When I was a senior in high school I went driving in a caravan with a bunch of friends to Panama City Beach, Florida. This was an extremely popular vacation destination for teenagers in those days and probably still is. It was an eventful trip even before we arrived. On the way one of our number was tricked into revealing his drug cargo to the police and spent some hours in jail, only arriving much later than we did with some other kids who were in the same boat as he had been. The sting worked like this: the police set up a roadblock along the highway to Florida. It was spring break, so thousands of high school kids were making there way there from all over the country, presumably. Well, the sight of a police roadblock is enough to scare the drugs out of any car, so the unwitting took their bags of leafy stuff or pills or whatever and threw it into the surrounding forest, which is what our friend did. The police, having planted lookouts in the trees, could easily spot the contraband and haul in the offenders. I was lucky enough to be in a car only carrying cases of beer. While approaching the roadblock we worriedly wondered whether drug-sniffing dogs could smell beer, and ultimately decided to sit pat and drive through. The roadblock, of course, was only a decoy, and we drove on to the golden beaches.
While there we went to a party in a stranger’s hotel room and there I met a resident of PCB (as it was sometimes known) who suffered from the weird misconception that west–that is the cardinal direction–is on the left–that is the left-hand side. I, having had a few Buschs, tried to help by qualifying that west is only on the left if you happen to be facing north. He didn’t disagree that west does always correspond to the cardinal direction west, but continued to insist that it’s also the left, wherever you happen to be facing. “You know, like when you say something’s west of here,” he offered, waving his arm to the left. I imagine this would also mean that you’re always facing north, even when you turn left, which introduces all sorts of problems. Anyway, seeing that I wasn’t going to get anywhere and being uncomfortable with his animated insistence, I tried to agree. He didn’t seem convinced of my sincerity, though, and I had to melt into the unruly crowd of the party to escape.
I haven’t gone back to Panama City Beach since then, but I assume they have GPS devices and can find their way around.
