjoyed getting a little turned around, because one never knows when you might end up somewhere better than you’d intended to go.

That could have been the case for one pilot who has gone down in history for going the wrong way. Eleven years after he helped ready Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis for its famous nonstop flight across the Atlantic, mechanic Douglas Corrigan made headlines himself as the last of the great aviation transatlantic daredevils. For his efforts, he was inducted into the Burlington, Wisconsin Liars Club and his pilot’s license was suspended.

On July 17, 1938, not long after landing in New York in a rickety modified aircraft salvaged from the junkyard and held together by little more than the audacity and ingenuity of its pilot, Corrigan took off again to make the return trip west across the country. Then to the surprise of onlookers, he turned and headed east instead.

When he landed twenty-eight hours later in Dublin, he asked the locals where he was and explained that he and his unreliable old compass had gotten turned around in the clouds.

Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan, looking pretty happy to be wherever he is. Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Of course not everyone believed the man who quickly became known as “Wrong-Way Corrigan,” possibly because his tale came with a wink and a grin. Also maybe because he’d already attempted to file a transatlantic flight plan in New York and had been denied since his plane was (I’m paraphrasing here) a hunk of junk.

The the public loved Corrigan, most likely because it’s kind of fun to root for an antihero who thwarted the rules and got away with. I have to assume, too, though, that there were a few sympathetic souls out there who thought there was a chance he was telling the truth.

I’m not suggesting that everyone who believed him was a gullible fool. I’m suggesting that they may have been the type who live with the condition I have come to know as directional insanity. As a fellow sufferer of this terrible malady, I could sympathize with a person who accidentally, delightfully, ended up in Ireland instead of California.

I’m not alone, either. In fact, there is a growing number of us. While I have been so afflicted since my earliest days of childhood, long before the era in which we all carry GPS devices in our pockets, the habitual use of such gadgets has been shown to negatively affect our spacial memories.

It’s also true that most of us have a harder time navigating as we age, so there really was never any hope for this gal who at one time went the wrong direction on an interstate she traveled regularly and didn’t realize it until she’d driven the amount of time that it should have taken her to get home and instead arrived at a town she’d never heard of.

This same gal, maybe a year ago, ended up about two hours north of where she was supposed to meet her sister for lunch because she got confused in a construction zone and took an exit she never takes from an interstate she travels regularly. The worst was the phone call to said sister who has never experienced a moment of directional insanity in her life, and rarely relies on GPS. Said sister wasn’t the least bit surprised.

So, card-carrying Wisconsin Liars Club member Douglas Corrigan would have had my sympathy had I been alive to see his possibly accidental triumph. He stuck to his story for the rest of his life and didn’t really get in very much trouble over it. His pilot’s license was revoked for about two weeks, the length of time it took him to make it back to the United States by ship, and he didn’t seem the least bit bothered by where he ended up.