I asked a man standing outside a hardware shop whether the footpath behind the fuel station went up to the ridge. He said yes. I asked whether it went all the way to the top. He said yes. I asked whether it was closer to two hours or four. He said yes.
He was not making fun of me. I have turned that morning over a lot since, and I am fairly sure he was being generous with the only thing he had on hand, which was agreement. I had turned up at his doorway with a phone map, a daypack, and a face full of hope, and he did not want to send me away with nothing. So he gave me three yeses. I walked off feeling informed, which turns out to be a completely different condition from being informed.
The path ended twenty five minutes later at a concrete water tank with a padlocked lid. Past the tank there was thorn scrub and a slope of loose grey stones and no path at all. I sat on the lid and ate the sandwich I had been saving for the ridge.
Agreement is not information
The failure that day was mine, and it was structural. I asked three closed questions in a row, each one carrying its own preferred answer inside it. Does it go up? Does it go all the way? Two hours or four? Every one of those is easier to nod at than to interrogate. If you hand somebody a sentence with a yes already built into it, a lot of people will hand the yes back, especially if they are being asked by a stranger who clearly wants a particular shape of reply.
I do this too. If a person stops me on a street I half know and asks whether the bakery on the corner opens on Sundays, I feel the pull to produce something. Not knowing feels like a small failure of hospitality. Multiply that by a stranger with a pack who has obviously come a long way, and the pressure to produce an answer gets heavy. I was not asking him for directions. I was asking him to help me, and he did, in the way that was available.
The question that has a wrong answer in it
What I do now is ask something that costs a little to get wrong. Not a trap, just a question whose answer would be visibly hollow if the person did not actually know.
The best one I have found is: when did you last go up there yourself? It is not aggressive. People answer it happily. And the answer sorts itself. Last spring is a real answer. My brother does it every week is a real answer, and it also hands me a better person to ask. I have never been up, but you should ask at the shop by the bridge is the most useful answer of the three, and people give it readily once the question makes clear that first hand knowledge is the thing I am after and not just reassurance.
The second one is: what would I see if I had gone too far? A person who has walked a route knows the overshoot landmark. They know the wall, the dead tree, the point where the tarmac restarts. A person who is guessing cannot invent that detail on the spot, and rather than embarrass themselves they will usually just say they are not sure, which is the outcome I want.
People who deal in distance
There is a category of person who is almost always reliable, and it has nothing to do with being friendly or unfriendly. It is people whose work involves distance being true.
Bus conductors know how long things take because they are held to it. Delivery drivers know which roads flood. The woman who ran the drinks stall at the bottom of that same ridge knew exactly how long the real route took, because for years she had been watching people come back down and buy a cold bottle, and she had absorbed the timings the way you absorb the sound of your own kettle.
The man outside the hardware shop was not any of those things. He was a man standing outside a hardware shop, which is a job description I invented for him and then treated as expertise. That was the actual error.
Being wrong costs us different amounts
Here is the part I got embarrassed about later. When somebody guesses wrong for me, I lose two hours and a sandwich. They lose nothing, because I am gone. That asymmetry is not their fault and it is not a defect of character. It is just the shape of the exchange, and it is on me to build my questions around it rather than to be disappointed in people afterwards for a situation I set up.
I also had to stop framing it as anybody misleading me. Nobody misled me. A man in front of a shop was pleasant to a stranger for ninety seconds. I was the one who converted pleasantness into a route plan.
What I actually say now
I open with the fact that I might be about to waste a lot of time, because that gives the other person permission to say they do not know. Something like: I am probably about to walk the wrong way, do you happen to know if anyone uses the path behind the station? The word happen does a lot of work there. It builds in an exit.
Then, if the answer is yes, I ask when they were last on it. Then I ask what I would see if I had overshot. Three questions, maybe forty seconds, and the difference in outcome is enormous.
And when somebody says they do not know, I try to actually thank them for it rather than visibly deflating, because a person who tells you they do not know has done you a much larger favour than a person who agrees with you. It took me an embarrassing number of wrong paths to start believing that in my body and not just on paper.
The follow up I did not expect
I went back to that hardware shop the next morning for a length of cord. The same man was there. I told him the path had stopped at a water tank. He looked genuinely stricken, said something about how the council had cut a new track years ago and he had assumed it linked up, and then he went inside and came out with a boy of about fifteen who did know the way and drew it on the back of a receipt.
So the yeses had not been careless after all. They had been a man believing something slightly outdated about ground he did not personally walk. And the fix was not a better filter for people. It was going back and saying what had happened, which is not a technique so much as ordinary courtesy that also happens to work.