Back when tail-finned Cadillacs and Buicks roamed America’s highways, gas stations gave out free road maps. Even before I was old enough to drive, I was attracted to these maps. I loved the way they folded and stacked in the glove compartment. I could run my fingers vertically and horizontally on the chart on the back of the map to see how many miles there are between cities.
With maps like that, I could get the big picture, follow Route 1 as it moved from north to south, and follow the spider webs of roads that joined the cities to the suburbs. From time to time, mostly out of nostalgia, I’ll still stop at AAA and pick up free maps, but for the most part, there’s no need. With GPS, I can get wherever I want to go without ever having a bigger picture; I just follow one turn after another until I’m told I’ve arrived at my destination.
It seems as if the whole world is mapped and knowable. That is, unless I find myself driving somewhere where there’s no cell coverage or I wander off the blazed hiking trail. Suddenly everything begins to look like it’s the right path, and something primal enters my body—fear combined with an acknowledgement of the illusion of being in control and knowing where I’m going. The world is so much bigger and mysterious than the frameworks I place on top of it.
Every one of my creative journeys has that unsettling moment, when I’ve lost the connection I thought I had and I’m wandering on my own looking for the trail marker. Maybe the wandering is an essential part of the journey, challenging as it may be. Each poem might start as its own map—the way ancient cartographers could draw the specifics of a coastline before their pens wandered off into terra incognita (which I imagine to be some combination of mythology and intuition) as they tried to give shape to the unknown.
Wandering is a way to map that terrain, to get the feel of it. I can remind myself not to move too quickly. To pay attention to where I am. To see what’s around me. To remember where I’ve been. I’m also listening to the voices of ancestors, people who have walked this landscape before. I look for familiar landmarks. I hear the voices of other poets. Each poem is its own quest, its own rite of passage.
In school, when we’d pull down the old maps from the top of the blackboard and see countries expand and contract and empires rise and fall, we were taught that the ancients thought the Earth was flat and if you got to the edge you’d fall off into oblivion. It makes for a great scary story and paved the way for the myth of Christopher Columbus, but it turns out that people understood the Earth was a sphere. They could only imagine what was beyond the next horizon, though, which is what we still do now. Meanwhile, the planet has always been mapping itself in its own way: the moon pulling the ocean in and out of bays and coves, the mycelium constructing its networks under our feet, exchanging messages between trees and the soil. Every step reminds me that there isn’t anything that isn’t connected to something else.
Full view of the image at top: image by Susan Webster, text by Stuart Kestenbaum, You Know the Way, gelatin plate monotype with letter-stamped text, 10 x 6 in., 2015.