Living without addresses

This morning I got an invitation to go out for lunch later in the week. I was told to meet my host at "the Dinghy Club in Paget". No address, no directions - I knew where Paget was, and could find the water, but after that... 

I emailed back and asked if this was somewhere that everyone knew - the response (along with an anecdotal description of how to find it -"turn left at the chain-link fence", etc.) was that everyone but me knew - but now, I did too!

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a map freak. I study them constantly (often missing what I was supposed to be looking for because I was staring at the page rather than looking out the window). Maps, Michelin guides, Eyewitness Top Tens - you name it, I've bought it and committed it to memory. Nothing makes me feel more complete than visiting a strange city and being able to give random passers-by accurate directions to get where they are going.

Then I moved to Bermuda. It's not that the streets don't have names, or that houses and buildings don't have numbers, it's just that no-one really pays them much mind. All directions are couched in terms of commonly known points of reference. It's probably not a bad idea because road signs (where they exist) tend to only be visible from one direction and not the other. A street that you have passed ten times before traveling west, becomes unmarked when you are searching for it in an eastbound car or bike. Distances are measured in minutes and specifics are addressed in terms of "just before, across from, or just passed" some locally notable landmark. For years I told taxi drivers how to find the school by telling them that it was the "old National Sports Club" just passed the Devonshire Marsh - worked every time! Now that I live here, I find myself slowly devolving into the same practice.

Our house (112A North Shore Road, Unit 4, Devonshire FL03) cannot be found by anyone simply by giving them the address (not even the post office on a regular basis). It is identified as: "the first orange house in Palm Gardens, just before Terceira's Shell station on the North Shore Road coming from town." The market is "at Bull's Head car park"; the bookstore is "by the birdcage"; T-ball practice is "in that churchyard just past White's Market in Warwick". When I tried to give directions the other day to a friend who was looking for the only pub in Hamilton where you can play NTN, I told her that it was at the corner of Front and Parliament. She looked at me quizzically and asked: "That's all well and good, but if I was staring at the Pickled Onion, would I go left or right?"

So, even though the roads have wonderful names like: Point Finger Road; Corkscrew Hill; and Parson's Lane - they never get mentioned. For my Bermudian friends it is a bit of a come down to have to actually resort to numbers and streets to locate an address. The sign that you have truly acclimated, it would seem, is to master the ability to pinpoint a house by visual picture rather than by an alpha-numeric label.

Oh well, the only saving grace for me is that now when someone wants to know specifically what street something is on, my Bermudian colleagues always say - "ask Jim, he'll know!"

Some things never change.