The Worst Thing That Could Happen

One Wrong Turn

I think we can all agree that the 2016 Presidential Election was hell on earth for most Americans. We all have our own dark memories of that time: the general politics, the family arguments, or seeing That One Candidate's name trending and wondering what in the hell he'd said this time. All of those things are bad, to be sure but my biggest memory of the election season has nothing to do with any of those. It was just a memory of one night when I went from happily rapping along to Hamilton to swearing and on the verge of tears.

Let me start from the beginning.

At the time, I was working a terrible minimum-wage retail job. I happened to be working the same day as one of my state's primaries, but not so late that I couldn't still vote. I'd just have to make a run for it. My phone was dying, so I stopped by our store's "dollar" section to get a cheap charger cord, car charging port, and one of those power sticks. The lines were crazy long, and I wasn't in the greatest mood, so part of me reconsidered the purchase. But I did need the stuff, so I pushed past my frustration and got on with things.

I should not that at the time I was driving my dad's car, a 2011 Honda Accord. That meant no built-in GPS. My mom had given me instructions on how to get to the polling place, but I'm really bad with verbal directions. My short term memory is garbage, and I have a tendency to miss landmarks. Additionally, it was pretty late, and my night driving skills are iffy at best. The contrast between the dark around me and the very bright headlines makes things hard. Call it me being an idiot, call it me getting over-stimulated. Same result either way. Still, I wanted to do my civic duty and vote, so I took the risk and started driving in roughly the direction I'd been told to.

Fifteen minutes later, I was parked at a gas station and using the last bit of my phone battery to call my mom.

"You probably drove past it," she said.

Shit, I thought.

By that point it was completely dark out. You know how it is in winter: one second it's bright enough, the next it's so dark you'd swear the sun never existed. On top of that, my phone died only a few seconds after I'd hung up with my mom, so I couldn't use GPS. By that point, even if I'd been able to backtrack and find the place on my own (not likely), I'd be cutting it really close. I was tired; I'd had a long day at work. I figured I'd done my best, I didn't need to feel bad about not voting because of that, and that I could go home without feeling like a terrible citizen. I took a few seconds to dig out the car charger and cord, plugged in my phone, and got back on the road. I had made note of where I'd turned to get to this point. It couldn't be too hard to get back.

Remember what I said earlier about my short-term memory being terrible? Because it is, and the universe gave me a harsh reminder of that.

For the first leg of the journey, everything was fine. It was dark out, sure, but the traffic wasn't too bad, and I even saw a dog chilling near a house along the two-lane back road I was driving down. It was about five minutes after the dog that I realized I didn't recognize this road anymore. I turned off my soundtrack—I think I was on "Yorktown" by that point—and kept a closer eye out for my turn.

Five minutes after that, I knew my turn wasn't coming. I had either driven right past it or gone the wrong way. Either way, I was completely lost. To make things worse, I was lost in the middle of nowhere. I live in one of those places where you can drive one way and find a well-developed, more urban area, and then five minutes the other way and find nothing but fields, houses on large plots of land, and the occasional gas station. It made getting lost very easy. There are few things more stressful than driving forty-five miles an hour down a two-lane road at night with nothing but the occasional house to keep you company.