Have you ever had the nightmare in which you can't get out? Maybe you're trapped in a maze, a dark dungeon or in the locker-clad halls of your high school with no clothes on. Lost and confused, you feel frantic as you try to find your way.
This is no nightmare, my fellow students; this is driving in Muncie.
Last May, I ventured to our little town for the first time with a fresh-off-the-Internet list of available apartments and a Mapquest itinerary, blissfully unaware that my new home was the Missing Road Sign Capital of the World.
For instance, when finding the road on which I now live, there is a road sign on only one side of the main intersection, invisible, of course, to those traveling in the other three directions. Luckily, I had purchased a street map at a gas station and was able to decode the missing links in time for my apartment appointments.
In a town of 60,000 residents, why does this happen? My hometown of barely 1,000 residents - Albany, Ohio - has a sign at every corner.
Only two reasons come to mind as to why Muncie is a place of so little direction. The first is simple disregard. Perhaps road signs have fallen down or been stolen over the years and no one has bothered to replace them, or local leaders are too busy with other matters to take action. This is understandable, although clearly negligent.
The second reason invokes the mentality of being "from around here" that is seen in so many small towns across America: most everyone is from around here, so they already know where everything is. There's nothing wrong with this thought process, but it makes things significantly more difficult for visitors; seeing as Muncie contains not only a mid-size public university but also a large hospital and stadium, busy downtown and is close to a county airport, one could assume that there would be a fair amount of people "from other places" at any given time. Of course there are individuals who never leave their hometown, but in today's increasingly mobile world of work and travel, it is foolish to make the "from around here" assumption to justify slacking off with the traffic indicators.
Instead of being able to give my friends and family specific directions to my house, I've resorted to using vague approximations and landmarks to describe where I live. To top it off, my apartment building doesn't even have a visible street number.
Don't get me wrong, Muncie is a nice enough place. It's empowering to have more than just a Wal-Mart when shopping needs to be done, and admittedly, I haven't met a single local who has been in the least way rude. Always willing to lend a quarter or give tips for good eatin' on the town, Hoosiers have so far presented themselves to me in the most favorable of lights. But apparently they all know exactly how to get exactly where they're going.
I consider myself a fairly resourceful person, but I admit I had a difficult time navigating through the labyrinth of nameless streets that is Muncie, Indiana. And I'm not the only one; a number of my classmates reported similar confusion. Here's to the hope that Muncie's responsible parties will wake up and smell the exhaust of misguided out-of-towners like myself.
Write to Marie at
mmzatezalo@bsu.edu
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