Losing a Night and Car in Cambridge, Mass.

To start with, the car was found.

When I was a kid, I read a bunch of books about World War II, and I remember being struck by the role of luck in the outcome of huge battles. This was particularly true in the naval battles of the Pacific. So for instance the commander of an aircraft carrier might send out a fan of search aircraft looking for the enemy. And exactly one of those search planes would have engine trouble and turn back, and that, as luck would have it, is exactly where the enemy aircraft carrier was lurking. Or the search pilot would spot the enemy aircraft carrier and, as luck would have it, his radio would fail. Or a single cloud would obscure his view at exactly the crucial moment. “For want of a nail” is an old story, but I was haunted by how these accidents could send carriers to the bottom and swing the tide of war.

The Campaigns of the Pacific War, Naval Analysis Division, 1946

I was playing for lower stakes this weekend. But I kept flashing back on those images of airplanes searching the vastness of the Pacific for the information that would win the day. Why? Because I was searching the vastness of central Cambridge, Massachusetts. Let’s turn back the clock and review the ship’s log.

My quiet Saturday afternoon at home was interrupted by a call from my kid, who had just met a friend near Central Square in Cambridge. “Dad, I can’t remember where I parked the car. I can’t find it.” It was cold and rainy, and they had already spent an hour and half searching without success. I hopped in the car and headed into town. After I picked them up, we began cruising around. I started asking helpful questions like “You really can’t remember anything about where you parked it?” and “Really? You can’t remember anything about where you parked it?” The closest thing we could get to a search area was “a small street somewhere between Harvard Square and Cambridge City Hall.” Then inspiration struck. Here was the incisive question that would surely crack this case wide open: “Are you absolutely certain? You can’t remember anything about where you parked it?” This failed to have the desired effect, so we moved from interrogation to methodical search.

By now it was dark and pouring rain. The streets of central Cambridge are clotted and double-knotted and frequently one-way in the least helpful direction. They generally conspire to dump you back onto Mass Ave, thereby draining you into the soul-sucking vortex of Central Square. Clawing against this entropy, we had to find some way to cover every likely lane and side street. Overlook a single one and the car is as good as gone.

Fortunately, I had just the tool. I have a hiking app called Footpath that leaves a real-time trail showing where you’ve been. So as we drove down each street, we could see a snail’s trail of exactly where we’d been and steer toward paths not yet beslimed. I was pretty convinced the missing car had not been stolen, but after an hour and a half, we had generated this dispiriting map. (The numbers are mile markers, and the colors correspond to how fast we were going.)

Image generated by Footpath Elite

Maybe the car had been stolen after all? At any rate, I was spent for the night. We stopped in at Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, ordered a cheeseburger, and rang up the Cambridge Police. I have nothing but praise for the police who helped us. They actually sent a cop to meet us at Mr. Bartley’s. Officer Ames was patient and kind, someone who makes you proud to pay taxes. I admitted that we might have just lost track of the car, but he let us file a stolen vehicle report anyway, just in case.

The next day, while I was busy elsewhere, my kid took the bus back to Central Square and resumed searching on foot in the very few places we hadn’t looked the night before. Around noon I got the call: “I found it!” “Where was it?” Friend, that car was at the location in the map above indicated by the red star. Said my wise child, “It was in the one place we didn’t look!” Ha.

In the end, it was an exercise in frustration, but also a triumph of methodology. That car sure enough was in a place we hadn’t looked, and only bad luck prevented us from finding it sooner. Really bad luck. I’m just glad there was no enemy aircraft carrier double-parked around the corner on Ellery Street. I was also left with an abiding appreciation of the remarkable amount of shit you can do with a modern smartphone. For two hours, we were continuously mapping, getting directions, making phone calls, researching stolen car protocols, querying car insurance forms, looking up Vehicle Identification Numbers on Dropbox, and locating nearby cheeseburger vendors. As annoying as the whole exercise was, at the end I had to pick up my phone and say “Thanks, little guy.” And happily, my kid and I have already reached that point in the future where we can look back on this episode and laugh.

Ha.