Map Girl Gets Lost

I have a thing for maps. My favorites are the ones on rollers found in history classrooms. The old and fragile and cracking on the edges type of maps on crazy spring rollers that don’t work so well. Sometimes the maps won’t come down and sometimes they won’t go up and sometimes even the most patient of history teachers will stifle a curse as he struggles with the blasted thing. But what I love about those old maps is that unexpected moment when the teacher points to someplace saying, “Here in this region the dominant export is-“ and the map suddenly evaporates. It rolls up so fast you couldn’t even see the movement, but could hear the loud slurping smack it made when coming to rest in the fully rolled up, this-lesson-is-so-over position. Yeah, I like those maps.

When I was younger I loved where maps could get me. I loved that with my dad’s beat up Rand McNally Road Maps of the U.S.A., I could plot a course to just about anywhere I wanted to go. I’d highlight routes to the north, south and west. Literally highlight them in bright pink and yellow and green highlighters, which probably drove my dad insane because the routes I seemed to highlight were never the ones he needed. But at that time there was nothing better than a highlighted map, a bag of candy orange slices, a new mix tape and a friend to travel with. Road trip, baby. Road trip.

Oddly enough, one of my most memorable trips was when I abandoned my precious maps altogether. An old friend and I left home one day (orange slices in tow) and decided to try to get lost. Oh, and lost we got. We were driving in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina, down winding roads full of dust and falling down shacks and expired cars that had become lovely planters. It was on one such road that I became entangled in my first wild goose chase. Upon turning down one dirt road, we came across a flock of geese. Each goose crossed the street while we waited patiently and pondered whether geese were able to appreciate the unnatural goodness of the candy orange slice. I watch the geese cross except this one big old goose who felt he needed to stop in the road and stare at the grill of my truck. Embarrassed, I wondered, do I have something in my grill? What could this goose want? My friend suggested I honk the horn at the goose to move him along. Good idea. Good idea. What developed I have since dubbed the Goose vs. Truck debate. Riveting material.

Honk. Went my truck.

HONK! Went the goose.

Honk. Honk. Went my truck.

HONK! HONK! Went the goose.

Now I was speaking his language. Honk. Honk. HONK! I lay on the horn.

HONK! HONK! HISS!!! Says the goose and then he spreads his wide wings and lowers his head and charges my truck.

Without thinking I throw the truck in reverse and run away from the hideous beast-goose intent apparently on getting to my candy orange slices. This, my friends is where life can take you when you leave the maps out of it. Wild. Goose. Chase.

The attack goose very literally drove me from his territory after which we traveled on looking for other lost destinations. The thing is that it is actually a lot harder to get lost than you think it might be. We kept making turns and each turn would somehow lead us back to something we knew. A highway that would take us straight home, a byway that would take us straight home, a secondary road that would take us to a different highway that would take us straight home. We were frustrated at every turn by our inability to lose ourselves. Then, around twilight, we drove around a large bend in a small highway (by which I mean barely two lanes with sheer cliff on one side and mountain on the other so that dodging the larger trucks was like driving between a rock and thin air). Just on the other side of the bend, I heard a gasp, then a sigh and an, “Awwww.” I looked at her and declared, “We’ve done it. We’ve driven to Europe. Did you see the ocean out your window because I missed it on mine?”

The sweetest little Alpine village was unfolding around us: Little Switzerland, North Carolina. The mountain landscape (while not as grand as the Alps, hence the “Little”), the architecture of the few buildings huddling in the snow, the lights just coming on and twinkling invitingly in the quickly growing darkness were all picture perfect. We were lost! We’d found a town we had no idea existed. And in that town, we found the world’s very best cup of coffee (the Swiss apparently keep their excellent coffee making skills under tight wraps). We sipped our coffee and felt very proud of getting lost and finding ourselves so content.

That night, as my coffee warmed me from the inside out, I imagined a life without maps. I could just keep going. Keep finding ways to get lost. Getting lost, as it turns out, is not so bad. Not really. And not every wild goose chase ends in empty handedness.

To date, that is the only day I’ve ever purposely left the map at home. I still love maps. I wish I weren’t so predictable, so map-able. But, at my core, I am a map kind of girl. I like planning my routes carefully, highlighting them, calculating needs (Mom, I’ve got to go potty!) and ways to meet those needs, understanding detours before they sneak up on me. And while it is fun to put the map aside every so often, I’d be kidding myself (and woefully neglecting my new highlighters) if I didn’t stick to my map. So that night so long ago, I paid for my coffee, captured Little Switzerland in my memory and kept making the right turns to get me back to the highway that would take me home.

Being a map girl doesn’t necessarily mean I have to be flat. I like to think that I am like the old classroom maps I love. I am one of those unpredictable maps that leaves everyone gripping their desktops wondering when it will go flying up, reeling the mysteries in, surreptitiously rolling them into its heart.