The Great Typo Hunt

by Jeff Deck

  “Uh …,” I said, glancing uncertainly at the animals.

  “Fine, fine. Callie it is.”

  Our hostel lay in the green hills of Cibola National Forest, between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Cedar Crest had proved to be an authentically rustic experience. The little cabin that was our shelter barely had running water, and the proprietor thought “Wi-Fi” to be an arcane cussword, but what do you want for twenty bucks a night?

  Since we’d covered Albuquerque last night, Santa Fe would be the site of our hunt today. After a gorgeous drive between the sibling cities, we came upon a town plaza with a row of shops leading to a central square, which boasted America’s “oldest continuously used public building” and the towering Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi. A stroll along the shops seemed in order. Continuing on the morning’s theme, we made a turn down Burro Alley, where we spotted our first ill-begotten sign. In the window of an otherwise friendly little French café, a sign commanded, NO SMOKING ARE DOGS ALLOWED.

  This amused Benjamin to no end. He’d spend the rest of the day playing with equally inappropriate word substitutions. “Dude, how about ‘No smoking our dogs allowed.’” His mood crashed, however, when I declared that we weren’t going to fix it. I pointed to my explanation before he could burst into a demand for one: the next three windows sported the same sign, but in those three the word ARE had been replaced with an even bolder OR in marker thick enough to make the two letters cover the three. Crude, but effective. Someone had already recognized the error and corrected most of the signs, so it seemed pointless to bother, at least to me.

  Benjamin growled, then replied in staccato, “But. They. Still. Missed. One.”

  I resisted further, but this was mutiny, and Mr. Christian demanded I surrender to him my marker and elixir. Then he went into the café, somehow slipped past the host, and ducked into the room with the window that the original corrector hadn’t remembered to visit. The fix happened fast, and after making sure the elixir had dried enough to not stick to the window, he reattached the sign and swung back out of there before anyone could comment. As we walked back the way we’d come, Benjamin broke the silence by offering, with a nod at the street marker, “What can I say? I’m just that stubborn.” The sign of the donkey. Or was I the ass? “And Jeff—no smoking dogs allowed!”

  I tried to make up for my malaise with the next one, sticking to my Sharpies over the initial irritation of the local bookstore employees. Feeling like an adventurer who’d recovered a stolen artifact thought lost for good, I returned the apostrophe to its rightful place in a sign for Barron’s magazine. Strangely, something about the scene shifted. Happy as I’d been at my restored treasure of an apostrophe, I found myself caught off guard as a shadowy figure began to prowl the corners of my consciousness—not the apostrophe thief, but a similar, internal scoundrel with the potential for greater mayhem. I couldn’t get a clear view, but I sensed its identity: doubt. Quiet, tentative, but nevertheless substantial doubt. If I tried to ignore it, the troublesome notion would sneak into backstabbing distance, dealing a critical hit to my confidence in the mission. Yet I couldn’t catch it, the rogue dancing out of reach when I spun and lunged.

  I stood outside staring back at the storefront for a moment, making the employees within fear that this mooncalf would be bothering them with oddball requests all day. Despite the rudeness I’d encountered, first by the younger clerk who thought I’d wanted an issue of Barron’s and then by the older one, who’d given me the go-ahead to fix their sign with a hearty “whatever” to get rid of me, the place had an honest feel to it. A local little bookshop for people who actually read.

  Benjamin nearly walked on without me before he noticed how I’d gotten stuck. “I liked that bookstore,” I said.

  He agreed. Nice place. Moving along …

  But I couldn’t. Something felt wrong about me or my mission, or both. Some contradiction between my feelings and actions. As we explored further, the thief at my heels continued to harry me with light fingers, challenging the preconceived notions I’d held when I saddled up for this adventure. Oh, but if I could stand here a moment more, I’d have it figured out!

  Alas, not yet. We continued wandering down the street and made our way over to the Mineral & Fossil Gallery, where Benjamin decided to pick something up for Jenny. I began examining exhibits and felt my internal radio tune to a familiar frequency. I knew these words. I’d had to spell-check some of them before. I began to enjoy seeing in person some of the minerals featured in articles during my time at Rocks & Minerals. Then I spotted a specimen with a label locality that rankled. I waved Benjamin over, and he and a tiny carving of a turtle joined me at the case. “Minas Gerais, but they’ve got the i before the a here, and I’m pretty sure that’s wrong.”

  “And I’m pretty sure it’s too obscure for me,” Benjamin said, a strange testing look in his eye. “It’s all you.”

  Yeah. I approached a clerk for help, explaining my purpose immediately so as not to offend her as I had the bookstore fellows. She came over to the case and examined the error. She’d obviously had more experience with minerals than I’d had in my short tenure at the magazine, and she immediately recognized the problem. It didn’t look right to her, she said. Ah, surely she possessed the very spirit of the League! I almost invited her to join our mission; her able eye could fix upon the most difficult quarry wherever TEAL might boldly spelunk. We conferenced on the correct spelling, and she opened the case so I could correct the error myself, even thanking me. Benjamin gave a silent nod of approval from the other side of the store.

  Then we bought some gifts for our girls, and oh, I’d hate to impose any further, but my receipt had a problem. So did Benjamin’s. So had every receipt they’d ever printed from this cash register from the day the store had opened. At the top, under the store’s name, lay the address: 127 W. San Francesco St. A simple glance at the street sign outside, West San Francisco, proved the receipts in error. Benjamin hung his head as I pointed it out, but when the kind woman ringing me up said she didn’t know how to fix it, Benjamin ended the episode by requesting they “pass it along” and thanking them for everything. He figured that only the GM of the store would have access to what got printed on the receipts. They honestly could not change it then and there. “Not even the other store managers had access to the store personalization function.” I nodded as if I knew what that meant as we headed into another store.

  After we’d admired some local artwork for sale, we struck up a conversation with a friendly young woman named Hailey near the shoe section. As she chatted about the city’s virtues, I began to realize how much I was enjoying myself here. Santa Fe would be added to the list of our favorite places, like Austin, that possessed their own character and felt real. Inevitably, though, a national franchise had infiltrated the town square, and Benjamin and I had watched, fascinated, as people dove into it, crowding the place as if afraid to venture from the haven manufactured for them by corporate America. I recognized that, yes, this street itself had probably been crafted as a capitalist simulacrum of a small town that had never quite been, yet it still had a sense of individuality brought to it by the independent businesses.

  Hailey helped me pick out a cowboy hat and showed me how to set it properly ’pon my melon. When we left the store, I wanted to blurt out an observation about how much nicer these kinds of places were than the Walmart-ized communities or the strip malls featuring the same store names over and over again, some names so ubiquitous as to confuse any sense of navigating through a country. Which were you to believe? The odometer that said you’d come a thousand miles, or the storefronts before you with the same names you thought you’d left behind? Each new iteration would reveal unto you the exact same floorplan as its brethren back home, and you’d navigate flawlessly, as if you’d once visited this store in a dream. Before I spoke, though, Benjamin sighed and offered a thought of his own. “Not much text in that one. Too bad, we’d caught one in every single store we checked
until there.”

  My new cowboy hat became the only thing keeping my skull intact as my mind exploded outward with the force of the revelations. I rewound myself back to the bookstore, understood what I’d missed there, and kept going. Back to Austin and New Orleans, back again to Alabama and the Carolinas, all the way to my first miserable typo-hunting excursion in Boston. Then I snapped back into the present moment like a rubber band. I’d apparently gotten in line with Benjamin at a humble fajita stand at the corner of the main square. The line moved fast, and we scored ourselves some sizzling food and lemonade, found a park bench, and enjoyed our repast. As if mirroring my mental overload, my taste buds bloomed in full thanks to a sensational rain of flavors. Benjamin handed over half of the ample stack of napkins we’d been given, tons of extras for the nose-blowing that unacclimated consumers would require; the well-spiced fajitas had opened our sinuses to breathe in the world. We kept pausing between bites to mutter our astonishment before blowing our noses and resuming stuffing ourselves with the food.

  Benjamin leaned back on the bench. “Dude, I don’t think I’m ever eating at a Taco Bell again. Fast food seems somehow offensive now.”

  I took a deep breath, putting down my empty wrapper. “Um. I have to tell you something.”

  We’d had trouble from the start finding the most fertile typo-hunting ground, but a pattern had emerged, and here in Santa Fe, it crystallized for me. The more homogenized a place became, the less likely we’d be to find typos. “Filene’s Basement was a fluke,” I explained, and Benjamin agreed. Most signs coming from corporate would have been checked for problems before thousands of copies were made. The bigger the company, the more widespread would be the single error that got through and thus the more they’d want to avoid that. “Owners expense” aside—and that didn’t belong to corporate America anyhow—we’d found many more typos on individually made signs, the ones run off quickly in the store’s back office.

  Benjamin summed things up. “Okay, so the more independently owned shops you have, the more typos we’re likely to find. So now we know where to go.”

  Yes, but no—he didn’t get it. He didn’t see the significance. “But I like these places better!”

  “So do I. The whole real America thing isn’t about urban versus rural; it’s identity versus … Walmart.”

  I stood up, clenching my fists. Yes, yes, valid point, but still. “Benjamin, I—” I didn’t know what I meant, or maybe I didn’t want to vocalize it, but I flailed in a mental whirlpool, and I had to face the fact that my mission could be a mistake. It’d been impossible to know it when I started out, but the standards I graded on were flunking the wrong people. The soulless, concrete wastelands of strip malls and big-box stores that all sold the same stuff, I gave a clean bill of grammatical health, and then I came to these places, these living last bastions of independent thought and color and energy, and I corrected them. “Are we—am I—Look. What if typos are an element of this kind of setting?” I spread my hands out wide, as if to encompass all of Santa Fe, offering it a ride upon my shoulders like Atlas’s burden. “Am I destroying a part of its character? What if I’m an agent of the very homogenization I despise, waltzing into town and demanding that everyone stick to our rigid grammatical standard, helping corporate agents claim these idylls by ‘cleaning up’ the language like a new high-rise ‘cleans up’ the area by evicting the poorer tenants?”

  “Whoa!” Benjamin cut me short. “Dude, no smoking our dogs aloud. Calm down.”

  He had a point. I took a deep breath. Then he suggested that while it wasn’t a bad idea to ask these hard questions, I didn’t have to give up immediately. I hadn’t explicitly suggested that, but he was right that I’d considered stopping the typo hunt right there on that square. It seemed like a perfect moment for true reckoning, that I could look back and say, “A fajita opened my sinuses and then Santa Fe opened my eyes to the evil I’d wrought!” Benjamin asked if I wanted to head anywhere else, offering that we could play tourists since we’d found a sizable chunk of typos already. I did want to see that cathedral, so we headed that way, after one last thorough nose-blowing.

  As we left the park Benjamin reiterated that bringing these questions to the forefront could be healthy. “Everything we do raises contradictions. It’s the people who examine them and work to resolve them who’ll succeed every time. I have to say, you’ve hit some valid points, and I don’t know what to tell you, but let’s enjoy the beautiful day and not worry about it for now.” Thus we moved from questions toward a destination many chose for answers.

  We entered the enormous barrel-vaulted nave of the cathedral. We passed the eight-sided baptismal font in silence and admired the wall of saints and sainthood candidates on the far wall. A display showed that artwork in miniature, with the addition of names. We leaned down to see who was who, and what I saw rattled my heathen bones. They’d identified Saint Francis of “Assissi” in the very Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi. The extra s didn’t jump out at me like usual typos, didn’t merely offend my delicate sensibilities. No, this spawn of the Evil One screamed with a thousand banshee wails, for it knew I wouldn’t dare correct this error sitting on an ancient-looking placard on church property. Some things were sacred, and though I might be the only typo hunter around, I dared not presume to be a skilled enough artisan to exorcise this thing that transfigured a venerated saint into a paragon of error (not to mention what the extra s does to the pronunciation of the word; the Catholic Church would not approve).

  Perhaps because I seemed so enraptured by the exhibit, Juan, one of the tour guides for the cathedral, approached us. Benjamin thought that he shattered the quiet and general sense of peace, but for me that peace had already been slain by a single s. A friendly older gent, Juan didn’t hesitate to fill us in on any cathedral trivia we had questions about, as well as things we had not yet thought to question, so Benjamin eventually warmed to the garrulous chaper-one. I also sensed that with Juan lay my best chance for seeing the error corrected. After we’d chatted long enough to confirm that he sincerely cared about the place and about educating its visitors, I gestured back toward the exhibit that named the people on the far wall. Immediately he began telling us stories explaining why these individuals had been chosen for the cathedral’s coveted Top 15. By taking a backward step after every new anecdote of Juan’s, I managed to get him to follow me.

  Now I’d gotten him close to the exhibit, and then I stopped and stared at his name tag again. No! Betrayed at every turn in this my Gethsemane. By some inconceivable oversight, his name tag listed him as an official tour guide for the St. “Frances” Cathedral. The venerable saint’s sister? The typos had now gone mobile on us.* “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I lied. “But this is St. Francis Cathedral, right?”

  He confirmed that it was, giving me a funny look, perhaps wondering what he’d said that had made me so incredulous. I explained by indicating his name tag, which had swapped its i for an e. “Well, you know, the Spanish have their own way of spelling things,” he replied with a dismissive wave of his hand, a slight eye roll, as if to add “those crazy Spanish.” A quick glance at Benjamin’s wide eyes confirmed my own reaction. The Spanish version was, in fact, Francisco. If we’d been talking about Saint Francis’s original Italian name, Giovanni Francesco Bernardone, that argument would have held more water. But no, the church took its name from old Giovanni’s Latinized name. It was a goof, a flub, and no cross-cultural shrug could deny it—or the exhibit error. I had now caught misspellings of both Francis and Assisi in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi!

  Juan had wandered off on another story, and as soon as I sensed the end of it, I pointed down at Assissi. How would he defend this one? He fed me the same line. “I believe that’s the Spanish way of spelling it.”

  His repeated calumnies revealed his allegiance once and for all: this guide served a dark idol. No powers of mine could stand against the unholy agency of Juan’s denial. I don’t remember leaving t
he cathedral, but the next thing I knew I was standing on the terrace out front. “You okay?” Benjamin asked me.

  I nodded, though I still felt dizzy.

  He smirked at me. “Still want to give up your mission?”

  I shook my head firmly. The questions and doubts plaguing my mind when I’d entered that building had been scrubbed away by the vinegary solution of St. Frances of Assissi. Ask, and ye shall receive—but be careful what you ask for. I squinted in the sunlight, still feeling unsteady. I decided I’d had enough for one day, and we retired to our dwelling among the donkeys.

  “Frances,” it turned out, had been our ninetieth typo found. Benjamin suggested we press for an unprecedented ten typos the next day. “If we hit one hundred tomorrow with a big day like that,” he argued, “we could take the day off at the Grand Canyon, since there won’t exactly be a lot of text scrawled on the canyon walls anyway. You could use a day off, Deck. It’d be good for you.” I agreed. One day off for actual tourism wouldn’t be bad. We’d be seeing the Grand Goldang Canyon, after all. Benjamin wasn’t telling me something, but I let that pass, too.

  We stared up for a while at the clear night skies, which allowed for extraordinary stargazing, and then headed back inside the cabin. I admired my new cowboy hat one last time in the bathroom’s streaked mirror. Let this be a symbol, I thought, of the inarguable importance of the mission, a continual reminder to me of my realizations in Santa Fe. Henceforth, when I put the hat on, I would assume my League identity—the righteous marker-slinger.

  “No smoking for donkeys allowed,” Benjamin muttered as he drifted to sleep in the lower bunk. I relaxed in my own bed, relieved and grateful that this day had ended, but also drawing a renewed sense of purpose over myself like a Pueblo blanket. The next day, everything would change.

  As we crossed the Arizona border the next morning, Benjamin literally cried out. I’d occasionally exaggerated our reactions when scribing the blog, but in this case it was absolutely true. Mid-sentence, Benjamin interrupted himself with a Charlie Brown–like “Argghug-ghhhh!” The first thing we saw in Arizona was an errant apostrophe the size of my companion’s head.