I grew up in a small canyon where the daily operating procedure of the bus driver was to drop the children off at the mouth of the canyon and wait to ensure that they all made it across the train tracks safely before she drove away. Parents usually lined their cars up along the side of the main road to wait for their children and pick up carpools. Most of the time parents would offer rides to stragglers even if the vehicles were full, but even then it was certainly not uncommon for more than a dozen children to be left to walk home unaccompanied. As one of the families who lived nearer the mouth of the canyon, my siblings and I were more often than not some of the walkers.
There were many aspects of the trek home that deeply influenced my life: the love I gained for mountain air, the joy of solitude, the appreciation for the beauty of autumn. But the single longest-lasting impact from the hundreds if not thousands of times I walked home was destined, strangely enough, to be a mathematical calculation.
I never knew the measurement of the distance from the bus stop to my driveway, but lengthy experience taught me that the range could be traversed in thirty minutes, give or take a few. A brisk walk could bring you home in as few as twenty, but rarely were we undertaking to hurry home to chores. This time lapse remained more or less constant over the years from first grade through high school, when, even after I transferred schools and my mother shuttled us home from a different city, we were nearly always deposited at the mouth of the canyon and told to walk home. I'm sure it was the most peaceful half hour my mother got to enjoy all day.
I was seven when I first asked my mother how long the road was that we traipsed every day. Let me spare a moment here to say that I had implicit faith in my mother for years. She was a former teacher and had the habit of answering us honestly except for when she answered us sardonically, a practice I had not yet learned to recognize. So when I asked her how long the road was, I believed her entirely when she shrugged and said, "I dunno. Probably a tenth of a mile."
This distance calculation became my sole frame of reference for all distances ever mentioned. It was my only experience with miles. People talked about miles all the time, but it's impossible for a seven-year-old to really picture that. Now I knew. A mile was ten walks home.
The first difficulty I encountered came the following spring when our third-grade teacher started a track and field focus in P.E. She announced that for P.E. that day we were all going to run a mile and a half, which she knew was one and a half times around the school's north field. I thought she was crazy. A mile was ten walks home. Ten of them! One walk home took me half an hour. Now she wants us to run fifteen of them? How long did she think P.E. lasted? Was it even legal for her to make us run for seven hours? The bus leaves in just two!
I began outlining an escape plan all the way to the north field and then stared at it more puzzled than ever. Though the field was certainly large, to circumambulate it one and a half times would certainly not take seven hours. Not unless we walked really, really slow. My explanation for this conundrum was that my teacher had been misinformed about the distance and I should certainly not bring it up to her because who the heck wants to spend the next seven hours marching around this blasted field? Not I. I ran the requisite length in about twenty-five minutes and learned that day that I had a mild form of asthma. See? School teaches you all kinds of things.
That was only the most overt problem I had with understanding distance. I learned at some point that a mile broke down into five thousand two hundred eighty feet. One tenth of that was five hundred twenty-eight feet. It took the average child (see I knew I was average because other children walked home with me and it took us all the same time) thirty minutes to cover five hundred twenty-eight feet. Therefore, per my completely accurate calculations, football fields were either impossible or sports people didn't know what a yard was. My money was on the latter.
I learned about the history of the marathon in fifth grade. People actually run marathons today? What a barbaric tradition! That's twenty-six miles! You know the guy who ran the first marathon died, right? And for good reason! That's two hundred sixty walks home! People were doing that in four hours! How were they not all dead? Running a marathon should have the same population effect as the black plague!
My understanding of miles continued far, far longer than it should have. It was not until I was nineteen and regularly driving myself home that I truly began to question the answer my mother had given me twelve years before. One day I simply reset the odometer as I crossed the tracks and then glanced down at it when I reached home. I stared at it for a minute and walked into the house to find my dad.
"Dad," I said, "you might want to check the odometer on the Toyota. It says the drive home from the tracks is a mile."
Lesson: When it's your mental math versus precise Japanese mechanics, the Japanese win every time. Learn to question yourself.
At least she only told me it was a half mile....
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