I Can Kill You With My Brain

Recently I took a little road trip after work to visit someone.  While I knew the way to get to my destination via interstate highways, I still punched the address into my GPS to see what it came up with for a route.  Depending on the time of day and traffic, I can get a much different and faster route from the GPS than the one I’m aware of.  This was just such a case, as the GPS served up a mostly rural route of state roads that did not include a single fraction of a mile on the interstate.

As I rolled through the country on a nice, almost-spring evening, I paid more attention to the scenery and my surroundings than I usually do.  Coming into a small town I did not know of, I glanced over to the GPS to learn it’s name.  I couldn’t find the name of the town anywhere on the screen, but I did notice that there was a waterway named Stony Creek.  I found this odd, as I didn’t see a waterway from my window when I was looking out it just moments before.  I checked again.

Nope.  I could not find Stony Creek, but I did find a large ditch that may have carried water at some time in the past.  I doubted that this was the aforementioned Stony Creek.  We were in the middle of a spring thaw, there was water flowing everywhere, even in places that it shouldn’t, yet this Stony Creek was bone dry.

Also, it was not stony.  Not at all.  It was muddy and full of twigs.  Not even branches, just twigs.  And piles of leaves from 2008’s autumn season.  Some trash, too.  All kinds of things were in this ditch, but not one of them was a stone, let alone enough stones that would lead you to describe it as “stony”.

Yet, according to my GPS, this had to be Stony Creek.

I was instantly upset at Mother Nature.  Why give us Stony Creek and then have it not be filled with water and stones?  I wanted to shake my fist at Mother Nature and her poorly named natural occurrence.  Then I had an “oh duh” moment as I realized that it’s not Mother Nature’s fault at all.  Mother Nature didn’t name this spot Stony Creek, but rather, some guy did.  Some guy that had clearly never seen a stone or heard the comforting babble of a beautiful creek.  I’m guessing it was some blind, deaf guy that got tricked into naming a muddy ditch by his idiot friends.