Bi-weekly Topic for Sept. 1, 2003
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060115145854/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?MapsAndPlace
Losing One's Place
By London and the North (Coup de Vent)
Funny how easy it is to get lost. One minute you feel secure, on track - Knowing where you're coming from and trusting that you will find wherever you are meant to be going. The path just seems to keep coming.
And then suddenly you're adrift.
Can this be an aesthetic experience in itself? To be lost? A man stopped me. He was looking for a lost dog. I hadn't seen it.
I remember once having a profound experience.
I'm not sure it is that easy to recapture
and in any case may sound trite
but it went something like this:
- There is only this moment now
- here
- wherever I am 
Am I then still lost or just relocated by meaning?
.......................................................................
I have loved maps so deeply, so widely. I have lived with maps on my walls: A Historical Map of The London Underground Roman Britain Wensleydale on tattered brown cloth A pink, green, yellow and mauve Map of the World I have been to exhibitions about maps. It would be misleading to think I could have a new journey writing about an old love. Writing, for me, is this spot here which passes with each keyboard tap. I could almost imagine this view could explain my increasing longsightedness or the forgetting of appointments for the temporal dimension is not that easy to map and diaries become the dictator.
::: posted by Coup de Vent at 8/3/2003 01:27:27 PM
on Mapping Place
By London and the North (Triks)
(Responding to the bi-weekly topics in Ecotone - Maps and Place).
"The map is not the territory"? Well actually, it is. They whom I live with are inclined towards postmodernism. I'm more of a modernist myself. In my world the map is the territory. There's a lot of it - some of which I tread often and parts which I will visit some day I expect.
When I speak of terrain I am also speaking of it in a temporal sense. And of its texture. The lower path floods in rain and still my spirit soars as it did when I was a puppy and saw the path come running towards me alive. I love getting wet. Sometimes on walks I take them to my favourite spot. Here they throw me a few stones. Usually about six. Then I dig for them as the water starts to cloud.
If we go through and over the rough rather than up the deer path to the bogs, we might sit and watch with nose and ears. I never understand why we sit here for a while but we do. Once I saw some beasts in the distance and was frightened so I barked. They didn't dare come near after that. I like to watch the other dogs from high up and see who is where. In the dry season, when we linger more, the berries are there and I help myself. I don't think I should have to be hand fed them when they are more my mouth height than hers in any case.
I own this path that I am on now. Until I have left it. But it is interesting to smell who else has owned it at other times. I ignore them when they appear and pass.
Sometimes the world is taller - it just changes and I work harder to find my ball in the dark underworld. I am not allowed to chase things here but at BA I do. I run the bank faster than the river and move the rabbit world till it has disappeared to the underground village. I can hear and smell but cannot see much down there. This is one of my favourite places. I have a lot of them.
In my territory on the other side of the door I sleep and play. In this one, where I am a granddog I lie anywhere until they ask me to move.
On holiday my bed comes with me and my spot is there. And that's where I am.
And I am always aware of where they are. That's how I know where I am. It's the space and sounds between them and me. The feeling of having been somewhere is like a lovely meal and makes me sigh, allowing me to be, just here, now.
Posted by Triks at 06:38 AMSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20031023192232/www.airenet.co.uk/alife/2003_09.html
September 01, 2003
By Bowen Island Journal
A map of Bowen Island This week's Ecotone Wiki topic is Maps and Place As a kid two of the most prized possessions were my stamp collection and my atlas. I learned more from those two things about geography than anything I learned in school. I learned about the shapes of countries, why some were coloured red (the Commonwealth, of course) More importantly, I learned from those things how we see the world, and it wasn't until I was in university and I had read Hugh Brody's Maps and Dreams that I began to see all of these representations as maps of place. The map itself, the topographic representation of a place was merely the beginning. What a country chose to put on its stamps was also a map. Certain countries other than the USA for example, honoured US presidents, a fact completely inexplicable to me in my childhood, but absolutely clear in the geo-political consciousness raising of my late teens (although why Poland issued a stamp in 1975 with George Washington on it is still a mystery to me). At any rate, suffice to say that my twin interests in philately and maps led me to thinking deeply about representations of place.
* * *
Maps are tools that help us make sense of place. We create maps of any number of scales in many different media all to tell stories about what we know. The very best maps contain exactly enough information for a specific purpose, be it wayfinding, hunting and gathering or planning. The maps that are most real are those that accurately reproduce our experience of a place, in three dimensions with sound and texture. We normally think of maps as flat reproductions of the elements of a landscape. They are pictures, with physical geography represented by lines and colours. Peering at these maps can help us understand the forces that shaped the land, or the best place to build a house. Maps are animated by a keen eye, and eye which understands both what is being represented, and what it really looks like. But maps are just pretty pictures without a sense of place. Only when you have visited Bowen Island does the above map mean anything substantial to you. It is only after you have walked through the old-growth of Cape Roger Curtis that the 600 acres in the lower left corner of the map resonate so strongly for the wild jewel that it is. Only after standing on my deck overlooking Mannion Bay - the large "bite" on the right side of the map - can you know what it is to look out over log booms and ferry traffic to the rocky shore of Whytecliffe on the mainland.
* * *
Stories are a little like maps of place. They help us to understand place and to navigate a little in someone else's boots. Over the 2+ years I have kept this blog, several people have told me how much they appreciated getting to know one islander's perspective and how it helped to inform their life on Bowen. That is why I have provided links to the Bowen Island noosphere, a group mind that exists on the internet, fed a steady stream of content by the likes of Markus and Marian, Michael and Penny, John and Mark and Richard and the contributors to Bowen Online. And then there is the Bowen Island GeoLibrary which in many ways is the sum total of everything our municipal government knows about this place. It contains maps of water sources, land use, geological composition, rainfall, roads, structures, plans, beaches and dreams. It also contains a way of understanding some of the stories contained in this blog and in other story gathering projects, as the Local Stories module charts our semantic relationship with the landscape. In a very real way we are connecting stories of place to maps here on Bowen Island. What use it will have is unknown. In a generation perhaps people will look back at the stories and the ways we were and recognize them as earlier steps on a path, deepening their understanding of place and how they arrived where they are. In the end perhaps that is the value of mapping place: it establishes our mark in time, like a "Kilroy Was Here" etched in the landscape for others to know that we tried to understand this place and live fully within it.
Source: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/miscellany/bijournal/2003_09_01_archive.html#106240082116289721
Maps and Place - Geoff on Ecotone Wiki
By Mulubinba Moments (Geoff)
Many years ago, while still a full-time student and despite meagre financial means I decided to buy the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Not for me the sensibly priced paperback edition, I had to have the hardback edition - for the maps. The paperback edition lacked the elegant fold-out maps boldly printed in red and black on crisp pure-white paper. For me these maps were not just an indispensable aid to finding my way around Middle Earth as I read the books, but beautiful artefacts themselves. Maps and writing are inextricably linked. But just as language existed before writing was invented, so did the oral and mental equivalent of maps. Aboriginal Australians did not have writing or maps. Yet they were able to do many of the things we use maps for. In the more arid regions of Australia they lived a nomadic existence covering vast distances on foot. They survived and were able to find food and water because they had knowledge of the land. This knowledge was not just location knowledge, but ecological knowledge - for example the knowledge that near a certain type of tree you only have to dig a little to get water. There was in fact a kind of kinship with the land that is described as “Sense of Place”. It might be tempting to think that maps were invented elsewhere as a consequence of people abandoning the nomadic lifestyle and living in more permanent settlements. After all, the earliest known map in existence is a depiction of a neolithic village in what is now Iraq (Catal Hyük). It has been suggested that the earliest ancient Egyptian maps were developed in response to the need to define land ownership because the annual flooding of the Nile removed landmarks. However in many areas Aboriginals lived in villages (which they often abandoned according to the season, but were able to return to the next year). Throughout Australia the Aboriginals knew and respected tribal boundaries. The Aboriginals had villages, boundaries, travel and trade, and their spirituality was linked with “Place”. They did all this without maps of any sort. The knowledge that allowed all this was of course passed from generation to generation by oral tradition. But in our culture the use of writing can enhance the use of language, and maps can enrich our experience of place, whether the place is real or fictional.
Comments
Hi Y'all! Interesting post. I feel so moved by people's relationship with place in other cultures. It's so humbling and exciting - touches something in me. I guess we are very street sign bound in the westernised world. We don't know where we are unless we're told!
I also like maps in books - espcially those relating to railways and tube maps in London.
Thanks for this piece reminding me that non-written, mental maps are maps all the same; our arrogance in forgetting this is like dismissing oral tradition story-telling as if it must be fiction, simply because our minds aren't trained to remember and transmit knowledge that way.
Hey CdeV...do you remember a board game from the late seventies that was based on a map of the tube system? I've never forgotten the likes of Cockfosters or Marylebone as a result.
This is very interesting to read.
Source: http://mulubinba.typepad.com/mulubinba_moments/2003/09/maps_and_place_.htmlMaps as Place
By Panchromatica
The excellent Ecotone wiki has moved on to Maps as Place for its bimonthly topic.
Maps I think are a language, not a place. They translate what you see as you walk around into another medium, a story if you like, a story that you can take away and reread. Like any language some of us are more fluent than others and can read them in the original - we can look at a map and visualise what it represents. I find that easier with rural mapping than with urban. I can read the topography and get some idea of the landform, although crucially the vegetation will be missing except in the most rudinentary form.
With urban mapping however there is no building equivalent of the contour and so the key issue of enclosure is missing. That square we see could be surrounded by a series of single storey sheds or by the most elegant of Georgian terraces. While there are often clues in things like road layout, usually the place has to be experienced in the 'original language' for the urban map to mean something. Pushing the metaphor too far perhaps, urban mapping needs some sort of Rosetta Stone - photographs, written descriptions, personal experience for a full ranslation to be possible.
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When I walk around central London I often just look at the rooftops / skyline and think that makes a wonderful socio-historical urban map.
Maps and Place: To Boldly Go
This week's Ecotone Biweekly topic is Maps and Place.
By Fragments From Floyd
The other day I picked up a National Geographic map from a back room shelf and sat in a quiet place and traveled to Indonesia. It is a place I have never been, and yet, I am there, in a sense, knowing from the map about the vegetation types and terrain, following the courses of meandering rivers within watersheds, tracing contour lines that hint of the texture of the place, of its geology and age. I walk along trails and roads past orchards and quarries and swamps and skirt around the perimeter of villages and cities. To possess an accurate and detailed map and see the world through its symbolic language of place is perhaps the next best thing to being physically in the place depicted. And yet, at least today, there still remains a vast gulf between map and territory. This may not always be so, and the best maps and the places they symbolize may someday be difficult to distinguish from one another.
The computer "games" that grow in synergy with government-sponsored technologies like war are already closing the distance between map and territory. The average civilian like you and me sees glimpses of this in computer-enhanced reenactments of actual bombing runs from our recent spate of "regime changes" around the world. The camera, in a CNN glorification of the war du jour zooms down from orbital to suborbital to upper atmospheric, pulling into range over a middle eastern desert, flying lower, down between dunes, showing wadi and oasis zooming past, with realistic shadows, texture, signs of life. Then we follow 'ordinance' as it annihilates the target: a baby formula factory or palace, perhaps. I could have been in the cockpit with the pilot, so realistic were the images racing past as the computer recreated the map in three-dimensional reality. It seems so sad to me that our most advanced maps are not for exploring places but for incinerating them with our gamers-thumbs or our bunkerbusters. And yet, the day will come when we can travel virtually anywhere, perceptually if not physically, by state-of-the-art "maps".
Arising from this same game and war technology and augmented by others we've yet to imagine, the day will come when I (or more likely, my children or theirs) can don a map-helmet and view-visor and walk the trail up old familiar places I have loved-- I can hike up Henley Hollow once again, or climb to the top of Massey Gap or peer out from a floating island in the Okeefenokee by merely saying the name of the place. In those pseudo-real places there will seem to exist 'real' trees and rocks, and perhaps simulated wind and water noises and one may see from time to time the common creatures of those coordinates (or the ones that used to live there decades earlier, when the ecosystem was healthy and whole). These computer generated maps of the future will be as much like being there as one can get without literally being in the place. Still, the map will not unite us with the place, even though viewing it may evoke some of the feeling of having visited places I used to go easily and often.
There are so many alluring features that I see on my topo maps or out my windows as I drive the back roads of rural Virginia. And yet more and more of these places that I can see I will never visit as my physical strength and vigor diminish over the years. I have already had to say goodbye to distant wilderness valleys and mountaintops-- in the Smokies, or up in Cranberry Glades in West Virginia-- that I once experienced but will not likely have the opportunity or physical resources to visit again. And yet I would love to be there, in that place I remember or see in my mind's eye out my car window, just beyond the farthest ridge in the distance through the blue haze.
If there is indeed a God responsible for creating all of this that our senses and instruments have revealed to us about the Universe (as I believe) then He is not likely to think us content for eternity to ride on clouds and play harps in our pajamas. So while mortally bound to a failing chassis I daydream of heaven. I imagine that I inhabit a new body and am not bound by either time nor space-- and am in some sense omnipresent, a trait 'inherited' from God himself. In this eternal incarnation, the newly-corporeal thing that I call self can actually be present in those cherished earthly places I have remembered or in the tropical rain forest or tundra or steppes and places I never experienced in this body. I could fly away in the 'twinkling of an eye' to any place within the boundaries of the Universe, exploring galaxies and perhaps even Time itself. Then there would be no need for maps because the physical-temporal place itself would need no reduction to symbol or representation or picture-thinking. Eternity would not be a terror or a bore as some imagine. I would never tire of exploring without limit, without fatigue; and I'd never have to stop and ask directions again! And rather than the perpetual tedium of cloud-riding and harp-playing forever, over the eons I would only find ever greater wonder and awe in the things and places I would be and know within this largest place we call the Universe.
Posted by fred1st at 07:07 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Comments
I read recently that Porsche (or maybe it was BMW) was in the development stage for a helmet for mechanics that would project content of repair manuals directly onto the retina. Mechanics could compare diagrams to reality and read instructions while actually working in the engine compartment. Augmenting relaity instead of replacing it.
Posted by bill at September 1, 2003 01:50 PMIt is amazing what maps can fire in the imagination. I wonder if that isn't an experience that may diminish as younger generations have different expectations - of a landscape that can be simulated and "travelled" through, virtually. Will they realise that it is only virtual? I have also enjoyed pouring over maps (where does that expression come from?) and puzzling over the meaning of those damn colonising colours assigned to countries. An arm outstretched and pointing.....
Posted by Coup de Vent at September 1, 2003 04:58 PMAbout 50 years ago I read a book where nearly each human had his/her brain disconnected from the body and installed into a bell-jar, awash in nutrient. The brain was connected to electronic nodes that allowed etermal life, lived in dreaming and pleasurable sensationing (is that a word??). The only "real" humans were those who tended the bell jars. We are closing in on this nightmare.
Posted by Cop Car at September 1, 2003 06:45 PMI love the idea of the eternal incarnation where we can revisit cherished places from our past and we are not limited by time or physical boundaries - thanks Fred!
Posted by Jenny at September 2, 2003 12:59 AMThe ability to fly -- to lift my arms and soar into the air, Superman-like, and go wherever I wish, at whatever speed and altitude -- has been a recurring, persistent daydream of mine for many years. Longing for the eternal state, I suppose...
Posted by Curt at September 3, 2003 12:46 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20031002132444/http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/archives/2003_09.html
A Map Means I'm Lost
By Notes from an Eclectic Mind
The following is my contribution to Ecotone's new bi-weekly topic, Maps and Place.
My family always seemed to travel to known destinations. That simple statement says more about us than volumes could. It perhaps explains why today I dont like to go to places that require me to use a map. For all my forty years Ive lived between the Red River and the Rio Grande and known how to get everywhere I needed to in between. More than once Ive headed down some narrow country road only to have a passenger ask nervously, Do you know where youre going? And always Ive answered; Sure, as I traced the lines on my mental map of a life lived in small places.
For the most part, maps touched my formative years only in imaginary ways. I remember trying to recreate the map from Treasure Island, wadding up a piece of notebook paper over and over until it took on the creased softness of age. With magic markers I traced the lines of an island and put an X at the spot where the treasure lay hidden.
One summer, one of the last before the chasm that exists between us now opened up, my sister took me to Six Flags. We came home with a cartoon like map of the theme park that became a major player in the games of make-believe with which I entertained myself and occasionally shared with M., the neighbor boy down the street.
Oh, the glove compartment in the family car did hold a map of Texas, picked up at some filling station long ago. The creases had worn feathery and thin with age and open diamonds appeared in the spots where four lines intersected. Occasionally Papa retrieved the map before some outing and opened it on the kitchen table under the good reading lamp. I dont think he needed the map, only liked looking at it; the pilot in him knowing you should look at your charts before you take off.
I can see him there still, in the circle of light thrown by the lamp, leaning his head on his hand. He would stare at the paper and trace lines with his index finger, occasionally tapping some spot twice for emphasis. Always twice. Tap, tap, and that was it. Wed go on the trip and I never saw the map again although I often heard the words, Goddamnit honey, we are not lost.
When I read The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey, I realized my favorite maps are old and inaccurate, reflections more of a fanciful weaving of conflated explorers accounts than accurate surveying. They are the maps that say, with honest warning, Beyond this point there be monsters, the ones that suggest you can only sail so far before you go off the edge. I dont want to go to uncharted territory, only to be warned about where it begins.
Many years ago I found myself lost, at night, in Yellowstone National Park. Construction workers closed the road wed used to come in and the late hour and unfamiliarity with the land forced me to pull over, spread a map across my lap, clench a flashlight in my teeth, and balance a compass in the palm of my right hand. No matter where I am in Texas I can always, instinctively, turn my face north. Once Im oriented with the poles, I can fake the rest. But when I cross over the border into the alien lands beyond, I travel with a compass.
That night, in Yellowstone, the simple act of finding north calmed my nerves. I turned the car around, over the protests of my companions who demanded to know why the only cars we saw were heading the other way. Finally, in irritation, I exclaimed, Goddamnit we are not lost anymore. I have a map and a compass and I know how to use them both. After a heartbeat of silence a voice asked cautiously, Then why are you so grumpy? I let my own heart beat a time or two before I answered ruefully, Because the only time I have to use them is when Im lost and I dont like to be lost.
Posted by Rana at September 1, 2003 10:56 AM | TrackBack CommentsSo it's not just guys that do it? :-}
Posted by: fredf at September 1, 2003 01:45 PMNope. You nailed me. I will almost never stop and ask directions. Drives R. crazy. I think it's what comes of being my Daddy's only son. Kind of a male thing grafted on to an already obstinate female.
Posted by: Rana at September 1, 2003 01:52 PMThanks for that post. I enjoyed reading of your relationship with maps and place. There's something about tales of old maps, old local maps that is, that does get me excited! What i really love is comparing old and new maps of my local area in Yorkshire and checking out paths, courses of streams and place names. So much can get lost of you don't call it something anymore or don't walk it.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at September 1, 2003 04:06 PMSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20051225144948/www.ranablog.com/archives/000433.php
A Map Book
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)]
The Ecotone Wiki is running a collective post today on Maps and Place. Please stop by and check out all the entries and please feel free to participate either by linking to your own post about maps and place or by joining the discussion!
Below is the text of an artist's book I made a while ago as a present for my father, who loved maps and the understanding they conveyed. He could study a map of a place he had never been (Spanish military maps were superb, almost as good as the British Ordnance Survey Maps) and decide that THIS place would be a good spot to camp in (we wildcamped throughout the 1970s and 1980s in rural Spain). He was always right, down to the abundance of firewood he predicted just by looking at an unfolded sheet of paper.
We had our moments, my father and I, but talking about maps always makes me realize how much I miss him...
Map Book
I never told anyone THE SECRET that Jennifer & I looked for years in the Casa de Campo on horseback & amid the ruins of countless Castilian castles for an iron RING we were certain would lead us to buried TREASURE but we had NO MAP
It took years to discover that the Treasure lies in the very art of being able to read a map at all. (Thanks Dad.)
Posted by Pica at September 1, 2003 10:18 AM
Comments
That's really nice and inspiring. I wondered what some of the images in your book were of. I have sometimes made monoprints or etchings of my locality - "my" locality, with personal punctuations of the landscape. I have an idea that making a book takes more courage than working on a single sheet of paper. I think I might try working on a large sheet and folding it up map like.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at September 1, 2003 02:19 PMI love reading about your life in Spain. It brings back floods of memories for me. I wish I could relive them. My Dad loved maps and compasses also - my sister and I have inherited the desire to search out the ruined abbeys and stone circles marked on the Ordinance Survey maps - we could spend days doing this whenever I visit her in England.
Posted by: Jenny at September 1, 2003 03:38 PMThe book looks great, and I just wish I could see it and hold it in my hands. Did he like it?
Posted by: beth at September 2, 2003 12:49 PMBeautiful piece. On an aside, I think the Ordnance Survey maps are fantastic - such detail and accuracy. I am sure they would even show the cows in the meadows if the animals kept still long enough.
Posted by: Geoff at September 4, 2003 04:35 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/09/01/a_map_book....
ECOTONE TOPIC: Maps and Place
By The Cassandra Pages
In my memory, there are always maps. There's the wall of topographic maps in my father’s office, the antique maps of New York State hanging on the walls, the intricately-detailed bird’s-eye views of central New York towns in the late 1800s, the blue school globe in my childhood bedroom – I can still remember the area in the Pacific that had rubbed off - the elaborate fold-out maps from National Geographic, the pull-down maps of the United States and the world hanging in every classroom, accompanied by long wooden pointers that made a hard rapping sound on the blackboard. Later there were specific topo maps for camping and hiking trips, and a boyfriend who sometimes seemed more in love with maps than with me, losing himself in the delicate green lines spread on his dorm room floor: a meditation and escape from the pressures of getting into grad school. Maps have accompanied all the best road trips of my life, even when the point was to leave the mapped and predictable behind; maps were part of the anticipation, the planning, the excitement of imagining "I will be here – and afterwards, maps became part of memory: “I was there.” Maps settled arguments and solidified dreams; they taught me things I couldn’t see and made me want to see others. And, of course, they were beautiful. Because I’m a designer, I’ve used maps in publications destined for other people, designed atlases, and even made a few maps myself. Nothing teaches you the real geography of a place better than drawing its map yourself, and nothing makes you more appreciative of the skill and judgment of people who do nothing else but map creation. Maps represent a lot, but neither are they a place, nor a person; maps are merely tracks on a beach, an enigmatic, tantalizing trail. I wondered today what a map of my present life might look like. There would be an X for my house, with a garden indicated behind it, and some trees, and the street outside, and the field near the river and the grove of thorny locusts. There’d be the bridge across the river, and some roads, big ones and small, not too many, leading to the places where I buy food or go to sing, or buy books, or visit friends. Another X, maybe, for my father-in-law’s house, and my sister-in-law’s, and the church, and the homes of a few friends. Then there would be a road west – that one goes to some mountains and beyond them to the place I was born. And a road north, toward Canada. And a road south, to the big city. And one east, not taken very much, toward the ocean. What would they tell you, these trails across the horizontal plane of my earth? Do I really exist in these two dimensions, these X and Y coordinates? No, but there’s no map for the rest of me: I can’t draw where I go through this machine, for instance, except to make an undecipherable cross-hatching of more two-dimensional lines, point-to-point. I can’t map for you my past or my future, the flights of my imagination, my dreams, the fragments of poems and paintings or where they came from, and where they go, like the morning fog. It might be better to make a map that shows this room: where I’m sitting with this computer by a southern window that looks out on the street, the place where I eat, the piano, the Druze chest by the door, the window out onto the garden…the location of the blue jay nest under the wild grapevine, the woodchuck hole, the wrenhouse, the yellow jacket nest under the tomatoes. I think it might tell you more. But, then, my map seems to be becoming words. 1:33 PM
Source: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/2003_08_31_cassandrapages_archive.html#106243760247972965
Treasure/map
by P.
It probably still stands in the corner of the "Scout House" in my hometown, 40 years dustier and that much more marked up by identifying fingers and the odd, illegal, pencil -- a tall, framed board displaying nine 1919 series topographic maps of the Susquehanna valley and its neighborhood, neatly trimmed and glued in place. When I first saw it and realized what it was, it gave me a thrill like no other map has done since.
I was 11.
Now you're shaking your head and thinking, "what a geek! Thrilled by a map?"
But I was a kid with a great deal of imagination -- still am, I suppose -- and I was just spreading my wings in my little town. I had permission to roam a little farther every year, and I was learning to find my way around town alone, to explore the creek and drop stones on waterbugs under the river bridge, to heave my bike to the highest street and speed down to the first stop sign, and I was already beginning to wonder, "what else is there?"
Kids don't get that much freedom anymore, I don't think. Will I trust my first-grader to hike to school alone in a couple of years? In third grade, I walked clear across town, such as it was -- my parents felt safer and no one pestered them with warnings all the time.
I knew about topographic maps, and maps in general, from family trips. I'm sure I met road maps early -- I can't remember the first -- but I grasped the trick of squiggly contour lines from studying a map of my grandfather's that showed the Canadian lake where his cottage was. I loved that place, and I admired the map's pale green contour lines and light-blue water. For some reason, I don't remember the shape of the lake, but I do remember clearly the texture of the linen the map was printed on, and the pencil lines my grandfather drew to mark the compass bearings for boating from the "lower lake" to his cottage.
The map in the Scout House was a dark khaki, the color of the oldest Boy Scout uniforms, and it fascinated me because it showed me not three but four dimensions of my hometown.
There were the dense clusters of lines, just blocks from home, where an undiscovered gorge followed the route of Newton Brook. There were miles of unexplored country beyond, where forgotten placenames like Kelly's Corners and Yaleville beckoned -- and, I realized, there was history.
I could see the road west from town wasn't the same as the one I biked on. Another highway, north and east, had radically changed, too. Some of my friends' houses weren't marked on this map. There were sawmills, soil mines, and big, irregular dark buildings along the railroad tracks. Even in a town where history stares you in the face on every stroll, here was revelation.
So, of course, I explored. West Main Street had moved uphill because the old route had fallen into Newton Brook ages ago. I found the collapsed bank and a lovely picnic spot hidden under a white pine tree below it. With friends, I probed the old factories -- not long before they were torn down. I hiked up to some of the old houses and found forgotten foundations, and in one dooryard, a lilac tree that still thrived, long after the door it graced was gone.
I am still a map fan. Most of the time they inspire fantasies rather than explorations, though.
(Not everybody is comfortable with maps, I realize. Some women I know give precise, accurate directions and follow them unfailingly, but want nothing to do with pictures. Deep in North Carolina this summer, I met a woman asking if "highway 25" would take her around Charlotte to I-95. Darned if I know, I said, but probably not. I walked about 50 feet to a posted map, checked and ran back to advise the woman -- a friendly person in her 60s -- to stick to the main road and avoid shortcuts. I hope she got where she was going. Maybe she likes asking directions, the way so many men don't.)
I am baffled myself by sky maps -- I can never get them oriented correctly upside down, but I love the fantasy they give me of standing outside listening to the racket of the crickets and frogs, feeling the cool summer air and scanning the dark horizon for Bootes or the Pleiades. Only recently I found out how a Polynesian sea chart worked, and I love the fantasy (the opposite of the sky-
map one) that the chart inspires -- of listening to the water slap on the side of my canoe and squinting toward the horizon to judge the prevailing wind and the pattern of the waves.
P.
Source: http://my.core.com/%7Epzicari/text/Maps.html
maps
By prairie point
"Advice on the Prairie" by William Tylee Ranney, 1853
A map is a wondrous thing. It enables you to see not only where you are now but where you are wanting to go and everything in between. But to make a map someone needs to be able to visualize where you are in relation to everything else. In this day, that’s easy to do as long as you are only talking about the physical world.
But most of the places we would like to get to are not as easily pictured and there are not always superhighways leading to them. We have to fall back on the equivalent of hearsay and opinion, which when they are available at all may not be clear or reliable.
This week's Ecotone topic is "maps and place"
Posted by Bill Hopkins on September 1, 2003 04:44 PM
Comments
Thought the picture was interesting and emphasised the point you were making.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at September 2, 2003 01:38 AMSource: http://www.prairiepoint.net/journal/archives/000154.html
drawing the line
By alembic
Maps have always fascinated me, in part because they played such an important part in my parents excursions into the dark canyons of memory. As a child, I didnt possess the vision that was required to see past the sunny ledge of the mesa of the here and now. For me there was no chasm, no broken ground that tore up the territory my parents once called home. When I looked at a map of our region in the Eastern European country of my birth, I saw a representation of the world in which I lived plain and simple. Everything that was here for me was also there in the map. For my parents, the same map, that grid of places; it was also a map of absences, charting interrupted lives.
I grew up in a place that was at times either the jewel or the bane of whatever haughty empire, shabby province, or hastily cobbled together country claimed its territory as its rightful property, or original homeland.
By the time I was born, the town I called home was known by at least three names in at least three tongues. Just before I left the country for good, the mapmakers in charge decided that resurrecting the towns ancient Roman name would somehow decontaminate it -- from its foundation all the way to its flaky layers of foreign-accented facades.
When history shifts the ground under your feet with wars and revolutions that fence you in or herd you off like sheep or cattle, you learn that there is no here, and yes, there is no there there, to appropriate a clich. You also learn a few secrets about mapmaking, the way the line between here and there takes shape. It doesnt take long before you, too, are scratching your mark in the sand, declaring that this here is my here. But the sand in which you are drawing the line is the sand of the hourglass. The deeper you dig to leave your mark, the less sand you have left or the less ground to call home.
My first mapmaking lessons came when, playing hooky, I would climb the fence into the Jewish section of the large cemetery not far from the school. All around the Jewish section of the cemetery, the other graves were tended to with bright flowers and polished headstones. The paths among the graves and small mausoleums were cleared by workers, inviting you to meander, as in a park. Widows, bereft parents, and odd widower you could always count on seeing a few of them sitting by a grave. This was not a desolate place.
Not so within the fenced-in confines of the Jewish cemetery. Here was a chaos of weeds and tumbled headstones -- and no path in site. The absence of new graves and the absence of people tending the old ones, what did that tell me about the territory I called home? Where were the newly dead Jewish residents of my town? Where were the children remembering their ancestors? Where did they all vanish? The living, that is?
The territory that was the home of my parents, I came to understand over the years, was remapped, not only to carve up the land and mark the chart with new names, but also to redraw the features of its inhabitants.
As a child in the early 1960s, I used to see people who had numbers tattooed on their arms. If I asked why they had numbers on their arms, I dont remember the answer I was given. But I remember this: whenever one of them walked into a restaurant or caf, the people around them fell silent for a moment, then stared with an expression that held both reverence and anger.
It seems to me that back then and in that place no one around me ever said anything about the people with the numbers on their arms, that mark and map of the dark continent of their experience. In fact, not once did I hear anyone say the he or she was Jewish, let alone speak of what that meant at that point in time and in that place.
It was as if with the new boundaries of the region and the towns new name, the Jewish population -- or what was left of it in the aftermath of WWII -- lost its features, even as its surviving members moved about, carefully steering their children away from getting too close to that sunny ledge, beyond which were the precipitous canyons of memory in which the river of their sorrow cut ever deeper into the unmappable dark ground.
Posted by maria at September 01, 2003 08:41 PM
Comments
I think one of the things about old maps and the mapping of territories as a child or consc(ient)ious adult is that one is aware of what is or was also present but is no longer spoken of (as opposed to does not exist). So things exist in parallel universes, or in a multiverse - harder for us to see.... Thanks for this post. It connects with my own Jewish background and things that could and couldn't be spoken of.
Posted by: Coup de Vent on September 1, 2003 11:33 PMMaria, we're so fortunate to have your participation at the Ecotone wiki. Your sensitivity and fine writing about place and the memory of place add another dimension to these topics...thank you. I too remember seeing the tatooed arm of a dignified gentleman who ran a clothing store in the nearest city to us. My father, who had fought in WWII and helped liberate one of the camps - something he never talked about - asked him to show me his arm. I was very young but the scene is burned into my memory, probably because I sensed that these two adults were acting much more gravely than usual, and that it was important for me to pay attention.
Posted by: beth on September 2, 2003 04:45 AMSuperb.
Posted by: qB on September 2, 2003 12:21 PMI've always had the impression that maps were a little mysterious--like looking at a foreign language. Have you seen the topical weblog The Map Room?
Posted by: sya on September 3, 2003 07:16 PMOops. Your comments don't accept html. Here's the link to The Map Room: http://www.mcwetboy.net/maproom/
Posted by: sya on September 3, 2003 07:17 PMAs a matter of fact, I do have that weblog bookmarked on one of my computers. I, too, love maps, especially the old ones!
Have you seen the book "The Atlas of Experience" by Louise Van Swaaij & Jean Klare? On the cover, above the title, it reads: "Scale: Unimaginable" The book jacket describes it as follows:
"This atlas follows the conventions of cartography, but leads the traveller through familiar-looking topography into hitherto uncharted realms of imagination, ideas, feelings and experience."
My scanner is not working, or else I would have posted a picture form it. The book is beautiful, wistful ... and entertaining. I bought my copy at the British Library....
Posted by: maria on September 3, 2003 08:31 PMSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20031008062823/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000209.html
On Cartophilia
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
This is an entry for the Ecotone wiki topic on maps and place.
Maps etch my life. The tale goes that I learned to read from maps, associating familiar placenames with words on the mapsheet. When growing up I prized my map collection. I would become lost in the world of maps: one game I would play would be to take a street map, start at some intersection, and trace sequences of turns -- left-right-left-right -- and see where I ended up on the map. Exploring that way was a lot less work than trying the experiment on foot. Another time I went to the long-gone Berkeley store Lucas Books, which had an excellent natural history section, to buy my first USGS topographic maps: I wanted to seek the source of Wildcat Creek in nearby Tilden Park, an expedition I would think about but never undertake.
Much later on I would become a geographer, and dabble in making my own maps. My thesis was on how to make maps of the distribution of animal species. There I glimpsed a bit of the mystical nature of maps, for who can ever be certain where a species isn't? All territories look vast when you start to make your own maps.
Maps are talismans. Even a map of the most familiar of spaces reveals new things: a forgotten street name, an unvisited urban park. A map collection, small or large, is a blessed thing, for it promises a feast for the imagination. Adventures to unknown places beckon, whether they are in the same town, county, or in the antipodes. And every once in a while we take the map in hand and follow the paths to that beckoning place.
Posted by Numenius at September 2, 2003 09:00 PMSource: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/09/02/on_cartophilia.html
Maps
B y travelertrish
Maps are the traveler's bibles. We live by them, swear by them, sing their praises. We gaze lovingly at them, letting our imaginations soar over their landscapes.
I don't learn geography from maps, though. I learn geography with my feet. If I've been to a place, the geography is imprinted. If I haven't been there, I can stare at all the maps in the world. They mean nothing. Before I went to the Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, I knew there were three little countries up "that way." I'd actually known an Estonian woman, a science teacher, but that didn't help me visualize where she came from. I never remember which South American countries our Spanish professors come from. I've been to Costa Rica and Peru. Everything else is a blur.
Travelers don't mistake the maps for territory because we know what territory feels like. We've been to territory and it smells different.
"Man has invented three suberb means of communication - language, music and maps, maps being the oldest of the three," said the introduction to the atlas in the glove compartment in our little red rented Mazda on an unspoiled island in the Baltic Sea off Estonia. The oldest? I wondered. People without language drawing maps in the dirt with their fingers.
Maps can save us. Maps, clutched, smoothed lovingly out, diligently consulted, can useless, or worse, they can be misleading. As a traveler, a map is my constant companion, more constant than my husband.
In Holland, after the ferry across the Ij River, JF and I got pleasurably lost, in a hilarious round of asking directions and never getting the same answer twice. One guy told us three completely different answers. We never did manage to get a proper biking map.
One German lady of a certain age (who looked in spirit exactly like my feisty 90-year-old Aunt Ruth) told us that many Germans come to Klaipeda, Lithuania because their grandparents or parents were born here. The "return to one's roots" phenomenon.
"Why," she asked, "are you here?"
"Because it was on the map," JF answered, to which she roared with laughter.
In Estonia, in the rain, I found the best map I've ever seen, tucked cheerfully into the glove compartment of the car. We were supposed to have rented motor scooters, but when we got up, it was raining.
At 9:30, it was a pouring rain, all-day, insistent, gray-sky-low-clouds rain. To my dismay, I could just see the day unfolding-reading in bed until noon, walk downtown to THE restaurant in town for lunch, back for more reading and listening to the rain. I couldn't stand the thought. Saaremaa was supposed to be a beautiful island, nature, a rustic way of life, windmills, seashore. And because of the rain...again...I wasn't going to see any of it. We would leave on the bus tomorrow and I'd have seen the inside of my blinking hotel room plus one or two eateries within walking distance.
We had a row about it. I wasn't gracious. I cursed the infernal weather and my husband's seeming inability to rise above it. He cursed my infernal need to be doing something, going somewhere, accomplishing instead of Being. I thought of just buying the damned raingear and renting a scooter anyway. He dismissed this as idiotic. I proposed checking the Yahoo Satellite map for a place in Europe without rain and then just getting on the next bus and the next one until we got there. He was perfectly willing to do that. He preferred his book.
"Okay," I offered, a last gasp, desperate proposition. "Let's rent a car."
"Spend 56 European Euros?" he retorted. "That's 56 American dollars. Are you crazy? Do you think we're made of money?"
Other people rent cars. We do not. But I didn't want to miss Saaremaa. My guidebook said that the island during the Soviet era was closed to foreigners and that Estonians needed special permits to come here because of an early warning radar system and rocket base. Consequently, according to the book, this is what Estonia would be like if the Russians hadn't invaded. Unspoiled.
"Damn the money," I told him.
The car, a little red Mazda was gorgeous. We zipped back to the hostel to pick up the picnic lunch we'd bought at the grocery store, I spread the map out over my knees and prepared to NAVIGATE!
I spent the first half hour just learning how to read all the information in this Estonian Atlas, but then it was just a dream. It had peat bogs, cliffs, open land, bus stops, GPS coordinates, manor houses, windmills, castles, boat landings, and even sacred stones! Along with red roads and oops, yellow roads, which are gravel.
About that time, we bumped onto gravel. We drove to the tip of the peninsula, stood in the wind off the sea and watched seven swan couples dipping their long necks beneath the waves, up and down. Wild swans. The wreakage from the fierce WWII fighting on this coast was everywhere, half bunkers, machine gun slits slanting into the water. Blue wild flowers waving, swallows swooping, gulls screaming.
The houses on this part of the island, each one with its own little black square on the map, were few and far between. Living out there must be like living in remote parts of Alaska, something silent and fierce, something that feeds on windsweep and salt air and no one for miles. The houses were wooden, painted green or dark red or-most often-baby poop yellow-brown. Wide bogs and rocky beaches and cliffs that had signs about how much history could be read in the layers. A lot. Another swan colony. A wrong turn down to a pier and four open fishing boats moored there. The road muddy and slippery in places, so that I got bursts of fear-images of getting stuck and nobody for miles. The little red car just kept chugging though, past wooden windmills and stone fences. A fox crossed the road in front of us. Alaska was like this for miles and miles, this flat, this windswept, this lonely, this beautiful...
We got off the peninsula and started seeing villages again, little clusters of wood frame houses and stone fences and picket fences. Sheep in the compounds and fruit trees.
"This is the way my grandmother lived," a New Zealand traveler said about her trip into the countryside. My own grandmother lived in Alabama, where it never rained that much at once and if July ever saw temperatures that low, they'd have KNOWN the Lord was about to end the world. But I could see this peasant life for her, the one cow, the constant farm work, the town something far off and only occasional.
The wonderful map had bus stops marked in tiny red letters, so all day I kept track of where we were from bus stop to bus stop. Near the city, they looked alike, just open shelters, but out in the country, they were like little individual masterpieces, with doors that close and each one looking only like itself. I could imagine curtains on the windows of some, with a tiny little stove inside for those long winter waits for the country children.
Coming back to civilization, the big city of Kuressaare, we stopped at a road house with a red sign called Artek, completely unprepared for what we discovered. It was a bar, restaurant and dance hall on weekends, devoted to a tongue-in-cheek, ironic homage to Communism. Honest. There were Communist flags draped down the center of the room, newspapers from the Communist era and paper money decoupaged into tabletops and bathroom walls. There were several bookshelves with Russian tomes extolling Lenin, busts of Lenin. The disk jockey's stand was backed with Russian Army uniforms, a gas mask draped over one and a cap over another. The waitresses wore Red Army jackets. There was a samovar, flags from the sailing Olympics in Tallinn before independence, even an old phone from the era.
I talked to the owner, a pleasant woman in her mid-thirties, who told me that Artek was a Soviet summer camp in the Ukraine for the very top athletes and students, "only the very best." She was 25 when the Soviets moved out, old enough to know about Artek, though she never got to go. The walls of the restaurant had diplomas and certificates issued by the Soviets. And there was an enormous mural showing the struggling Communists in battle, pushing on to victory. Weird for us, this nostalgic-sarcastic approach to Communism, sort of like a night club with a McCarthy era black list theme. I had October Revolution meat dumplings and JF had Capitalist sausages and sauerkraut.
It never did stop raining until we got back to town. We did the wooden windmills photo op in the rain, 14th century gothic church in the rain, and quaint north island town in the rain. It rained particularly hard during our 7500 year-old-crater visit. The Kaali crater looks like a wimpy little lake with some man-made mounds to keep the water in, but it isn't. It is the site of a wild-ass meteorite landing, one so spectacular that it has been handed down in Estonian mythology as the Sun's Grave. This, the story goes, is why the Estonians are blessed by God, since He chose this very spot for the burial place of the sun. There were many conflicting theories about this hole in the ground until the early 20th century, when geological analysis of the fragments of meteorite confirmed the hypothesis that it was one massive chunk of metal that went boom. We are talking 1000 tons on entry into the earth's atmosphere and 80 tons when it finally hit. It was going about 10-20 km per SECOND when it landed.
After dinner, the sun briefly showed up. JF admitted that it had been a really good day, that we never would have discovered Artek without the car and that it was worth every Euro we put into it. I admitted that I would have been miserable had we attempted a tour by motorscooter. The minute I realized the map's yellow roads were all gravel and mud, we'd have turned around, completely missing the swans, the fox and the feeling of the Far North.
"After tomorrow morning," I wrote in my journal, "we will be hard traveling, just moving and moving and moving down the map."
The territory may not be the map, but the metaphor of moving down the map means getting down the real road.
CommentsFrom: bluebellrock Date: September 3rd, 2003 08:04 am (UTC) (Permalink)
Just wanted to tell you I'm enjoying your writing, and have pondered similarly about maps and their natural limitations. I've been creating masses and masses of envelopes out of maps, and I get so much satisfaction from seeing which colours and places appear on the face of each.
Philippa
PS: I found your LJ randomly and am so glad I did.
From: travelertrish Date: September 3rd, 2003 08:25 am (UTC) (Permalink)
Ya'll come on back and visit just any time! Thanks for the kind words!
From: travelertrish Date: September 4th, 2003 04:39 am (UTC) (Permalink)
I love the idea of making envelopes out of maps. My daughter makes envelopes out of advertisements out of magazines. Where do you get the maps? I would hate to dismantle a map. It would be like dismantling a book.
From: bluebellrock Date: September 5th, 2003 10:20 am (UTC) (Permalink)
*Gulp*
Out-of-date school atlases I pick up cheap as chips at the local charity shop. I used to loathe destroyers of books but you'll just have to trust me that there's nothing (nothing!) charming about these 1980s-vintage books. They make much more beautiful mail art than dumped book, and I take great care to craft them well and oh, even I can tell I protest too much. I'll go and sit in the corner.
From: travelertrish Date: September 5th, 2003 12:34 pm (UTC) (Permalink)
I believe you
I was at a craft fair in Hatfield, Hertfordshire and saw great framed prints out of old books that had been damaged beyond repair. The books, not the prints. I'm casting NO aspersions. I promise. No sitting in corner!
Source: http://travelertrish.livejournal.com/69136.html
Maps and place
By OnePotMeal
Driving home from Maryland to Massachusetts last weekend, a detour sign in Delaware obscured the point where the New Jersey Turnpike bends east and interstate 95 bends west. We missed the split, and continued north up 95, skirting Philadelphia on the inside of the river. On our Philadelphia area map, so old that its faded, crinkled leafs, seams split between them after years of frustrated folding and refolding and misfolding--that nanosecond of decision when the mapreader realizes they've got a bend in the folding, that they could unfold it and start over or just force the paper into position, tearing a seam in the map--; so old it's priced at $1.95 while all the others in the glovebox read $4.95, the interstate disappears into a dotted line after connecting to 295 north of the city at the far corner of the page--our next move contained on some other panel beyond our possession. On the ground, 295 runs into 195, and following that brought us back to the turnpike, and up through New Jersey.
Had we followed our obsolete map religiously, never looking up from it to read signs or do what Mapquest calls 'a reality check', we'd be lost, circling hopelessly around Philadelphia and Trenton, waiting for dotted lines to become roads. The drawn lines of the map weren't the same lines we drove, and there's a leap of faith in straying from the page, but it's the only way to get home. It's easier to trust a map, or a Mapquest, since they already know where they're going, but what is time to a map, or a computer? If you ask Mapquest to guide you from Boston to Baltimore, you'll be directed down 95 all the way, through Manhattan, across the George Washington Bridge, when everyone with a car knows the Tappan Zee and Garden State Parkway are the only way to go. (Or do they? Is my map yours?)
Maps are just stories we tell about a place--what we imagine it is, or was; what we will and wish it to be. Maps are no more a place than a photograph is a moment, obsolete as soon they're printed. They're Arcadian visions: a unified Europe; a manifested North America; a conquered Iraq. Arcadian as Mapquest's world without people, a perfect, paved world of uncrowded, egalitarian roads.
Driving through Maryland we passed the signs on 95 that marked where my family would've turned to go home in my childhood, signs proclaiming Fallston and Bel Air and Churchville, signs I'd looked for long past the threshold of my five-year-old tolerance, longing for an end to the interstate wasteland between the giant Termite of Providence and the green signs of home. Once, for school, I asked my grandfather to help me draw a map of Fallston. He showed me where to put a blacksmith shop, just up the street from my house; he guided my hand and pencil in tracing the scope of the cornfields, devouring what I knew as a small, single-strip airport; together we flattened housing developments and high schools and a swimming club. Later I asked my father to help me, and he added friend's houses, a drive-in, maybe a cinema. But on the bus to school the next morning I passed none of those: I passed the high school, the airport, the houses; what kind of map had they drawn, a map that could only guide backwards? More, what kind of map would I draw this morning; what kind of obsolete, neverwas Fallston would my mind (re)construct? What kind of maps would I draw if we hadn't moved?
We map what we need, or want, to know of a place. Old seacharts look nonsensical to a landlubber's eye: there are no continents, no countries, just unbroken white spaces bordered by floating, ungrounded black lines squirming across corners and edges of the page. Land exists only where it stands in the way of water, only in one dimension; no cities, no towns, no capitols or castles or construction. Only what a navigator needs to get across water. For another elementary school project, I invented and mapped my own country. Charleton, I called it, an island small enough to fit a sheet of graph paper but vast enough to contain both Mohawk and Apache Indians; mountains, rivers, and lakes; dark miles of forested wilderness; metropolitan meccas of shipping and soot (mine was a pre-electric paradise, an Arcadian map I haven't much strayed from). Everything an eight-year-old boy might imagine an ideal world to be, and I spent many hours wandering that island, shrinking and expanding it to suit that day's adventure--throwing my own map for the sake of surprise, you might say. And Charleton, in my life, became as real as the town of Fallston I lived in or the Scituate, Massachusetts I'd never yet heard of but would be a resident of within a couple of years, in a state whose capitol city prides itself on being unchartable, on tourists getting hopelessly lost with the most up-to-date maps.
Some of my favorite maps are the walking maps of Great Britain, drawn in a scale fine enough to include every pub, every ruin, every relic. An afternoon's stroll can take in three or four historical drinking spots, a graveyard, and a church--a week's worth of history in other places. But those maps never include a tinker's campsite or tenement slated for the wrecking ball: they're fixed things, because maps of the English countryside (and all maps) belong to the past rather than the present; there's only room in them for one vision, and it's one that needs to sit still enough to be drawn on a map. A map needs a slow moving story, a story that can be told once and for all, and who wants to live in a place that won't tell anymore stories? Who'd want to live on a map?
Written (better late than never) for Ecotone: Maps and Place from notes taken on a back porch.
September 5, 2003 10:53 AM
Comments
You were in my neck of the woods--I live a few miles from the 295 split in Delaware--I often take 295 home from work, in fact. I'd say that you should have stopped to say hello, but I was driving back from Ohio at the time.
Posted by: Natalie at September 5, 2003 01:34 PMTZ and GS — no question.
Posted by: AKMA at September 6, 2003 08:16 AMGreat post. I also used to draw imaginary maps--they always included a truncated whale to denote "ocean" (not very much like a whale at all, but I knew what I meant...). Good to have you participating in the Ecotone Wiki!
Posted by: Pica at September 6, 2003 11:50 AMTZ and GSP here too. Not to mention the Merritt Parkway through Connecticut rather than yucky old I-95. Much more scenic.
Posted by: ralph at September 9, 2003 08:28 PMMerritt Parkway--I'll have to try that next time. Anything that's more scenic than 95 has to be worthwhile.
Posted by: steve at September 10, 2003 07:29 PMSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20030930021118/http://www.onepotmeal.com/blog/archives/002340.html
Discussion
[Citizens of Nowhere] is a timely read for this group (while not necessarily related precisely to maps, but then again it is) -- Fred
I have really been enjoying these posts. I just love maps and live with them though not always by them. In such a changing world, in such a describing world, I feel drawn to plot my self in that landscape around me - on a local scale and worldwide -and at the moment Ecotone functions as a kind of "random world" mapping project. Thanks so much for all those posts. Coup de Vent
In response to these posts, which I've really enjoyed too, Language Hat (a self-described "mapaholic") left this map-related link to [Incoming Signals] at my site today and I'd like to pass it along: --Beth
This is hilarious...what synchronicity! -- Chris
CdeV?...good point about Ecotone. I think this is what I was saying in my post, that the sense of place informs the pretty pictures. I have a very interesting perspective on very tiny pieces of the world as a result of this little blogging community, but somehow I sense that Floyd County might just be the valley over the mountain from here. Stuff like this acts as threads that draws the pieces of the world closer together. And with the second anniversary of 9/11 coming up, it feels like 'tis the season for connection. Bring on the atlas of the noosphere! -- Chris
DOH! I got as far as the editing box with this yesterday but must have forgotten to SAVE. Will just post this [link to the topic] I posted this morning on Fragments. What are thots about posting map links to where we each live? Would be interesting to compare topography. This might be a future biweekly... to post a topo map from Topo-Zone and write about the details of that place and the significance to/impact of landform on your life. Just a thot, which I expressed with greater clarity when I almost posted it yesterday! -- Fred Fred, I like the idea of posting a topo map with descriptions. It will makes us all neighbors and draw "the world closer" as Chris put it. Kind of like a blog block party.... -- Maria
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20051219055122/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?DiscussMapsAndPlace