High above Wyoming, in the belly of a Boeing jet, my husband was making a map of Montana out of two cocktail napkins.

“This,” he said, pointing to the napkin on the right side of his drop-down tray, “is Billings. And this,” he said, pointing to the napkin on the left side of the tray, “is Bozeman.” Using his index finger, he traced a route between the two napkins. “This is how we will go from one to the other.”

I nodded. While it was charming the way he made his napkins into cities and his fingertip into a car, I had other things on my mind. For one, I was thinking about my high school geography teacher, whose name was Mr. Bozeman. He was a big bear of a man with a kind, soft face, and I liked him even though I did not like geography. I seemed to know, even as a teenager, that directional concepts would always present a special challenge for me, but I also that I couldn’t hold Mr. Bozeman responsible.

“Do you understand the route?” my husband asked. His tone was serious, as if he had presented me with an actual detailed map with legends and highway numbers instead of a collection of artfully arranged airplane detritus. I smiled a smile that said, Yes, thank you for making geography so fun and accessible! But once again, I had other things on my mind.

What I was thinking about, after I was done conjuring Mr. Bozeman’s face and recalling all the times geography has made me cry, was how hungry I was. We’d had a short layover in Dallas (which, in case you, too, are geographically challenged, is several cocktail napkins below Billings) and, believing we somehow had time for a leisurely dinner, sat down at a wine bar and ordered two fat glasses of wine, an appetizer of hummus and crudites, caramelized mushroom and gruyere flatbread, and a fresh arugula salad. This fine, very expensive spread was on its way out to us at Gate 28B when we got word our airplane was leaving in mere moments from Gate 34B, necessitating that we abandon our (pre-paid) feast and sprint like foals in order to catch it.

We were the last to board. Once the relief wore off, starvation set in, made worse by the knowledge that we had three long hours ahead of us with no WIFI and nothing to distract us but napkin GPS and finger cars. Sure, I’d packed figs and pretzels for just such an emergency, but in the same way you pack an anti-venom kit and bear spray for a hike: praying you’ll never actually have to use them.

If you’ve ever eaten figs and pretzels in amounts far exceeding the recommended USDA guidelines, as we did that evening, mid-flight, then perhaps you understand the kind of confusion this creates in your colon. Speaking geographically, it’s like a fig car speeding south through your intestines encounters a pretzel roadblock of epic proportions, which results in a very uncomfortable traffic jam. If you get my drift.

We touched down in Billings at an hour that would otherwise be past our bedtimes. After a late dinner of terrible salads at an antelope-themed bar where we overheard a large hairy man extolling the virtues of ashtanga yoga to several large hairy friends, we slept the sleep of kings, and the next morning drove to Bozeman. Interestingly, the route we took from Billings, if you don’t count the stunningly beautiful views of snow-capped mountains, looked a lot like the route my husband’s finger traced from napkin to napkin on the airplane tray: mostly flat and largely colorless, with a few forested patches thrown in for interest.

And interest me they did. Sometimes, when I daydream on long trips, I think about where, were I to commit a heinous crime, I would hide from the authorities, and I always come back to the same plan: I will take cover in a dense forest. This is as far as I’ve gotten with my strategy; I’ve not yet worked out how I will acquire food (especially salads, of which I am fond), what to do about rain, or how to play pickleball while on the lam. But I’m always thinking, especially about the pickleball conundrum.

You might think the most disturbing part of this daydream is the fact that I may or may not be planning a heinous crime, and that is what I thought too, until I shared my admittedly ill-formed post-crime hidey-hole plan with my husband. Who said, entirely without irony, humor, or even a shred of sadness, “Well, I always expected you to run away from me some day.”

I may or may not have gasped. But he has nothing to worry about (or look forward to, as the case may be). If/when I do run away, I probably won’t go far, because let’s face it, even if I knew where Far was, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t get there without him navigating.