I Love Maps!

I love maps. Maps are affordable gateways to movement and transformation; the intrinsic pleasure of stretching out an arm and reaching deep into the universe to grasp a star or a starfish. They are finite in shape, size, and data, but infinite as sinkholes into a jungle, desert, city, pyramid, marketplace, river, cave, museum, tundra, or fireside. Love of maps is similar to love of travel, and Pico Iyer describes that joy as “the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.” (www.salon.com, March 18, 2000).

I love maps. When I taught seventh grade in my twenties, I petitioned AAA to donate a classroom set of USA road maps. I created individual student assignments to write directions from, say, Ypisilanti, Michigan to Portola, California. Each student would slowly read his or her directions while everyone else traced the route at their own desks. The goal was to skillfully guide everyone in the class from the starting point to the destination. It was a lot of fun, everyone participated, and I hope they learned something about giving (and following) directions! When my own two children were about middle school age, we bought a white van, customized it with a plywood seat/convertible bed, and set out across the country. Each day, one of the kids would be in charge of maps and directions, letting us know where we were, how far to the next destination, what crossroads or major intersections we should encounter, etc. That was a long car trip for young adolescents and I devised quite a few activities in addition to maps to occupy them through long stretches between territorial targets. There were no seatbelts in the van, the air conditioning stopped functioning before we hit Texas, and we had more than a few battles over who sleeps in the tent vs. the van!

I love maps. Several years after being lost on a highway near the wrong Las Vegas, I was clutching a subway map and learning the byways of Manhattan. One of my first assignments upon joining a small publishing house at the very bottom of the pecking order was to go to the map room of the New York Public Library and identify maps for a book called Christianity Comes to the Americas. It was a plum of a mission; I was the proverbial “kid in a candy store.” With the authority of being “on assignment,” I looked at many more maps than necessary, completely fascinated by early perspectives of territory and experience. I recently came across this quote attributed to Christopher Columbus, “For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.” (www.brainyquote.com) Columbus does not, however, disavow using stories which long-preceded maps as inspiration for exploration. Philosopher Michel de Certeau comments on the evolution of present day maps from narratives. “Maps of medieval times, which were really illustrated stories telling of journeys made and of memorable encounters along the way, were gradually supplanted during the early history of modernity by spatial representations of the earth’s surface.”*

I love maps. While I am out in the world spinning my own narrative thread, I often integrate a variety of maps. I superimpose maps one on another: for example, a simple grid marked only with numbers keyed to an index of site names is superimposed in my mind with a full color map that has little pictures of churches, monuments, tramcars, fountains, ships, etc. On a trip to Helsinki, Finland, I collected and carried around four maps: a guidebook map cut with a razor out of the big fat travel book, a color grid of streets, a tram map superimposed over light grey streets, and a sketch of the city with destinations of interest highlighted. I studied my maps frequently, seeking the layered knowledge of the city they offered. I was a visitor to Helsinki, but when a city dweller knows her or his city, it becomes a series of layered internalized maps, many more than my four maps of Helsinki. For example, one layer would be a map of daily routines; another might be be a map of significant sites in this person’s life as lived in this city.

I love maps! My most recent map purchase is a world map called, “What’s Up? South!” by ODT, Inc. It is based on the simple premise that our typical representation of north at the top of a map is somewhat arbitrary. How strange and unfamiliar the continents look when the whole scheme is reversed! I should have learned this lesson years ago from my favorite Sesame Street animation and jingle, “That’s about the size of it.” It’s a lesson about relative sizes to be sure, but the refrain of “where you put your eyes” is significant when considering the perspective of a snail versus the whole universe, and those of us wandering in between, both near and far.

*According to Tim Ingold (“Up, Across, and Along” p. 48, accessed online at http://www.spacesyntax.tudelft.nl//media/Long%20papers%20I/tim%20ingold.pdf) who reports on de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life. 1984: 120-1)

Reflection Excursions ™

Let’s take a trip. Let’s set off on a journey. Let’s pack lighter this time, set out earlier, and travel longer. My husband gave me two new travel journals for Christmas and I long to select a pen and direction and begin moving and writing. For me the journey and the journal begin at the first hint of the road. When the car is packed, the door is locked, the mail and newspaper suspended, our feet leave the ground and the journey begins. If the first setting isn’t Route 80 East or West, and it isn’t the bus station on North Atherton, it must be the University Park airport. Our airport is so small and easily accessible that I hope to achieve my lifetime quota of courtesy airport pick-ups and drop-offs right here. We can arrive with less than an hour before a flight and have time to check-in, browse the tiny café/convenience shop, pass through security, and read half of the latest Newsweek in the isolation ward, i.e. boarding lounge. AND I can begin my journal. Why not? Airports, bus stations even more so, and even Route 80 are rich experiences. If we had a train station here it would rank near the top for me in terms of experiential wealth! Just recalling the lives I’ve lived in and through Grand Central Station would fill a dozen notebooks! And the narratives, fortunately short, of being lost in Penn Station would resonate far and wide. These are all liminal spaces where lives are in flux. The outward signs of dramatic transitions, momentous change, minute developments, slight shifts, sorrowful partings, joyous reunions, palpable doubt, painful hesitation, determined courses, and heavy-footed routine flow through these spaces. And that’s not to mention undercurrents. The workers in these spaces are often invisible vectors just slightly below consciousness, even when we approach on the opposite sides of the glass at the ticket window. And even deeper beneath or behind yet another scrim are those who take refuge in the corners, stairwells, hallways, and empty platforms. They inhabit the shadowy places in the stations and in our consciousness, even when they approach us.

My travel journal will begin in this liminal space between here and there, a place that is a destination only to those employed on the premises. I’ve written about the seating in airports in Italy, about dignified garbage collection in Philadelphia, about waiting and waiting and waiting in Rome. I was fascinated by the staccato of metal cards clicking on the huge, old fashioned departure boards at the Keleti Station in Budapest on a very hot day in July. Our misadventures at Heathrow airport in London and at Guarulhos (GRU) in São Paulo have been duly noted for after-the-fact amusement. No, I lied; Grand Central Station IS a destination space for me. I try to visit this monumental space when I’m in NYC to feel all of the kinetic energy on at least three levels and in four or five dimensions. I feel more alive there, vibrating at a different frequency, alert and poised for action.

For Your Writing:
Why not? Go to a station or airport in your city or town. Pack light: just a pen and notebook. What do you see, hear, smell, feel? Write about the surface first and then observe the same scene looking at what’s not obvious the first time. It’s ok to imagine why someone is lingering at the café or why someone is running through the terminal. Pick one facet from your observation of this space and ask yourself what it means. For example, what does it mean that many airports have become like shopping malls? What does that say about our lives? How do you feel about shopping in airports? OR observe people waiting. What occupies them while waiting? What occupies you? What is “good” waiting vs. “not-so-good” waiting? Do people change when they travel? Do you?

Quotation for Percolation :
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.” Pico Iyer