A man refilling a water container told me the place I was looking for was very close, and he said it in a way that made me put my map away. It was nine kilometres. There was no shade for the first six of them. I arrived at four in the afternoon with a headache and a strong sense that I had been lied to, which was wrong, and it took me most of the following week to work out why it was wrong.
He was right. It was very close. He had a motorbike leaning against the wall behind him.
Distance is a report about a vehicle
When somebody tells you how far something is, they are not reading a number off a map. They are running a small simulation of themselves going there and reporting how that feels. The output of that simulation depends entirely on what they would be sitting on.
Nine kilometres on a motorbike on a decent road is eleven minutes and no thought at all. It is the distance to a shop. It is so unremarkable that calling it far would be a strange thing to say. He answered honestly, in his own units, and I converted the answer into mine without doing any conversion.
The reverse happens just as often. An older woman at a gate once told me a village was far, and I believed her and did not go, and later found out it was a twenty minute walk on the flat. Far, for her, meant far for her knees on that particular morning. Also true. Also not about kilometres.
The question that fixes it
I stopped asking how far. I now ask how long it takes to walk, and if the person hesitates, I ask how long it takes them to get there, and then how.
How long does it take you to get there, and how do you go. Two clauses. The second clause is the one that does the work, because it hands me the conversion factor. If they say twenty minutes on the bike, I can do arithmetic. If they say twenty minutes walking, I know something entirely different.
The other question I like is: is there anywhere to get water between here and there. This is not really a question about water. It is a question that forces the person to picture the actual ground in sequence, and in picturing it they usually volunteer the climb, the junction, the stretch with no shade. I have got more useful route information out of asking about water than out of asking about routes.
Just there
There is a phrase I have now heard some version of in enough places that I treat it as a category rather than a local quirk. It is the phrase that means just there, or just up, or just behind. It is almost never a measurement. It is a reassurance, and its actual meaning is something like: you are on the right track and you do not need to worry.
Which is genuinely useful information. It just is not distance information, and I spent years hearing it as distance information and then being annoyed. The annoyance was me demanding that a kind sentence be a precise one.
Now when I hear it I take the reassurance, say thanks, and separately ask about time and legs. Both things can be true. You are on the right track, and it is another hour.
The one time being wrong worked out
A boy of about ten, sitting on a wall with a younger sibling, told me a lake was five minutes away. It was closer to fifty. I do not think he was inventing anything. I think five minutes was his word for soon.
What saved that afternoon was that a woman hanging washing overheard the exchange, said something to him in a tone I understood perfectly without any of the words, and then came out to the road and told me, using her fingers and the sun, that it was more like an hour and that I should fill my bottle first. She pointed at a tap.
So the correction came from the ordinary social machinery of a street where people are within earshot of each other. That happens a lot more than my worrying suggests it will. If I ask my question out loud, in the open, at normal volume rather than in a private huddle, somebody else usually joins in. The huddle is the mistake. Asking quietly, as if I am imposing, removes the only correction mechanism available.
My own numbers are also wrong
It would be tidier if this were a story about other people’s estimates being unreliable, but my own are worse. I consistently underestimate uphill and overestimate my own speed at the end of a day. I once told somebody a beach was ten minutes from where we stood, because it had been ten minutes when I walked it in the morning going downhill and empty handed.
I have started padding by a fixed amount when I give directions, and saying out loud what I am basing it on. It took me forty minutes but I walk fast and I was not carrying anything. That sentence costs nothing and it hands the other person the conversion factor I spent years not asking for.
What near actually encodes
I think near and far are not really about effort either, in the end. They are about whether a place is inside somebody’s ordinary week.
The place a person goes for bread is near, regardless of the number. The place a person went once, for a funeral, eleven years ago, is far, even if it is closer. The nine kilometre place was near to the man with the water container because there was presumably a reason he went there, routinely, without thinking about it.
Which means the answer I get is a small piece of information about that person’s life, and if I listen to it that way instead of as a failed measurement, it is more interesting than the number I wanted. I did not get a distance that day. I got the shape of somebody’s normal radius, and a headache, and eventually the understanding that the headache was entirely my own doing.