We Will Always Have Whhyyy?!

Twice a month I drive to the Salt Lake City airport. Twice a month I drive back. I have made the trip dozens of times now, and all four times every month, I use my GPS.

I do not need it. The route is not complicated. There is one major freeway and a few well-marked exits and the airport is the kind of large, signed destination that practically reaches out and grabs you as you approach. I could draw the route on a napkin. If you woke me up at three in the morning and asked me how to get there, I could probably tell you. And yet the GPS is on. It is always on. The little voice tells me to merge onto I-80 West, and I merge onto I-80 West, the same way I would have merged anyway, because the voice is now part of the merging.

I do not remember when this started. There was no decision. There was a phase, somewhere around the time the phone got good enough at it, when I would check the route before leaving and then drive on my own knowledge. Then there was a phase when I would start the GPS but mute it, so the screen was a kind of confirmation but the voice did not narrate. Then the voice came back on, and the screen and the voice together became the way I drive, even on routes I know better than those old hometown streets I rode my bike up and down every day. The phone is now my co-pilot in the most literal sense. I am not navigating. I am having my journey narrated.

The thing I notice, on the drives when I do remember to notice, is not that I have forgotten how to get to the airport. I have not. The route is in there, intact, the way a song you have not sung in years is still in there, in the back of your mind. What I have lost is the experience of using the route. Of being the person who knows. Of arriving at the airport because I drove to it rather than because I followed instructions to it. The airport is the same airport. The drive is the same drive. But something about the relationship between me and the road is different, and the difference is the cost this essay is going to acknowledge.

* * *

On a recent drive to the airport, somewhere after the merge on to I-80, I found myself thinking about another drive.

It was the late nineties. A friend and I were heading from where we lived in South Florida to Port St. Lucie to see the Mets at spring training. For most, Port St. Lucie was not the kind of place anyone went on purpose. The phrase ‘spring training destination’ implied something more like Vero Beach, with palm trees and decent restaurants and an air of half-vacation. Port St. Lucie did not have that air. Port St. Lucie had the Mets, and it did not have much else, and you went there because you were a Mets fan or because somebody you cared about was.

About thirty minutes out, we stopped at a gas station. We asked the cashier how to find a particular road. We knew from the Rand McNally map that it led into town. We told her we were trying to get to Port St Lucie.

From back in the line, a voice rang out. Whhyyy?!

The man who said it had a thick country accent and the kind of timing that suggested he had been waiting all day for somebody to give him this opening. The ‘why’ did not mean what is your reason. The ‘why’ meant what could possibly be wrong with you.

My friend and I still say it to each other frequently, almost thirty years later, in the same accent. We said it to each other, just a month ago, in fact. When his New York Giants drafted a player he didn’t like in the second round, he said Whhyyy?! It has a 100% hit rate. We laugh every time. It is one of those phrases that means nothing to anyone else and everything to us.

There was another man in the gas station on that day. He was filling up at the next pump and he had overheard the exchange inside. He asked, in the way one stranger asks another at a Florida gas station, “You guys Mets fans?”

I was not. My friend was. So was the man at the pump. They got to talking, and I half-listened while I worked the nozzle, and when my friend got back in the car he said, “Follow that guy. He’s going to the game too.”

We followed him and ended up talking to him again before the game. He was a regular at spring training, the kind of person who had been to a hundred of these. We bought him a hot dog by way of thanks, and he laughed and said he would have shown us where to go for nothing.

I have thought about that gas station, off and on, for almost thirty years.

I do not know what that day was for him. I have no idea if he remembered it the next week, or told his wife about it that night, if he had heard the Whhyyy?! and shared it with a friend the way my friend and I kept it all these years. He may have forgotten the whole thing inside an hour. But it is just as possible that he did not. It is also possible that being the person who knew, the person two strangers needed long enough to follow him into a ballpark, was a small good moment in an ordinary day. It is possible he told the story sometimes, the way we still tell ours.

I find myself thinking about him more often than I would have expected. Not about him specifically. About what he had, in that moment, that a 2026 version of him would not have. The pleasure of being asked the way. The small expansion that happens in a person when somebody else needs what they know. The moment when a stranger is briefly your responsibility, and you discover, almost by accident, that you have something to give them.

GPS did not take that away from us directly. We are still allowed to be useful to each other. But the conditions that produced those moments are certainly not as frequent. The conditions under which a stranger at a gas station became the most important person in our trip, those conditions have been quietly removed. The need is no longer there to call them out. The phone has the road now. The phone knows the way. The man at the next pump is just a man at the next pump.

* * *

The other thing I think about a lot is what had to be true for that moment to happen.

We had to stop somewhere. We had to stop specifically at a place where strangers passed through on their way to somewhere else, where a person from a hundred miles up the road and a person from two miles down it might find themselves in line at the same counter for two minutes. We had to ask the directions. The cashier had to be the kind of cashier who answered, in the kind of voice that carried far enough to be overheard. The man behind us in line had to be the kind of man who said Whhyyy?! out loud rather than thinking it. The other man had to be at the next pump rather than the one across the way. He had to overhear. He had to care enough to ask whether we were Mets fans. He had to be going to the same game.

None of it had to happen. Each piece of it was a coincidence stacked on a coincidence. The gas station was a junction we did not know was a junction. The Mets fan was a stranger we did not know we were going to meet. The hot dog was a thank-you for a kindness we had not known we were going to need.

That kind of moment is what a road trip used to be made of. Not the destination. The accumulation of small accidents in between, the ones that produced things you would only later realize you had collected. The gas station was not on the itinerary. The conversation was not on the itinerary. The itinerary, in fact, was barely an itinerary at all. It was a starting point and an ending point and a few hours of road in between, and the road in between was where the trip actually happened.

GPS did not remove this directly. The road is still there. The gas stations are still there. But the architecture that made the moment possible has been quietly disassembled. We do not need to ask anymore. We do not need to stop, except for fuel. The route is on the phone. The phone does not introduce you to anyone. The phone does not, having heard you were heading to a Mets game, mention that it is heading there too. The phone does not laugh at where you are going. Or maybe it does and I just do not have that version of the app yet.

The trip still happens. The arrival still happens. The gas station is still on the side of the road. But the gas station is now a place you pass through with your eyes on a screen. Whatever it might have produced is no longer being produced, because the conditions that produced it have been quietly removed.

* * *

Each of the essays in this substack is about a trade. The railroad standardized time and gave us the modern day. We gave up the noon of our specific sky. The calendar concentrates love and adoration on specific dates. We gave up the rest of the year. GPS gives us routes. We gave up the moments that used to live between us and them.

What I notice, when I sit with the GPS version of the trade, is that I do not feel one way or another about it. Some trades I am not sorry for. Some I would undo if I could. This one I am genuinely uncertain about. I get lost less often and have less anxiety about the unknown. On the other side, I would not trade away the summers my mother and I spent on mapped-out vacations, the ones I might have found a little less interesting if I had been born twenty years later. I feel lucky, in a strange way, to have lived inside both versions of the world. To have known what it was to ask a stranger the way and to have known what it is to never need to.

What I am grateful to have is Whhyyy?!

I would not have heard it in 2026. The man would still be in line, but we would have no reason for me to ask how to get to the stadium. My friend and I would not have met the Mets fan, and he wouldn’t have had the gratification that comes with helping out two strangers.

The trip would have happened. The game would have happened. But the Whhyyy?! would not have. And I am lucky that it did. A part of me feels a small sadness for the people who will never have their own version of it. Some moment that did not have to happen and yet did, sitting between them and a friend for thirty years, creating a memory that could not have been mapped out.