Maps made road trips with Dad a blast. Since a ten year
old couldn’t drive, said ten year old was the navigator. Needless to say, this
kid’s world held maps as a huge fascination. That makes today’s Google Earth a
bit like porn. But that is another story….
Urban legends show that cartographers put down unmapped
areas such as “Here Be dragons”, claiming crazy beasts or serpents to exist in the
far corners of the earth (see Lenox Globe). One ponders if this was a major
inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkein and the whole Hobbit series. In fact, the much maligned quote from the books
and then the junior high play “over the Lonely Mountains through Mirkwood and
the Withered Heath” rings in my head still today (if Joe was here he'd smirk and recite his monologue).
I crave old, paper maps. They are sketched-out canvases for the travel imagination, should one like to explore out of the comfort zone, that is. Old maps show lands yet untraveled or seen. They offer a matrix of material requiring one to fill in the path by foot or car or cross-country ski. Exploring maps helps us know places in our minds as fantastic, bizarre, shocking, or, well … flat and boring.
Never the less, a trusted map helps know the place before setting foot and eye into the setting. Before going to Spain last year, I utilized Google Earth to identify the alley and block around our rental apartment in Barcelona. It was good thing to have in mind as there were a few hours of adventure and stress before finding out the secret knock and Scottish password to get beyond the scary door (see above). THAT was not on the map.
The other day I street mapped our next destination. Loreto, Baja Mexico. Can’t wait! I’m all mapped up and rarin’ to go. Though, I’m down just a notch as I’ve already seen it.
Even as I anticipate and support the emergence and development of digital, hand-held phones with GPS, I lament the disappearance of regular, paper maps. There is little space left for imagination to fill in the gaps as you can now see it in the palm of one’s hand. Today’s maps show a greater reality and leave little to resourcefulness of the mind. The need to know ahead of time has formally supplanted a wondrous experience of surging forward into an “in the moment” unknown.
The maps of old may have tantalized people with Terra Incognita, sea monsters, and large expanses of the unknown, but that didn’t stop explorers from traversing mountains or setting sail to the edge of the earth. So, why the urge to know a place ahead of setting foot there?
Ultimately, we have misplaced the imaginary destination.
We have lost fiction before fact. RIP the last digitally unrecorded place on
earth.
