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By Root 500 0

hit an ATM while we were out. First, though, Benjamin wanted to set the tent up. He was excited about the tent. He’d nabbed it for half off a price that he already considered low (and rejoiced when I went in for half of that). As he leaned into the trunk, where he’d stuffed the tent that very morning at his parents’ house in Virginia Beach, he discoursed at length on all its marvelous features, such as how quick and easy it was to erect, and how well it held up against an insane wind during a trial setup. This last bit cheered me, since the wind here still kicked up an occasional rough gust. The dying sun spilled fantastic colors into the sky and the pond. I stood smiling in its glow until I realized that Benjamin was caroming between the tent he’d unrolled and the trunk.

“Something wrong?”

He didn’t answer, muttering to himself as he shook the empty tent bag like Heracles throttling the Cretan Bull, but with a more distracted air. I looked over at the unrolled tent, which waited to be unfolded, hoisted onto poles, and staked into the—wait a minute. Where were the tent poles?

“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it!” Benjamin shouted. He turned to me. His voice became perfectly calm, though the wildness of his eyes betrayed the tempest within. “This simply cannot be. I’m not the kind of person who does this. This is a rookie mistake. How could I have …”

He’d left the tent poles wrapped up in the tent’s protective outer coat, the rain fly, back at his parents’ house. The wind had turned so furious the day he’d done the test setup that he couldn’t roll the fly up with the tent without the thing blowing away, so he’d spun the fly around the poles and then rolled up the heavier tent. He’d stashed the two bundles side by side in his closet, but the pole/fly bundle fell back into the dark recesses, and Benjamin had forgotten all about it this morning when he’d reached in and grabbed the tent.

I recognized in his apologies a note of my own glistening self-flagellation from the beach and resolved that tomorrow, by the light of a new day, we’d learn from our mistakes and charge forward, not allowing a defeatist attitude to get in our way. I did wonder, though, as I stared up at the moon that had risen during the search for the poles, where we would be lodging here in rural North Carolina with no notice. Then I remembered that my GPS had uses beyond simple navigation. I had it search for nearby hotels as we came back out onto the main road, now in full darkness. Six or seven places came up.

“Which of these sounds cheap to you?” I said.

“Uh.” Benjamin scrolled through the list. “Probably anything with ‘Econo’ in its name.”

The bolder future that I’d envisioned came true, in perverse fashion, the next morning after we set off from the Williamston Econo Lodge. We’d checked off lessons learned, with nary a glance at our mistakes in the rearview, but then everything else began to fall apart. Callie’s troubles began that morning with a faint protest that would get worse over the coming days. I’d realized before I even began the trip, when I’d taken her to the shop for a full inspection and a mani/pedi, that I’d be putting some serious miles on her and that she was entering her elder years by automotive reckoning. Even so, Callie’s grumbling took a backseat to the rebellion of another modern technological wonder.

During the first days of this journey, probably somewhere in New Jersey, as I listened to the tinny female voice squawking orders from my dash, I’d decided that my GPS needed a name, and that the only proper name would be Authority. I was being somewhat ironic at the time, but as the days went on, I slipped into placing more and more trust in the inerrancy of her dicta. O folly! How soon I forgot the motto of my parents’ generation: Question Authority. Thus, Authority caught me off guard when she announced that the trip from Williamston to Beaufort would be nearly an hour shorter than the Google Maps route I’d looked at before nodding off to bed. Benjamin, too, thought the eastward heading strange. We looked ahead in