If you fall into the map challenged group feel free to stop reading now and go pick-up your Garmin or Tom Tom.
Have a nice trip! A nice boring trip.
Those of us who love maps can't explain it any more than we can explain why we love baseball or cookies. We just do.
Since I was a boy I have practically worn out a Rand McNally per year. Not a day goes by that I don't look for new places to go and new ways to get there. Some evenings I'll cut short my reading addiction and simply leaf through an atlas planning an extended trip to someplace I've always wanted to see. It never gets old. It defined me. I plotted career moves and vacations late into the night and would wake up considering how much fun it was going to be making it happen.
New places, fresh faces and a chance to reinvent yourself...that's what maps facilitate. Travel can heal too. William Least Heat-Moon took his shattered life on the road after a bad divorce in 1982 and wrote about in his book Blue Highways. It's a terrific story about rediscovering and refreshing your soul by traveling the back roads of America. If you haven't read it, correct that mistake tomorrow. It's still in print and still just as relevant today as it was nearly thirty years ago.
William Least Heat-Moon
Lately I find that most of my map gazing revolves around places I want to see when I have completely given up hustling a buck. Working can cramp your style when it comes to travel. I realize that the days of wonderful offers involving exciting new jobs are behind me now. Hell, offers of crappy jobs have taken a hike. Who cares? I know I don't.
However, there is an ache that is beginning to nag me when I'm dreaming with my maps. I now know that I'll never see it all.
There are roads I'll never travel; people I'll never meet and one of a kind sights that are there for somebody else's eyes.The clock can be a real bastard that way.
Blue highways indeed.
1 comment:
Prairyerth: (a Deep Map) is one of my favorite books!
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