Among the basic principles upon which I’ve conducted my life is the dictum that if I can put myself into a situation, I also ought to be able to get back out, unaided.

And generally, that’s always been the case – at least in the wilderness, anyway.

What changed my mind in respect to technical help in the great outdoors was a particular canoe trip on the west coast of Vancouver Island, during which fog settled so heavily for four days it was the equivalent of paddling by Braille.

Without visibility, a compass and marine charts are next to useless. You know you are next to a piece of shoreline – somewhere – and north is off that-a-way. Lose sight of the shore, and you’re pretty much left with ... north.

That’s still better than 360 degrees of bean-all, but to the other two expectant crew members, this is pretty feeble navigation intel.

So, this year it was time to break down and go high-tech, and embrace the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

(When one is hopelessly lost in the boonies, and you say to your partner, gee, we ought to have brought a GPS, that abbreviation can also designate the likely response, which will be Good Point, Stupid!)

A GPS is really nothing more than a battery-powered, satellite-guided computer. As such, it has been designed by people who wear beanie caps with propellers on top, and think in ways that the rest of us do not.

Hence, getting a GPS to make itself useful is not as easy as picking it up and pointing it in the right direction. That is the key question, after all.

The device only knows where it is now, not where you want to be, unless you have told it otherwise.

And that’s where the instructions come in.

I confess to a natural aversion to step-by-step instructions. Maybe it’s genetic. Could be a gender thing.

Give me a new toy and the manual that goes with it, and I’ll ignore the instructions and get right down to good old trial and error.

That might explain my first marriage. I don’t recall even checking to see if there was a how-to booklet that came with the whole kit.

Happily, my second wife does not have an official set of instructions – or maybe she adapts them as we go along, patient soul that she is.

It makes the entire undertaking that much more challenging, but it does appeal to my sporting instincts.

I mean, it’s not like assembling a barbecue or a U-do-it vinyl garden shed.

If you make a mistake in a relationship, there are no extra parts lying around to indicate something has gone awry. Realization of one’s grievous errors tends to be a touch more dramatic.

Anyway, back to the GPS.

Every once in a while, even the handiest guy encounters something that defies the “gimme that, I can figure it out” approach – something that requires more than the common sense to know not to jump into the bathtub with the electric hedge trimmer.

The GPS manual is required reading.

In it, one learns that these units work on a system involving “waypoints.”

In simple terms, this means the point “way back there” when you should have told the GPS to remember where it was you were, as opposed to where you are now. Otherwise, it cannot tell you from whence you came, nor how to return, and most definitely not how to get where you want to be.

And if you’ve always had trouble in life defining that last point, the GPS can’t help there, either.

But when their complexity and geek-speak is mastered, these gizmos will indeed tell you where to go and how to get there, when your wife isn’t around to do so.

aholota@surreyleader.com