Small details in big places

   I love examining maps.

   A few years ago, I could just sit still on a couch or at my desk poring over a Rand McNally atlas of the entire United States, any particular state, even maps of cities.    My interest is still easily captured and maintained, but now there is Mapquest online with satellite images, the actual mountains and plains the real thing, shrunken down to fit my computer screen.    It causes a sense of awe and wonder in me.

   I have driven across the USA several times, and always try to find a route upon which I had not previously driven.  My goal is too see every town and city possible, cross every freeway and highway, often even sticking to smaller roads in an effort to see as much as possible.  My anxiety usually prevents me from getting out of the car too often during these trips, I feel like I need to get back to The Shop to deal with whatever lingering obligations are waiting me, the emails, the phone calls, the bills.   I don't get out of the car a lot.   I drive slowly though, and my field of vision always sweeps left and right like a radar dish on top of a warship, I don't miss much visually.

    My point is, and I am not bragging right now,  but I have seen a lot of America from the road through a windshield or open front window.   I can not honestly say I have seen MOST OF or more than you, or more than most people, but I have seen a lot, and I pay attention to what I see.   I file details - skylines, smells, temperature, vegetation, roadkill littering the sides of the roads, these are all lodged away in my memory.    - MY POINT IS - When I look at a map or Mapquest, or a satellite photo of an area, I can look at most anywhere in the USA and a lot of southwestern Canada now, and imagine exactly what it would feel like there, what it would smell like, who lives where, what the bridge over that tiny blue line of river would look in actual real life and 3D,  what gas station has what to eat, what the people who work there look like, if they were nice or not.

    I often sit with an atlas open (or now, the computer representations) and squint, and maybe trace with a finger, and can spend HOURS imagining what it would be like on the ground wherever I happen to be investigating,  what I would see from the road, I remember what a mountain looked like off in the distance that I can see on a map now, a dark green fold, maybe denoted with a black dot and a name.  I know what it may look like to drive around it, in full three hundred and sixty degrees,  it may take hours to get around them, it probably does if you can see it on a map.    There are similarities between the maps and real life. This is probably obvious, the map an expression of the actual physical world,  but it goes further than that.

   Once you are able to look at a map and be able to picture yourself right there in it, on the ground inside that map, looking up at one of those green points , and able to judge the distance in the satellite picture from how far away from the road (your point of reference) and the point you were - ?    You know what a peak looks like from, say,  twenty miles away,  you look at the map at all the reference points you have memorized, and if you have enough of them memorized in many different areas,  and you can match them to the map which you are examining,   you can begin to make accurate guesses about how other places you have NOT been to yet may look.    And, if you have enough previous experience, you will be pretty close to accurate.

   This may not be interesting or surprising,  but it allows me to study a map for hours and hours, breathless and near tears imagining the places I want to go.    I can imagine the smells, the humidity,  the air pressure, the wind, even what the people will sound like when they speak to me in the gas stations.    This makes this particular diversion extremely interesting for me.    Enjoyable.  Educational.

   I zoom in, I zoom in more, I squint, I calculate, I zoom once more, and I can actually see the rocks where I watched you leave some of the ashes of your dead mother.   I can feel just the same as I did that day, and even if it was not an easy day, my memories of it are entirely pleasant and I revisit that day often, it makes me feel good to think of that time.    I can also zoom in on the river that flows out of the Smoky Mountains and down into Chattanooga, with a little work I can see the blue snaking water where  we pulled the car over at a wide spot, still in the mountains, and stripped naked, waded and swam, my hands tracing the hollows in the riverbed, fingers sifting the silt resting there, looking for gold or a precious stone.   You stood, swam, laid out there naked beside me not far from the thin traffic passing on the road past our parked car, Kudzu vines hanging from all the trees around us, looking like a jungle from some old Tarzan movie.   Much later that same day we wound up in a bathtub in Alabama.   The next morning was your first time going to a Waffle House.   Scattered, smothered and covered - an excellent morning beside yet another freeway.

    I watched turtles moving much more quickly than you are led to believe they can, move, sprinting, across the 4-lane highway in Louisiana,  in my rearview mirror I saw one run over by a trailer, I backed our car up, a tenth of a mile or more, to check if it was alright - It's five gray/green reptilian extensions remained pinioning slowly out of the brilliantly shattered shell.   Hopeless and heartbroken, I pulled back into traffic, back to 75MPH, heading West once again.

   After what was probably our best dining experience together, EVER, in West Monroe, LA -  We continued west.   You were falling asleep in the passenger seat as we crossed the state line into Texas.   I drove most of the night, admiring the skyline of Dallas off in the distance twinkling.  I drove, I kept driving.   Eventually, hours and hours later I was close to the western border.  I grew tired, and vision failing, had to pull over.   We slept together in the car in a rest stop not too far from Amarillo.   I listened to a book-on-tape of some Sherlock Holmes story you bought as I fell asleep upright in my seat.

   We drove all of the next day off of the freeway, on secondary roads,   across the rest of Texas, into New Mexico,  up up up into the mountains gradually, and without knowing it we were climbing into The Rockies,11,000 feet of elevation, the car running funny in protest at the lack of available oxygen there.    A thunder storm erupted that night.  Before it got dark we could see the flashing black clouds off in the distance and could tell we were driving right into them. As it became night, vivid bolts of lightning were hitting not far away from us as I pulled into Raton, NM and desperately searched for a place for us to pull in out of the storm.   A cheap but cozy motel.   We ate mediocre enchiladas and tacos up the street before showering and crawling into bed together, the thunder and lightning gone now, but the sound of heavy rain pounding on the roof making me even more glad to have you near me.

   I fiddle with cars.  I enjoy them.    I enjoy machines in general, they do not give confusing messages. They work or not, they are yours or not, objects.   Property.   I enjoy trafficking across states in my cars.   I am usually alone.    Sometimes not though.


      Recently?