Jim Klobuchar, Ecumen "Changing Aging" contributor:  In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor.  He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota’s senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.

The Hazards of Finding Direction in Our Lives

Since the Neanderthals found their way around by tracking the sun, the make-life-easier industries have been tying to rescue us from simplicity.

We have graduated into a frenzy of automated route-finding symbolized by the GPS, sitting imperiously on millions of dashboards. It is the electronic successor to St. Christopher, who for decades was the patron saint of travelers until being downgraded from sainthood 30 years ago by the Vatican’s well-intended but somewhat rash housecleaning of border-line saints. My miseries of a week ago in southern Minnesota made me yearn for the now-mothballed services of.Christopher, who is sadly functioning now in the minor leagues of sainthood.

You know about the speed-of-light advances in direction finding since the compass and road map. The pioneers before the compass were craftier folk like Eskimoes and Scandinavians. They found that if you drew an imaginary line between the two outlying stars of the Big Dipper, and multiplied that distance by five, you would find your way infallibly to the North Star. This came to be called True North. That was an illusion, because there is another force of nature called magnetic deviation, which can be caused by the presence of mineral deposits on the earth, and can land you in the middle of a lake if you fly light planes and don’t know about deviation..

Later the on-line masterminds created interactive road maps that could take you from your doorstep to your favorite casino in the Mojavi Desert and, allowing for a pizza stop in Wichita, come within inches of measuring the precise distance and elapsed time. Like many, I relied on this flawless system until I found myself at night in the middle of a country bridge that literally led nowhere, abandoned two years before.

Nonetheless I bought my highly intelligent wife a $300 GPS for her birthday three years ago, knowing her fondness for the latest miracle devices but aware of her short attention span for gadgets. She uses it twice a year and we can now happily follow the GPS to the nearest Walgreen’s, a half mile and one left turn from our house.

So a week ago I was scoping out the route of a bike ride I organize annually, with a friend who enjoys these missions. Although we rode in my car, he brought along his personal GPS, realizing my high-tech limitations I told him I’d grown up in northern Minnesota where inventive iron miners developed makeshift devices to serve as compasses. One of theirs had run into another hunter from the cities. The city hunter noticed the local hunter staring into the reflectorized bottom of a snuff can. “Does that tell you directions?” the visitor asked. “No,” the local replied glumly, “but it does tell you who’s lost.”

As he drove toward a town in southeastern Minnesota I advised my friend to head for Highway 16. I dozed off but awoke to voices. It turned out there was a state AND a county 16, heading in different directions. And the authoritative female voice coming from the GPS was telling us to take Highway 16. But there were two voices, I swear. “The voice on the GPS is a robot,” I said to my friend, “why are you yelling at a robot? She can’t hear.”

He denied yelling at the invisible robot. I was conciliatory. “Probably mistaken,” I said. “Which route are you taking?”

“Highway 16,” he said cryptically. After considering a coin flip, somebody got out a road map. It worked.

You could almost hear St. Christopher applauding.