Landscapes of travel

•         Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware. Martin Buber

•         The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and, instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. Samuel Johnson

 •         There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. Nelson Mandela

•         Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Marie Curie

•         . . . from the images of motion, a pure impression of purposefulness. Something was going on outside. People were going places . . . dimly sensed concepts of direction, volition, change, and the existence of the unseen. He was six years old, and much of his thinking, especially when he was alone, went on without words, went on beneath the level of language.

He understood about the cab. There were passengers. She picked them up in the street and took them from one place to another (as the people walking outside were going from one place to another), but she herself had no destination. She went where the passengers told her to go, and remained, in a sense, a witness, like himself. The cab started out in front of the apartment in the morning and returned at night. It appeared to him to be going around in circles . . .
Frank Conroy, Body & Soul

•         Between youth and maturity comes a time of questing and discovery; between apprenticeship and mastery comes journeying. M. S. Rohan, The Forge in the Forest

•         There is a point beyond which there is no turning back; it is the point that must be reached. Kafka

•         I am being driven forward
Into an unknown land.
The pass grows steeper,
The air colder and sharper.
A wind from my unknown goal
Stirs the strings
Of expectation.

Still the question:
Shall I ever get there?
There where life resounds,
A clear pure note
In the silence.
D. Hammerskjold

•         A good map is both a useful tool and a magic carpet to far away places. NY Times

•         A map says to you, "Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not." It says "I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me you are alone and lost." . . . Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope or sagas of conquest. Beryl Markham, West of the Night (1942)

•         POETRY ON THE ICEBOX, CHRISTMAS EVE 1995
You might imagine memories of a friend
almost delicate
and still mine would rush by
as some do, sail past
if night, beauty hid in pain
or joy for tears, fantasy & hope
a window to the wind & mist.

I love her, we cried
loudly.
So remember to savor a thought
of us & time and rain
go pretend
sing about magic, cry & ache
wish for a star to fall toward
the sea.

Did you win I ask?
We prepare to leave.
Greg

•         . . . maps give you a way of seeing things, finding things you had overlooked before. Seattle Times Post Intelligencer

•         Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the mind abhors randomness. Automatically we see pictures in the stars above us; we hear voices in the white noise of a river, music in the wind. As naturally as beavers build dams and spiders spin webs, people draw maps, in the sky and in the sand. George Johnson, Fire in the Mind (1995)

•         If I had to choose between where I live and you, I'd rip up everything I own because the only landscape worth looking at is the landscape of the human body. I kiss your Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. I kiss your Missouri and Monongahela and Susquehanna and Shenandoah and Rio Grande. I kiss the confluence of all those rivers. I kiss your amber waves of grain. I kiss your specious skies, your rocket's red glare, your land I love, your purple mountain'd majesty. But most of all, I kiss your head. I kiss the place where we make our decisions. I kiss the place where we keep our resolves. The place where we do our dreams. I kiss the place behind the eyes where we store up secrets and knowledge to save us if we're caught in a corridor on a dark, wintry evening. And you, with your mouth, kiss my head because that's the place where I kept the pictures of you all these years. Durwood Peach, Act 1, Landscape of the Body (John Guare, 1977)

•         There is no way to satirize a map. It keeps telling you where you are. And if you're not there, you're lost. Everything is reduced to meaning. A map may lie, but it never jokes. Howard McCord, Listening to Maps

•         MAP
It tells the truth by lying,
like a poem
with bold hyperbole of shape and line--
A masterpiece of false simplicity.
Its secret meanings must be mulled upon,

Yet all the world is open to a glance.
With colors to fire the mind, a song of names,
A painting that is not at home on walls
But crumpled on a stations wagon floor,
Worn through at folds, tape patched and chocolate smudged
(What other work of art can lead you home?)
--A map was made to use.
Juliana Muehrcke

•         "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
". . . but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've go to?" (Alice had not the slightest idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but she thought they were nice grand words to say).
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

•         He loved maps, and in his hall there hung a large one of the Country Round with all his favorite walks marked on it in red ink. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

•         I brooded by the hour together over the map, all the details of which I well remembered. Sitting by the fire in the housekeeper's room, I approached that island, in my fancy, from every possible direction; I explored every acre of its surface; I climbed a thousand times to that tall hill they call the Spyglass, and from the top enjoyed the most wonderful and changing prospects. Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us; but in my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

•         In the early morning I had studied maps, drawn a careful line along the way I wished to go. I still have that arrogant plan--into St. Paul on Highway 10, then gently across the Mississippi . . . That seems simple enough, and perhaps it can be done, but not by me.

First, the traffic struck me like a tidal wave and carried me along, a bit of shiny flotsam . . . As usual I panicked and got lost. I pulled to the side of the street and got out my book of road maps. But to find where you are going, you must know where you are, and I didn't.

I had been given written directions on how to go, detailed directions, but have you ever noticed that instructions from one who knows the country gets you more lost than you are, even when they are accurate?
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charlie

•         "What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country on the scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected; they said it would cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

•         "The map is not the terrain," the skinny black man said.

"Oh, yes, it is," Valerie said. With her right hand she tapped the map on the attache case on her lap, while waving with her left at the hilly green unpopulated countryside bucketing by: "This map is that terrain."

"It is a quote," the skinny black man said, steering almost around a pothole. "It means, there are always differences between reality and the descriptions of reality."

"Nevertheless," Valerie said, holding on amid the bumps, "we should have turned left back there."

"What your map does not show," the skinny black man told her, "is that the floods in December washed away a part of that road. I see that the floods didn't affect your map."
Donald Westlake, High Adventure (1985)

•         What we experience is only a small part of what matters about objects. R.L. Gregory, The Intelligent Eye

•         DIRECTIONS
I would like to tell you how to get there so that you may see all this for yourself. But first a warning: you may already have come across a set of detailed instructions, a map with every bush and stone clearly marked, the meandering courses of dry rivers and other geographical features noted, with dotted lines put down to represent the very faintest of trails. Perhaps there were also warning printed in tiny red letters along the margins,, about the lack of water, the strength of the wind and the swiftness of the rattlesnakes. Your confidence in these finely etched maps is understandable, for at first glance they seem excellent, the best a man is capable of; but your confidence is misplaced. Throw them out. They are the wrong sort of map. They are too thin. They are not the sort of map that can be followed by a man who knows what he is doing. The coyote, even the crow, would regard them with suspicion.

There is, I should warn you, doubt too about the directions I will give you here, but they are the very best that can be had. They will not be easy to follow. Where it says left you must go right sometimes. Read south for north sometimes. It depends a little on where you are coming from, but not entirely. I am saying you will have doubts. If you do the best you can you will have no trouble.

When you get there you may wish to make up a map for yourself for future reference. It is the only map you will ever trust. It may consist of only a few lines hastily drawn. You will not have to hide it in your desk, taped to the back of a drawer. That is pointless. But don't leave it out to be seen, thinking no one will know what it is. It will be taken for scribble and thrown in the wastebasket or be carefully folded and idly shredded by a friend one night during a conservation. You might want to write only a set of numbers down in one corner of a piece of paper and underline them. When you try to find a place for it--a place not too obvious, not too well hidden so as to arouse suspicion--you will begin to understand the futility of drawing maps. It is best in this case to get along without one, although you will find your map, once drawn, as difficult to discard as an unfinished poem).

First go north to Tate. Go in the fall. Wait in the bus station for an old man with short white hair wearing a blue shirt and khaki trousers to come in on a Trailways bus from Lanner. You cannot miss him. He will be the only one on the bus. Take him aside and ask him if he came in from Molnar. Let there be a serious tone to your words, as if you sensed disaster down the road in Molnar. He will regard you without saying a word for a long time. Then he will laugh a little and tell you that he boarded the bus at Galen, two towns above Molnar.

His name is Leon. Take him to coffee. Tell him you are a journalist, working for a small paper in North Dakota, that you are looking for a famous desert that lies somewhere west of Tate, a place where nothing has ever happened. Tell him you wish to see the place for yourself. If he believes you will smile and nod and sketch a map for you on a white paper napkin. Be careful! The napkin will tear under the pressure of his blunt pencil and the lines he draws may end up meaning nothing at all. It is his words you should pay attention to. He will seem very sure of himself and you will feel a great trust grow between you. You may never again hear a map so well spoken. There will be a clarity in his description such that it will seem he is laying slivers of clear glass on black velvet in the afternoon sun. Still, you will have difficulty remembering, especially the specific length of various shadows cast at different times of the day. Listen as you have never listened before. It will be the very best he can do under the circumstances.

Perhaps you are a step ahead of me. Then I should tell you this: a tape recorder will be of no use. He will suspect it and not talk, tell you he must make connections with another bus and leave. Or he will give you directions that will bring you to your death. Make notes if you wish. Then take the napkin and thank him and go.

You will need three or four days to follow it out. The last part will be on foot. Prepare for this. Prepare for the impact of nothing. Get on the regimen of tea and biscuits and dried fruit. On the third or fourth day, when you are ready to quit, you will know you are on your way. When your throat is so thick with dust that you cannot breathe you will be almost halfway there. When the soles of your feet go numb with the burning and you cannot walk you will know that you have made no wrong turns. When you can no longer laugh at all it is only a little further. Push on.

It will not be as easy as it sounds. When you have walked miles to the head of a box canyon and find yourself with no climbing rope, no pitons, no one to belay you, you are going to have to improvise. When the dust chews a hole in your canteen and sucks it dry without a sound you will have to sit down and study the land for a place to dig for water. When you wake in the morning and find a rattlesnake has curled up on your chest to take advantage of your warmth you will have to move quickly or wait out the sun's heat.

You will always know this: others have made it. The man who gave you the map has been here. He now lives in a pleasant town of ten thousand. There are no large buildings and the streets are lined with maples and a flush of bright flowers in the spring. There is a good hardware store. There are a number of vegetable gardens--pole beans and crisp celery, carrots, strawberries, watercress and parsley and sweet corn--growing in backyards. The weather is mixed and excellent. Leon has many friends and he lives well and enjoys himself. He rides Trailways buses late at night, when he is assured of a seat. He can make a very good map with only a napkin and a broken pencil. He knows how to avoid what is unnecessary.
Barry Holstun Lopez, Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven (1976)