by Jeff Deck
TYPO TRIP TALLY
Total found: 16
Total corrected: 9
* Maybe that’s for the best. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison formed the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, to regulate the names for the astonishing number of cities, towns, and natural features that America had come to encompass. They decided that the less punctuation, the better, particularly in place names containing a possessive. So they went and blasted the apostrophe out of Pike’s Peak, making it Pikes Peak, and so on. The policy remains to this day, with only a few exceptions being granted by federal largesse (and, here and there, rebellious communities such as the Fells Point neighborhood in Baltimore—its residents insist on Fell’s).
5 | Maladies
March 11–12, 2008 (Kill Devil Hills, NC, to Myrtle Beach, SC)
In which our Heroes suffer numerous Trials against their spirits, plans, and digestive abilities in their inexorable Quest across desolate beaches, cold woodlands, and ferryless harbors.
Another burst of cold wind blew across the beach in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. I recognized that the sand wasn’t flying in our eyes, but that was about the sum of our blessings. The afternoon had yielded a fairly lousy hunt—not from hesitancy on our part, but because we didn’t know where to go. As Benjamin tromped over to a far sign, the sole bit of text on the beach, I examined the magazine I’d picked up at the only place open for business this early in the season. The cover promised suggestions for outdoor “activites”. Benjamin returned shaking his head. “Some notice about which parts of the beach are unsafe for swimming due to sewage.” Disturbing, but grammatically clean.
Our nose for fertile typo ground was proving to be stuffy indeed. We had entertained thoughts of a thriving boardwalk along the beach. Instead we found ourselves plodding along frigid white sands, gazing in both directions down an empty shore.
Benjamin pointed out that we’d found a couple of fascinating historical typos earlier that day at the Wright Brothers National Memorial. The fathers of modern aviation had tried their hand at a newspaper, and one front page showed why their talents lay skyward instead—they’d spelled the name of their own paper wrong! Another exhibit specifically called attention to a typo. A telegram about their initial flight success had misreported the duration as a mere fifty-seven seconds rather than the full fifty-nine (not to mention calling Orville “Orevelle”). While Benjamin found this intriguing, to me it meant the League had arrived a hundred years too late on the scene of a devastating offense.
“Sorry, man,” I said. “I suck.”
“It can’t be helped. Nothing’s open,” he said as we wandered by the gray waters of the Atlantic.
Yet the typos were out there, somewhere. The town slumbered in seeming peace, but knowing what I knew, I could find no such respite. I had chosen to come here on the hunt, and I had gotten it wrong. A mere three typos had been found, and none corrected. Benjamin, a numbers guy at base, would be crushed once he realized we’d dropped under the fifty percent mark of mistakes corrected versus found. We headed to a campground, where a new problem would elicit his regret with mightier force.
It was a decent enough clearing in the woods, but it appeared deserted. We selected one of the little sites facing a pond, and then found no one to take our payment at the office, which stood as abandoned as the rest of the grounds. During the off-season, campers were on the honor system to drop an envelope with the proper amount into a slot. We didn’t have cash, but we had to go grab some hot dogs to make over a fire anyway, so we could 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 the GPS route and saw that Authority had steered us toward a ferry. Oh, all right, so that solved it. Except that the ferry, like everything else along the North Carolina coast, wasn’t running in early March. Our road ended at a chain blocking access to the dock, with a sign that said CLOSED FOR SEASON.
Benjamin shut Authority off and yanked my road atlas from the pile of stuff suffocating the backseats. “A chance to redeem myself,” he announced, taking over the navigational duties. The trip to Beaufort would take an additional hour, thanks to the necessary backtracking.
We could at least take comfort in the fact that eac
h of our trials carried with it a crucial lesson. For example, very few typos exist on beaches. And: Tents need something to hold them up. And above all, I now knew not to place blind trust in Authority again; I would always compare her routes against the maps. Though she’d mislead us a little here and there, never again would she send us so far astray. We paused for lunch along the way, making a shopping trip for supplies and eating peanut butter sandwiches in a grocery parking lot before heading onward. Beaufort was a little coastal town with a big heart and an exceptional Maritime Museum, wherein Benjamin scraped an errant apostrophe off the wall with his thumbnail.
Another spartan day for finds, but at least this time we went three for three, knocking us back over the fifty-percent correction mark. In retrospect, that day was also notable for our first run-in with an enemy whose name is Legion: CARS WILL BE TOWED AT OWNERS EXPENSE.
As I wrote my day’s blog entry, I reflected on my continuing struggle to find the places in most dire need of our typo-hunting services. I needed more text-rich locales than I’d been able to find yet. Still, at least Benjamin was on board with my mission, we’d be picking up the tent poles tomorrow, and we could once again claim to have corrected a (slim) majority of our discovered nemeses. We went out to dinner thinking our troubles had mostly concluded, powerless to resist the grotesque “thickburgers” that Hardee’s had been bombarding us with through highway advertisements for some time now. Alas, the worst was yet to be digested. For Benjamin, it turned out to be utterly indigestible. By morning he lay prone across his bed and skipped our second Econo Lodge’s continental breakfast. He retched to try to force the fast food out of his tract, but to no avail.
I realized then that my poor friend wasn’t used to consuming the mounds of terribly unhealthy food that an epic road trip requires. The Hardee’s tera-burger had been his grim initiation into the lifestyle. This seemed the culmination of our woes of the last few days, as if an accumulated sludgeball of ill luck were what was actually troubling Benjamin’s guts. If we could propel it from his system, I thought, we’d see an immediate change in our fortunes.
On the harrowing drive to Myrtle Beach, I thrice feared for Callie’s interior, but the burger remained lodged in place. Each Hardee’s billboard we passed made Benjamin’s nausea swell, and there were many, but when we cranked up the latest album by his favorite jeans-clad bard, Springsteen, some eldritch Magic helped quell his troubled stomach’s pains. We managed to arrive without the forcible ejection of any internal organs.
Once inside the city limits, we drove past lurid signs promising simulacra of whatever one desired. Dinosaur putt-putt! Medieval banquets (serfs and wenches included)! A rock-and-roll theme park! I hadn’t visited this particular honky-tonk since my dad led a family expedition here many years ago. Time had not moved on here; apparently the place was still catering to my prepubescent self. Our first stop in Myrtle Beach was the FedEx office, where missing tent parts had arrived ahead of us. We put them to use right away at a KOA campsite in a modest wood not far from the beach. After Benjamin and I erected the tent, which proved at least as easy as he’d told me two nights prior, he crawled inside it to die. It was late afternoon at that point. I had to get the day’s typo hunting done soon, and it looked like I’d be doing my rounds without a companion. I told him I’d be back in a little while. The pedestrian exit led me past a fundamentalist church and into the touristy main commercial district, separated from the beach by a bulwark of outsized chain hotels.
On my own again so soon! How vital was a partner in correction—how forlorn felt I without one. Benjamin’s absence hobbled the League’s gait. I visited a couple of souvenir and T-shirt shops and made rote fixes to a few typos here and there, but my orthographic heart was listless. Then I came upon the biggest typo I’d seen to date, on a giant marquee outside the “Pacific Superstore.”
Suddenly vigor crested over me. I had to show Benjamin that I could do this alone. I strode into the store. The place was a cavernous repository of beach gear and trinkets, perhaps imported wholly from the other coast, as the name of the store implied. I saw one shopper present. I hung around for a moment until a short lady approached me. “Can I help you?”
“Hi there,” I said. I gave her the heartiest grin that I could manufacture. Which may not have been all that convincing, I admit; I’ve always been a more adept scowler. I knew I’d have to work on my salesmanship, though, in this and future typo-related endeavors. “I noticed that your sign out there in front has two ts in SWEATTS, and I was wondering if there was a reason for it.”
She gave me a puzzled look and accompanied me outside, where she looked up at the sign. She was unmoved. “Oh yes, but I thought that sweatshirts did have two ts when shortened …”
“Well,” I stammered, “no. I actually have a strange request for you—can you take one of the ts out? I’d really appreciate it. You see, I—”
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to ask the manager,” said the lady, indicating a long-haired guy perched on a ladder while talking on a cell phone and making adjustments to surfboards on display along the wall.
“Hello,” I said to the manager when he came over. I gained some more momentum, sensing that this was an essential trial of my mission. Its outcome would predict the success or failure of the many confrontations to come. “I couldn’t help but notice that your sign out front has two ts in SWEATTS. Could I ask you to, uh, fix it?”
“Does it?” he said. Now it was our turn to promenade in front of the Superstore. He headed for the door. “Who would have done that?”
Certainly I had a suspect in mind, but since TEAL’s mission focused on amending the error and not on finger-wagging, I shrugged, following behind him. “I’m actually traveling around the country correcting typos, and it’d be great if you could fix this one. Would you be able to do that?”
Strangely, my story did not faze him in the slightest. The guy was but the first of many supervisors, middle managers, and wage slaves who would take the tale of the League at face value with no visible reaction. Probably half of them didn’t believe me, or didn’t care.
“No, they don’t care,” Benjamin would explain some few hundred miles down the road when the topic of responses came up during our westward journey. “When you’re a service manager, things break into two categories: typical and atypical.” I had become atypical, and atypical was bad.
The manager peered up at the sign, squinting in the sun. “Yes, that’s not right. Don’t worry, I will make sure that it’s fixed.” Evidently he thought this would be enough of a response, as he started for the door.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I pressed, “but could you fix it now so I can take a picture of it? I’d really appreciate it. I’m keeping a blog, and I can write this in.”
He hesitated, then glanced back into the echoing interior of the store, still nearly devoid of customers. “All right, I will do this for you, but you must hold the ladder.”
I nodded, sensing a solemnity to the moment. “Sure.”
He returned with a ladder a moment later. For some reason it was a different ladder from the one he’d been using to adjust the surfboards. Perhaps it was reserved for handling requests from meddling passersby. He set it up beneath the sign, and I held the legs while he climbed up. Keep it steady, I thought, wouldn’t want to have this crucial encounter end in a sprained ankle. As I stared up at a rear end in board shorts, I realized the greater import behind my ostensibly simple duty. To come to this juncture, to hold that ladder, was why I had dreamed up the Typo Eradication Advancement League in the first place—so that I could aid in endeavors such as these, pointing the way for the managers of the nation to correct problems in their own territories. With my hands firmly grasping the ladder of attentiveness and care, who knew how high my countrymen could ascend? Perhaps to the very heavens of perfect spelling and grammar, where seraphim cry hosannas to the correctly deployed apostrophe and cherubim strike down subject-verb disagreements with their burning blades!
Above me, the manager popped at out, then moved the rest of the letters closer together. “There, do you feel better?”
“Sure do,” I said, taking the question at face value. “I can count this as a success story.”
“Just don’t include me in the picture, eh?”
I stood marveling at the small but visible improvement in the world that my ladder-holding had brought about. I won’t say that it was a rush, because we’re not talking about Xtreme snowboarding here, just a small and early step on the brambled road to righteousness. But I did feel a palpable lifting of the spirit, a realization that the landscape around me was more malleable than it seemed. All I had to do was ask. Though, as this episode had demonstrated, sometimes asking more than once would be necessary. Persistence was my most potent weapon against the black hordes of error. For the first time in my life I could see the panoply of possibilities opened up by merely engaging people. Imagine what else could be accomplished!
I returned to the campsite to share the happy news with my TEAL colleague. My tale of success lent him needed vitality. He struggled into a sitting position. “Let’s go for a walk,” he wheezed.
“Are you … sure that’s a good idea?”
Benjamin grinned bravely. “Here’s the thing, Deck. I need to puke, but I can’t physically get it out. So let’s walk, and that’ll agitate my insides, and eventually—”
“Okay, I get it,” I said. “You need a hand up?”
He waved his hand dismissively and heaved himself upward on shaking arms. He took a couple of tottering steps over to Callie and grabbed a water bottle from the backseat. Then we made our ponderous way out of the KOA camp and into the commercial district. Benjamin still grimaced like a hurting cowboy, but he persevered, taking liberal swigs from his water, which, he explained, was another facet of his vomit-inducing strategy.