The Great Typo Hunt

by Jeff Deck

  It was time to go public with my intentions. I hoped my trip idea had grown a sufficiently leathery shell.

  To recruit allies, I’d have to somehow thwart the considerable barricades thrown up by practical, responsible life. Most of my friends were gainfully employed and thus not likely to accompany me on the road for a dozen weeks. I could try for a rotating lineup of roadmates, but taking off work for even a third or a quarter of that time would be out of the question for normal folks. The standard clauses of the American dream only included two weeks of vacation a year. Still, I knew at least one person who would risk it all for a stab at true adventure and righteous action.

  “Dude!” Benjamin hollered into the phone without preamble. “I’m so done.”

  “Hi?”

  “That’s it; I’ve had enough. I’m quitting my job.”

  Benjamin D. Herson had skipped our reunion, but I already knew what he’d been up to the last five years. Back in D.C., we’d been roommates, holding down jobs while we co-wrote an epic novel about two ordinary guys beating up evil frat boys. He would come home from his night shift at the bookstore as I was heading off to edit Rocks & Minerals, and slip me the day’s bus transfer, which I would dutifully return that evening before he left the apartment for more overnight shelving. My only regret about moving back to New England had been leaving my old friend behind.

  “You’re leaving the bookstore?” This shocked me to the core. When asked once why, if he loved his job so much, he didn’t marry it, Benjamin had replied that he proposed to it late one night, in the hallowed aisle between the Architecture and Household Repairs shelves. It had played coy, and now it had broken his heart.

  “Yes, and I’m going to hike the Appalachian Trail next year.”

  “Really? I’m planning on taking a road trip next year.” I wanted to ease sideways into discussing my idea.

  “Cool, so we’re both heading off on adventures.”

  “So speaking of our adventures,” I said.

  “Oh yeah! My brother was going to come on the trail, but he’s married now. So he’s out. Want to hike New Hampshire with me?”

  “Hm.”

  “That’s okay, Deck. You’ve got time to think about it.”

  “The thing about my road trip is that, while I’m going around, I thought I could also—”

  “When are you going? What time of year?”

  “Probably around—”

  “Because, you know, if you want any company, and you plan it right … I won’t hit the trail until April, so I could potentially do a leg of your trip with you or something.”

  Capital! I thought. He was so raring to go, I hadn’t even had to ask him. Then it occurred to me that Benjamin didn’t drive, had never even bothered to get a learner’s permit. So much for sharing the wheel. Now I merely had to mention that in addition to taking in the sights of our comely nation, we’d also be harassing people about spelling mistakes the whole time.

  “… time to see the country, you know, before it’s gone,” Benjamin was saying.

  “Before the country’s gone?”

  “What? No, the opportunity!”

  “Yes, the opportunity,” I replied, determined now, “and I thought I’d also take the opportunity to correct typos while I’m traveling around.”

  “You want to correct typos around the country?” Benjamin asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Didn’t you write a story about something like that?”

  “No,” I said, “that was just one typo.”

  “On a homeless guy’s sign!”

  Benjamin, as usual, had excellent recall (another desirable trait in typo hunters, who would need to summon the musty old rules of grammar on the fly). A few years back, I had written a short story called “The Missing R,” about a well-meaning editor with a warped sense of how to aid his fellow man. The story had ended with the editor inserting a missing r into a homeless man’s sign (HOMELESS, HUNGY, PLEASE HELP). Obviously the character and I had divergent priorities, but now that I thought about it, perhaps the story had tapped into my subconscious more than I’d realized. That sign, after all, had been based on a real one I’d spotted long ago.

  “Right,” I said. “I don’t think I’d bother with the typos of the destitute.”

  “Because sometimes I think those are intentional.”

  “But what do you think?” I pressed.

  “About what?”

  “The typos! And going around the country fixing them!”

  “I think a road trip’s a great idea,” Benjamin said.

  Someone in the background asked him a question on his lunch break. As Benjamin patiently explained to his co-worker how to go about some arcane inventory procedure, I attempted to mentally regroup.

  “Sorry,” he said. “And I’m not even the inventory supervisor!”

  “Right. So do you think someone could sustain a trip around the country correcting typos? I’m pretty sure they’re everywhere.”

  “Sure. Yeah, typos, man. So this’ll be cross-country, right? As in, all the way across? As long as you can get me to Californ-aye-yay, count me in. L.A.’s stolen a good half dozen of my friends.”

  Benjamin’s endorsement of the actual mission was lukewarm at best, but no matter. I steered us instead toward the proverbial brass tacks. We discussed the dates and found that my plans to head down the East Coast and west across the South in March fit well with Benjamin’s plans to hike the Appalachian Trail. He’d come along until Los Angeles and then come back east to strike out on the Trail (it would be early spring, an ideal time for a northbound hiker starting in Georgia). I’d signed on my first sidekick for almost a month’s worth of trip.

  I savored this initial triumph for a moment or two, then decided to attempt recruiting friends for the latter legs of the trip. I tried to picture the more unconventional types, the ones who would be as open as Benjamin was to exploits and escapades. Then I remembered that my friend Josh Roberts, who lived down in New York City, had been talking about a West Coast road trip for years now. His perfectionist tendencies would have him typo hunting with gusto. He’d jump at this opportunity! I instant-messaged him.

  Sometimes, in the oft-long stretches between seeing each other, I kind of forgot what Josh was like in person. His online persona became the reality, a living screen name that hid the red-haired, bespectacled figure typing away behind it. To some extent, we are our own text, which is why my mission would be important—erroneous signs confer their blemishes on their very owners. Still, the images we project with IMs and social network profiles are hardly a substitute for genuine, three-dimensional people.

  After I’d finished describing my proposed journey, Josh was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Oh my god. You’ll be killed within a week.”

  I feigned indifference, trying for a different angle of appeal. “Probably, but it could at least be funny.”

  “Okay, I do find unintentional misspellings funny,” Josh allowed. “I saw a diner calling itself the ‘All Night Dinner’ once, but I can’t remember where.”

  Yes, I thought, come along for the yuks if you must. Once we were on the road, carrying out actual corrective action, I could train him to focus on the higher goals of the journey. Right now I only had to get him into the passenger seat.

  “Who are you road-tripping with?” he asked.

  “Whoever wants to come along,” I said. Then, cautiously: “So … are you in?”

  “Definitely!” he fired back, to my delight. “I’ve never been to the West Coast. I want to do the leg of your trip that’ll encompass Los Angeles to Seattle. I’d even go up to Vancouver if that were possible. And hey, when we’re in L.A., I can network.”

  Josh worked as a film editor and production assistant in New York. He had some decent gigs with commercials and friends’ projects, but I could picture the greater opportunities that Left Coast connections could produce. Judging by the high-quality editing that I’d seen him do, he deserved a shot at loftier
glories. I imagined he would bring the same exacting discipline to interstate traveling. True, now that I reflected on our past adventures, Josh could also be obnoxious sometimes, but I figured that would be a plus in places like L.A.

  We discussed the financial considerations. Money would be tight for him. Living from gig to gig takes a dire toll on one’s bank account. I’d lit the watchfires of the idea in the turrets of his brain, though, and he would not see them extinguished for anything.

  “I may have to live off ramen, but I will make it happen,” said Josh.

  Now both Benjamin and Josh were on board—no longer would I be a lone typo maverick. We were a team, and we needed a catchy name. Something that captured the scope of our ambitions and that would also look great on a T-shirt. Something like TEAL: the Typo Eradication Advancement League.

  Autumn fell, and I discussed my ambitions openly and frequently now with friends, family, and hapless seatmates on the subway. Their questions helped me realize that typo described some of the errors I would be looking for, but not all. Some errors would be caused by ineducation, not carelessness. Some errors would be scrawled by hand, not typed. They were all worthy quarry, so I would expand the definition of typo for my purposes, to include all types of textual errors. I had emerged from the typo-hunting closet. I began to set up tentative sofa-surfing arrangements with people I knew in various corners of the country. It turned out there were certain geographic limitations to the Jeff Deck social network. I had the West Coast, the Midwest, and the Northeast/East Coast pretty well covered, but there’d be giant housing gaps in the South, the West, and the Great Plains. I needed cheap shelter options or I’d burn through my travel stash in a hurry, so I picked up a guide to reputable U.S. hostels (it was a short book) and Benjamin and I went halfsies on a tent. Hotels would be a last resort, and definitely not resorts.

  In late September a friend invited me to a party down in Allston, near Boston University. I almost didn’t go. It was an eighties occasion, and I had grown weary of such things, having already attended two eighties parties that year. Though I was a child of the decade myself, I never wanted to see parachute pants again. But I was always looking for excuses to talk about my impending mission, so at the last minute I threw on a Nintendo T-shirt and headed for the subway.

  My friend greeted me at the door, wearing a dyed side ponytail, glammed-up eye shadow, and a tied-off Aerosmith shirt. Perhaps, I thought, I should have tried harder. She led me into the living room of her apartment, where the revelers had congregated. In the midst of them, a pretty, lanky brunette corralled chairs for guests. Like me, she had made little concession to the eighties part of the evening, opting for a jean skirt and tights. She threw me a thoroughly genuine smile with a goofy tinge, and I froze. My friend said, “Jeff, this is my new roommate, Jane! She’s from Maine!”

  “Uh,” I said. All the glittering turns of phrase available to me had, in that moment, collapsed into a verbal slag. I had to tear myself away from those wide, warm eyes before I could regain conscious thought.

  “Hi!” said Jane, taking my hand, which I had apparently extended.

  It’s all in the opening line, I thought wildly. Snare her with a brilliant observation or offhand witticism, something that will, in ten words or less, perfectly position you as a captivator of mortal hearts, an unalloyed ingot of allure. What came out was: “What do you do?”

  Jane responded by typing on an invisible keyboard in the air. A web designer, i.e., a geek girl. My heart soared still higher. Then she asked what I did, and I found my stride.

  “At the moment, I am but a lowly administrative assistant,” I said. “But soon, very soon, I will be embarking upon a road trip to correct typos around the country!”

  The room quieted. Or maybe I stopped listening to everyone else as I awaited her response.

  “Sounds like a fun idea,” Jane Connolly said, tacking on an anime-character-like, high-register “uh-huh!” Dazzled by her gracious smile and those hazel eyes, I launched into how I envisioned the trip playing out, burnished with heroic embellishment here and there. She tossed me thoughtful questions, such as what tools I would need to bring with me, how I planned to deal with hostile reactions, and whether I would get people’s permission every time (I hadn’t even thought of that). I thrilled at her attention. She was really listening to me, I thought, not just waiting for someone handsomer or more interesting to wander her way.

  I may have been flattering myself a tad. Asking a lot of questions, I learned later, was a common Jane tactic to mitigate her own shyness. She did loosen up after a while, though, and told me more about herself, about her favorite mystery books and her experiences at a women’s college in western Massachusetts. I ended up talking with her pretty much the whole party, and I snagged her phone number before I left.

  We enjoyed two dates in downtown Boston during the next few weeks. On our third date, Jane came over to my apartment for Chinese dumplings and a screening of some embarrassing videos that I had made during a film course in college, including the adventures of the Phantom Purifier, a hygiene-obsessed superhero portrayed by me in a bathrobe with a tie around my head (also featuring Benjamin as my sidekick, the Soapy Ghost). Then we retired to my bedroom—to play the engaging card game Phase 10, of course. After a few strenuous rounds, we took a break, and Jane’s eyes wandered to that giant map of the U.S. over my bed. I’d slathered the map with a rainbow of sticky notes. Yellow ones indicated places where I knew people. Blue marked second-degree connections. Purple was for hostels. Most of the sticky notes lay along the circuit I’d be taking around the perimeter of the country.

  “Dang,” she swore. “I don’t think I know that many people even in New England.”

  “A lot of them are friends from school,” I demurred. “I could only keep track of them through the wonders of Facebook, honestly.”

  “So this is all for planning your trip?”

  I nodded. “Going to try to crash on as many couches as possible.” Divans, futons, davenports, and settees were also a possibility; anything to keep expenditures down. But I didn’t want to come off as a cheapskate this early in our courtship, so I didn’t elaborate.

  “You’ll have such an amazing adventure,” Jane said. She looked a bit wistful.

  She couldn’t be missing me in advance, I thought. Could she? I chided myself for vanity, but the thought remained. However, I never stopped to consider the perils of missing her. “There’s going to be a website that you can follow,” I blurted.

  For the sake of the greater mission, I had to pave the way for TEAL in the meadows of the InterWeb. I envisioned keeping a blog of the trip so that interested net-trawlers could track my progress. Merely fixing the typos was not enough; I wanted people to know what I’d be doing, and to have a record of every vile typo vanquished. I’d post before and after pictures of each typo and update my kill count at the close of each entry.

  “I see,” she said. Then, casually: “So who’s designing it?”

  This time I got the message. Jane did ply the innards of websites for a living. With her considerable expertise in Flash, she could build an attractive site around the blog. It’d be a much better production than whatever awkward code I could paw together. “Nobody yet,” I said, keeping my tone neutral. “Say, what’s your going rate?”

  “Ten Twizzlers an hour!” she proclaimed, and went off to raid my candy supply.

  After we’d been dating for about three months, I realized that my Weltanschauung had undergone a subtle but measurable shift—Jane was now in everything I saw. No one else had ever cut such a finely limned cookie on the dried batter of my heart. Taking a three-month journey without seeing her at all would be a swift invitation to madness. This became ever clearer as I got down to planning the journey day by day, stop by stop, and I gained a visceral understanding of how long seventy or eighty days straight on the road would really be. When I’d sown the seed of this typo-hunting idea in the black soil of my brain, I’d been prepared to a
bandon every aspect of my former life. But as 2007 yielded to 2008, I found that I needed to drag Jane across the boundary with me. One early January eve, as we were playing Phase 10 again, this time at her apartment, with the green-line trolley screeching on its tracks outside and soused frat boys screaming along to “The Final Countdown” on some nearby fire escape, I said, “Come with me.”

  “Hunh?” Jane had thrown down a Skip card.

  “You should come with me,” I said again. “For part of the trip.”

  She gave me a big grin, and finally I saw that I should have asked her a lot sooner. “When, where, Jeff-Bear?” she sang.

  “From Seattle to, uh, somewhere east?” Josh would be parting ways with me right at the last critical turn of my compass, and I’d be left alone to face a three-thousand-mile eastward journey. “In late April. Time-wise, it would be about the middle of my trip.”

  “Sure,” she said, adding gamely, “I love road trips!” Jane would have preferred to go to California. She was such a good sport, though, that it didn’t ultimately matter to her where we went, be it Mission Street or Missoula. She was sure we’d have fun anywhere. That kind of optimism tends to be self-fulfilling, and contagious. Wouldn’t it be a touch romantic, I thought, or at least Romantic, to experience the wide and unblemished Western plateaus with this shyly smiling nymph beside me? We could dare the plains and the mountains together, under gray skies and fair, our two tiny islets of warmth shielded all around by a sea of empty miles.